[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Exams, tasks, K8, eCommerce, cell sites, ...
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Launch HN: Exams, tasks, K8, eCommerce, cell sites, health, data
quality, travel
This is the inaugural "Meet the Batch" post that we discussed a few
days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280. There are
8 startups in this thread. I've attempted to squeeze a reference to
each in the title above. The initial order is random. Direct links
to each startup: Portao 3 (YC S21) - Corporate travel for Latin
America - https://portao3.com.br/,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930563 Sitenna (YC S21) - A
marketplace for wireless cell sites - https://sitenna.com/,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930564 ContainIQ (YC S21) -
Kubernetes observability based on eBPF -
https://www.containiq.com/,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930569 Appollo (YC S21) - A
single API for launching to eCommerce platforms -
https://www.tryappollo.com/,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930570 Beau (YC S21) -
Automate repetitive client-facing tasks - https://beau.to/,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568 Telm.ai (YC S21) -
Real-time data quality monitoring - https://www.telm.ai/,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930566 Filadd (YC S21) -
Online courses for LatAm university - https://courses.filadd.com/,
entrance exams https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930567
Shimmer (YC S21) - Online video support groups for mental health -
https://shimmer.care, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930565
You are invited to share your questions, thoughts, feedback, and
experiences in any of these spaces! Simply reply to the founder's
post you want to discuss.
Author : dang
Score : 154 points
Date : 2021-07-23 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
| foobarbecue wrote:
| K8, with no "s," eh? I've been seeing this more and more...
| dang wrote:
| Oops I forgot the 's'. It was fortuitous, though, because the
| current title is exactly 80 chars and HN doesn't allow 81.
| beaugunderson wrote:
| > Beau (YC S21) - Automate repetitive client-facing tasks -
| https://beau.to/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27930568
|
| get your own name! >:[
| [deleted]
| tamasnet wrote:
| Just gotta say: I was really expecting to not like this batched
| format but actually it seems kind of okay.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks for saying so. We're going to iterate on it so
| suggestions (from anyone!) are most welcome.
|
| There are so many S21 startups wanting to launch on HN before
| Demo Day that I think we're going to be doing a lot of these,
| at least for the time being.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fnfilho wrote:
| Hi HN, we're Bianca and Fernando, founders of Portao 3
| (https://portao3.com.br/). We help companies in LATAM (Latin
| America) with their corporate travel, expenses and payments. We
| traveled a lot to visit clients in our previous companies, and
| realized that the corporate travel market had a lot to evolve
| technologically. Latin America didn't have a startup helping
| companies and work travelers with a real all-in-one experience.
| Our software includes features like a timeline that recaps the
| entire trip and a BI for 100% control at the end. We make it easy
| to understand expenses and manage them. B2B companies in LATAM
| like CredPago and Junco are using Portao 3 and reducing costs
| significantly (as in 30%). We founded Portao 3 in 2020 and are
| currently growing at 40% MoM (month over month).
| tucaz wrote:
| Congrats on your launch! I'm just another Brazilian here
| cheering for more companies to be part of YC.
|
| Wish all the best and success to you!
| hluska wrote:
| Hey friends, congratulations on your launch! I really dig what
| you're doing and enjoyed reading your website. Excellent work!
| fnfilho wrote:
| Thanks for the support hluska!
| vcoelho wrote:
| As a fellow brazilian I'm happy for you guys. I don't know very
| much about corporate travel, but I loved the idea behind
| Anywhere Office. If it's any help, there's some text color
| issues on your website header, and the language dropdown is
| breaking on larger options.
| fnfilho wrote:
| Hey Vini! Thank you for the kind words. That actually helps a
| lot, working on it now.
| gmontanola wrote:
| Congratz! It's really nice to see fellow Brazilians featured
| here.
|
| I'm very skeptical about most startups business models but
| looks like you folks check two important boxes of my imaginary
| list:
|
| [x] solving a real problem
|
| [x] plenty of room to grow (generalist b2b)
|
| I hope to see more of Portao 3! Best of luck for you :)
| fnfilho wrote:
| Hey Gabriel! Thank you for the kind words and wishes! Bianca
| and I actually suffered from this exact problem and that is
| why we decided to build it.
| 101008 wrote:
| Congrats on launching, it is always nice to see more startups
| in LA. The first question that came to my mind seeing your
| landing is that it's everything in Brazilian Portuguese. Your
| market now is only BR? Because the rest of the countries in LA
| speaks Spanish (with a few colony exceptions).
|
| Are you planning to open to the rest of the countries? Have you
| already customers in Chile, Argentina, Mexico?
|
| Thanks!
| hluska wrote:
| Hey pal (and anyone else having a similar issue)!!
|
| If you look at the top right hand corner, you'll see a globe
| icon. That icon handles translations - the site is available
| in Brazilian Portuguese, English and Spanish.
| fnfilho wrote:
| hluska is right, you can use the globe at the top to change
| languages.
|
| I have to say this is not intuitive and we actually purchased
| new domains for other countries yesterday and we will have
| dedicated websites for a lot of countries coming this
| weekend.
|
| But yes, we do have customers in Brazil where we were born,
| but Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Peru too!
| 101008 wrote:
| Thanks for answering! I noticed that after my posted my
| comment - the dedicated websites for each country (or at
| least language) sounds great. Congrats again!
| XzAeRosho wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| As a previous corporate traveller, I agree with your value
| proposition. As a software engineer I was astounded by the very
| lacking systems we have here in South America. Most of the
| travel stuff was managed via email!! I absolutely hated every
| single second of having to manage my travels while working,
| since it meant digging through emails and even spam folders...
|
| On another note, I'm based in Chile, and already have good
| connections with managers in key companies that may be
| interesting for you. If you're looking to expand to Chile, let
| me know so we can setup some talks ;)
|
| My linkedin is in my profile.
| fnfilho wrote:
| Hey XzAeRosho! Bianca and I did a lot of corporate travel
| too, so we do feel your pain as well. I'll definitely reach
| out to you now, thanks for all the kind words!
| DanielCampion wrote:
| Hey HN! We're Daniel and Brian from Sitenna
| (https://sitenna.com/). Sitenna is a marketplace connecting
| wireless carriers, tower providers and real estate owners. Think
| booking.com for telecom cell sites. Currently, it takes wireless
| telecom carriers up to 24 months to deploy a site because the
| process is based on screenshots, maps, emails, PDFs and
| spreadsheets. This is a particular issue with the advent of 5G
| which requires x6-10 (depending on which analyst you believe!)
| more cell sites in the network.
|
| We use maps and workflow tools to reduce the time it takes to
| deploy a new site by up to 75%, saving tens of thousands of
| dollars. Wireless carrier radio planners can easily search,
| identify and acquire sites for deploying antennae whilst the
| tower providers and real estate owners can market and monetise
| their assets to the telecom market.
|
| I (Daniel) have worked in telecoms my whole career and worked in
| more than 30 countries. The same issue exists in every market so
| there is a rather big opportunity ($40B is spend on wireless
| infrastructure globally per year!) if we can get some solid
| product market fit. We'd love to speak to any of you that are
| curious about what we're doing or if you have any
| ideas/challenges for us.
| jedberg wrote:
| My house happens to sit right next to a freeway and a mall, and
| would be the prefect spot for a tower. Can I sign up as a
| landlord if the land I lord over is a small tract home?
| DanielCampion wrote:
| Thanks jedberg. You can submit you land to the platform and
| our radio team will assess it for viability. All going well,
| you can absolutely manage one site or an entire portfolio
| apayan wrote:
| Hi Daniel. I'm probably just overlooking it, but I can't
| find a link on your site to submit my land for assessment.
| Should I just send an email to info at sitenna?
| briansexton wrote:
| Hi Apayan can you send the details to sales at sitenna
| dot com
| aresant wrote:
| Awesome idea - we own ~44 commercial sites in dense / infill
| locations and growing quickly - how do we get in touch?
|
| For HN this is a great idea because today the process of
| engaging cell operators is an absolute black box - literally
| fill in your contact info in a modal and hope for a call back.
|
| Zero transparency, totally inefficient and the companies
| themselves are a giant pain in the ass to deal with.
| DanielCampion wrote:
| Delighted to hear you agree! It's been a pain for operators
| in every market I've worked in so it's not a small problem
| but starting on HN is a good first step. Send me a DM and
| we'd love to chat. We've launched in the UK and gathering
| supply/demand for US so let's chat and see how we can help
| aresant wrote:
| No DM on Hn? And getting an error on your website form
| briansexton wrote:
| Odd. The form appears to be ok after some testing. Can
| you send an email to sales at sitenna dot com
| interrealmedium wrote:
| Good luck. Yours is the only one in this batch that made me go:
| "Hey, that's a smart idea."
| briansexton wrote:
| Thanks. We appreciate that. We have some big plans for the
| company
| jamestimmins wrote:
| This looks awesome. For potential real estate investors, how
| feasible is it to use Sitenna to identify sites that are likely
| to work well?
| XzAeRosho wrote:
| Hi Daniel, congrats on the launch!
|
| Is Sitenna US only? My FIL works on the telecom industry in
| South America doing location scouting for antennas, data
| centers, etc. He would really love something like this.
| briansexton wrote:
| Hi XzAeRosho Brian here Im the Sitenna co-founder and CTO. As
| you can see this is a worldwide problem that we want to
| solve! We will be expanding globally but the initial rollout
| is US and UK focused. We would definitely love to hear from
| your FIL on what he is working on at the moment to see how we
| might be able to help.
| jonxwang wrote:
| Shimmer (https://shimmer.care) offers guided video support groups
| for people struggling with their mental health. Shimmer matches
| members with shared identities and experiences and places them in
| small groups that meet for weekly support sessions along with a
| qualified peer coach. During the rest of the week, members have
| access to our Community Platform (a mobile app and web app) to
| leverage resources like community events, mood tracking, and
| gratitude journaling.
|
| 79% of young adults with mental health issues do not have access
| to care; the most common alternative, teletherapy, is expensive
| ($150/session), has significant churn (40% drop off after first
| visit), and lacks diverse representation (average age of 51 and
| 80% white). We've developed a curriculum incorporating material
| from expert group therapists at UCSF. This has led to a number of
| great outcomes including: providing care at a fraction of the
| cost of therapy ($50/month or $12/session), an 80% 4-month
| retention rate, and a diverse set of highly experienced
| facilitators that members can relate better to. If you're
| interested in trying Shimmer, you can sign up for a consultation
| call or a wellness workshop (both for free) directly on our
| website. Shimmer is led by three founders with extensive
| experience across healthcare and engineering. Having seen
| firsthand the severe effect that mental health issues have had on
| loved ones, we left previous roles (graduate programs at Berkeley
| MBA/MPH, UCSF MD and Salesforce SWE) to dedicate ourselves to
| improving the accessibility and affordability of mental health
| care.
| brudgers wrote:
| Is Shimmer a health care provider?
| jonxwang wrote:
| No, we are not a health care provider in the traditional
| sense.
| hijinks wrote:
| $50 a month is a lot of money for a lot of people with mental
| health issues. I get it's a lot cheaper then normal care by
| going to see a professional but I was expecting the student
| pricing I guess
| jackson1442 wrote:
| From an American viewpoint at least, this is actually very
| reasonably priced. Paying < $20 for a session of medical
| services is essentially unheard of. I paid $30 as copay for
| PT every two weeks with rather nice insurance, and every time
| I walk into a doctor's office it's _at least_ $30.
|
| I have never pursued therapy but I'm sure it would be a
| minimum of $30 per session with insurance, if not more.
|
| Not to say it couldn't be better, but at first glance this is
| a _great_ improvement from the status quo.
| jonxwang wrote:
| Yeah it's really unfortunate how few people have access to
| insurance for therapy too.
| jonxwang wrote:
| I agree. For now, we offer financial aid for those who can't
| afford the sticker price.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Long-term: Maybe insurance or government equivalent can help?
|
| Short-term: Every new invention needs to start somewhere.
| There are plenty of rich, middle class, and even lower-
| middle-class families that easily have $50 a month to help
| out a struggling child / sibling / cousin / ect.
|
| Remember, new businesses need to start somewhere, and that
| somewhere is often selling to a very tiny segment of the
| market that they intend to serve. [Edit:] Many times this
| means starting at a higher price, and then lowering the price
| as the company streamlines itself and can handle more
| customers.
| jonxwang wrote:
| Yeah we're thinking insurance or B2B as potential avenues
| someday. Also will definitely be doing some streamlining as
| we build up :).
| nullspace wrote:
| I have some personal experience with this. I think what you are
| trying to do is commendable. Group therapies are also pretty
| expensive and not accessible for most people except in extreme
| circumstances.
|
| The thing is if you're having say, 10 people for a 1 hour
| session, that gives each person about 6 minutes to share. But
| really more like 4 - 5 minutes after overhead. I think that is
| still worth _something_ (12 dollars per session sounds about
| right, edit: you may be able to go a few dollars higher), but
| you are basically trading off quality and cost here. It's going
| to be hard to actually build a connection and make it
| meaningful.
|
| (edit: to be clear - the cost here isn't necessarily the lever
| - whether you charge 5 dollars per session or 25 dollars per
| session - you will need to make the 1 hour meaningful for the
| 10 people who are in the meeting, which will be the hard part
| IMO)
| jonxwang wrote:
| Good points! We've thought a lot about this and how to make
| the 1 hour as meaningful as possible. Three things that may
| help with this:
|
| 1) we do breakout rooms so members have more time to talk
| with one another. 2) groups are capped at the 8 person mark.
| 3) depending on the week, not everyone is always hoping to
| chat/share, sometimes members just wish to listen that day.
| hluska wrote:
| Hey friends, you're working on something extremely important
| and it's a real honour to be here for your launch thread. I'm
| celebrating my four year anniversary of getting out of a
| cardiac ward and to be blunt, I wish this had been invented
| four years ago.
|
| Seriously folks, wonderful work - this is really cool.
| jonxwang wrote:
| thank you <333
| shafyy wrote:
| This is really great! A friend of mine recently stayed a clinic
| for two weeks for a mental health issue, and she said the best
| part was that she could talk to others in the group who had
| similar problems.
|
| The best of luck!
| jonxwang wrote:
| Awww thanks! I'm glad your friend had the support she needed
| at the time <3.
| japhyr wrote:
| This looks great, and clearly addresses a serious need. I'm
| curious about your plan for scaling. It seems like finding
| qualified group leaders would be a limiting bottleneck.
|
| How will you continue to find and supervise good group leaders
| as you draw more users?
| jonxwang wrote:
| Currently we've adopted the requirements and interviewing
| strategies from leading support groups such as Mental Health
| America.
|
| Surprisingly there are a lot of thoughtful people out there
| with solid experiences facilitating discussions/conversations
| and this has not been a bottleneck for us!
| mona_rakibe wrote:
| Telmai (https://www.telm.ai/) is a real-time data quality
| monitoring platform that can automatically detect and investigate
| data quality issues as data is getting ingested. Our tool uses a
| statistical and ML engine that helps data product owners
| understand data anomalies and intuitively define correct versus
| incorrect data. These definitions are then used to proactively
| monitor and alert on data quality problems.
|
| We have decades of experience with enterprise data and find that
| this approach towards data quality addresses a huge gap in data
| platforms. Detecting and investigating data quality issues is
| extremely tedious, time-consuming and expensive. Using Telmai,
| companies like Dun & Bradstreet and Myers-Holum are able to find
| and resolve such issues across millions of records in minutes.
| Ask us anything!
| citilife wrote:
| Telm.ai (YC S21) - Real-time data quality monitoring
|
| Looks interesting! I worked on
| https://github.com/capitalone/DataProfiler
|
| We are looking to monitor correlation changes over time, see if
| sensitive data gets entered, track schema changes, etc and see
| the impact of down stream modeling, etc
|
| I'm curious how heavy the input is? because usually these
| systems take a lot of effort to setup. Any idea?
| maxlukichev wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback and the link, it's indeed a very
| nice open source profiler. The complexity of initial analysis
| of the data in search for anomalies was one of the main
| drivers for us. Our approach is based on providing
| interactive experience through which you can see the impact
| of various statistical distributions, ML suggestions, narrow
| down the important criteria and explore actual data
| associated with it. All this helps in building much more
| accurate models of data correctness to be applied for the new
| data. And do it much less time. However as of now we don't do
| data classification, it's one of the future topics of
| interest
| XzAeRosho wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I wanted to give some feedback on the pricing page: it's very
| vague, to the point I don't know how much I will end paying if
| I go over the 500k values (is that the free tier?).
|
| Also, this is only for data monitoring, or can be used for
| stuff like server monitoring too?
| mona_rakibe wrote:
| Thank you so much for this feedback. Regarding the pricing
| page we will tighten it and also add calculator, please stay
| tuned. For now the way it works is after first 500K values we
| charge $150 per 1M attribute values/month.
|
| We dont monitor server or any infrastructure, we are designed
| for data quality monitoring we can flag issues like missing
| data, volume drifts, schema mismatch and where we stand out
| is monitoring actual accuracy of data at record value level.
| Example : We can flag anomalous titles, emails ,
| overrepresented phone numbers etc
| joaquinolmedo wrote:
| Hi HN, we're the founders of Filadd
| (https://courses.filadd.com/). 80% of students in LatAm (Latin
| America) need private tutoring classes to prepare for university
| admission exams. The system is centralized and extremely high-
| stakes: exams only happen once a year and based on your score on
| the exam you can basically choose your university. If you don't
| get the desired score, go home and come back the next year. So
| there is a huge market of private coaching for these admissions,
| and lots of academies that give face-to-face classes like a
| school. We offer online courses that include one-on-one tutoring
| to students who are preparing these exams. We have a revenue
| share business model with the teachers who work with the students
| --not a common model in the region. We also use Data Science to
| identify how well students are performing and we offer them the
| exact content they need to study.
| XzAeRosho wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Fantastic website by the way. How are you planning to reach out
| to students in high school? The Pre-U market in Chile at least
| is brutal, and there are so many competitors that I imagine it
| might be hard to get some market-share.
| joaquinolmedo wrote:
| Hey, we have been operating in Chile for the last year, and
| we aquire users mostly with ambassadors. They refer our
| product and earn a commission. Most of our ambassadors are
| followers in IG (https://www.instagram.com/filadd.cl/). Most
| of our competitors are Tradicional academies that are losing
| more a more share with new Covid Paradigms
| agucova wrote:
| Always great to see more YC startups from LatAm and Chile!
| joaquinolmedo wrote:
| Great opportunities in LatAm
| kyrilku wrote:
| Beau (https://beau.to/) is a no-code tool that helps businesses
| automate customer interactions and onboarding. Customers use our
| software to collect documents, manage payments, send messages and
| more. For example, tax advisors use Beau to collect documents and
| send reminders, and immigration consultants use us to automate
| repetitive client-facing processes. Currently, businesses use a
| mix of form builders, website builders and CRMs to build this
| kind of thing. We launched Beau to make it easy for non-technical
| people to use just one tool to automate their onboarding
| workflows. We are a small team of 3 founders with an art, design
| and engineering background. We needed something like Beau when we
| were onboarding clients to a design agency, and realized we had
| to build it ourselves.
| rubyron wrote:
| Just some quick feedback on your mobile site with iPhone
| Safari:
|
| "Send a clients" typo on home page. Client should be singular.
|
| Pricing page: not clear I could swipe plan cards to right. When
| attempting to swipe, could not get second card to come into
| view. Recommend letting them flow beneath.
| kyrilku wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback! Will fix this shortly
| motoxpro wrote:
| Incredible design on the landing page!
| kyrilku wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| arkitaip wrote:
| I absolutly love the art direction, such a nice break from
| Corporate Memphis.
| [deleted]
| paulgb wrote:
| > immigration consultants use us to automate repetitive client-
| facing processes
|
| Yes! I couldn't believe how inefficient the process of sending
| dozens of documents over email to my immigration lawyers was.
| Glad to see someone working on that problem.
|
| Beautiful landing page, too.
| kyrilku wrote:
| Thank you, glad to hear!
| NWMatherson wrote:
| We are building ContainIQ (https://www.containiq.com/)! We
| provide Kubernetes native monitoring instantly with pre-built
| dashboards and easy to create monitors. A one-line install that
| takes 5 minutes to set up and it just works. By using eBPF we're
| able to correlate kernel-level metrics with Kubernetes objects.
| Our current users are using our product to track and get alerted
| on things like p95/p99 latencies, Kubernetes jobs failing, pod
| evictions, among other things.
| orf wrote:
| Why choose Containq over Datadog?
| NWMatherson wrote:
| Good question.
|
| - ContainIQ just works. Comes pre-configured and you don't
| need a degree from DD University to know how to use it.
|
| - We are only focused on K8s.
|
| - We have differentiated features, easier setup and we take
| less time to maintain (ex our latency features like service
| latency and latency by URL path don't need to be instrumented
| on each application)
|
| - transparent pricing. We are a flat rate of $250 per month
| up to 50 / nodes. You don't have to worry about insane bill
| spikes.
| gregwebs wrote:
| How does this compare to using metadata (eBPF bases metrics).
| NWMatherson wrote:
| Could you expand on what you mean a little? We're a full
| service platform that collects, stores and visualizes the
| data for you.
| sidcool wrote:
| Congrats on launching!
|
| One question about containiq though which I could not figure
| out with the skimming of the link. How it compares to (istio +
| prometheus + grafana)?
| NWMatherson wrote:
| Thanks for reading! Our goal was to create an out of the box
| solution that didn't require on-going maintenance. Another
| goal was to make something that all engineers on the team
| would know how to use.
|
| The amount of 1/2 broken prometheus/grafana setups we see is
| crazy.
|
| From a feature perspective there is some overlap (ex pod/node
| CPU and memory). But we have features that you can't get from
| the solutions you mentioned (ex service latency, latency by
| URL path (coming soon!). And have a lot more in the roadmap
| too. :)
|
| We are also housing and managing the data for our users.
| sidcool wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. Is it available to self host? Or self
| manage in public cloud?
| NWMatherson wrote:
| Currently no, not yet at least.
| debarshri wrote:
| Half broken setup is a people problem. Prometheus and
| grafana is integrations is actually pretty solid and quite
| simple if you follow the docs [1].
|
| If you are out there to replace existing monitoring stack
| like ELK, Prometheus-grafana, victoria metrics, i think it
| will be an uphill battle proving your value because there
| is high switching cost.
|
| Also, In most of the organisations, core resources that
| people care about are well monitored. Just my 2 cents.
|
| [1] https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-kubernetes-
| app/
| bogomipz wrote:
| Congrats on your launch. Your site was a little light on
| details. Could you say how your product compares to Pixie which
| is also Kubernetes-native and uses eBPF?
|
| https://pixielabs.ai/
| NWMatherson wrote:
| Thanks so much!
|
| The initial version of ContainIQ is in a similar space to
| what pixie has built, but our eventual vision has a few
| differentiators. I believe Pixie was built using BCC (an
| assumption based on the 2GB requirement and their BPF trace
| tooling) which requires llvm and the kernel headers to be
| installed on every node. This ends up requiring a lot of
| ephemeral storage. Since Kubernetes is most commonly used for
| stateless applications this ends up being a problem, because
| the default node storage allocatable is relatively low. We're
| in the process of migrating out from BCC to libbpf which
| should alleviate a lot of the issues associated with the
| larger storage/memory footprint of BCC. We also have a few
| unique features in the pipeline that I believe are unique to
| our product (EX: P95, P99 http latency by microservice
| endpoint).
| theptip wrote:
| Sounds interesting!
|
| I'm on GKE. How does this compare against Cilium and the new
| Dataplane V2?
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...
|
| Sounds like you have more work curating dashboards at the
| least. And maybe this bolts on to the standard kube-proxy
| dataplane so folks don't need to change that?
| NWMatherson wrote:
| Cilium has traditionally focused more on the security and
| performance side of Kubernetes networking. Cilium's Hubble
| product more closely aligns with what we are trying to
| achieve, but with ContainIQ we simplify visualization, setup
| and host the data for you. Hubble currently sends the data to
| Prometheus, but we wanted to remove the headache of managing
| your own monitoring platform.
|
| Exactly we bolt on to the standard kube-proxy setup. We put a
| lot of effort into ensuring that everything works right out
| the box.
| Robrechtlr wrote:
| Hi YC, We're Darrell, Jibril, and Robrecht, the co-founders of
| Appollo (https://www.tryappollo.com/). Appollo is a single API to
| launch your app to all eCommerce platforms. Appollo enables you
| to create 1 app with our APIs and launch it to all the eCommerce
| platforms while also letting you maintain it as 1 app.
| Previously, you had to create and maintain an app separately for
| Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Square, Wix,
| SquareSpace, Etsy, etc. Before Appollo, we were working on a live
| stream application for eCommerce stores, which was how we were
| confronted with this problem. Looking forward to your feedback!
| [deleted]
| pbreit wrote:
| I'm wondering what sort of "app" would be deployable to all
| these platforms? Any examples?
| callmeed wrote:
| Looks really great. I have 2 ecomm side projects I'd like to
| start using this in right away.
|
| BTW what happened to the live stream application/idea?
| Robrechtlr wrote:
| I'll follow up with you over email! Long story short,
| customers only used it once and didn't come back to the
| product. We also were more interested in working on this
| problem that we faced ourselves while working on the live
| stream application.
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| Hi! We actually came across the idea for Appollo whilst
| trying to distribute the live-streaming app to ecommerce
| stores. It looked like too much effort so we built what we
| wish had existed. This new market seemed a better
| founder/market fit and had much stronger customer "pull".
| dangrossman wrote:
| You have a pricing page but there's not a single dollar sign on
| it. I have no idea what this costs.
|
| I also took a quick look at your API documentation, and I
| couldn't figure out how I'd use this.
|
| I run several popular Shopify and WooCommerce apps right now.
| Their primary integration point with the store is via injecting
| a script tag into all pages, using Shopify's ScriptTag API or
| WordPress's wp_head hook.
|
| I couldn't find how I'd do this using Apollo.
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| Hey, We are adding script tag support very very soon!
| alex4864 wrote:
| Hey! As someone who isn't super familiar with this space, I'm a
| bit confused about who your target user is. At first I thought
| it was for people who have a mobile app and want to publish it
| on a bunch of stores, but the APIs are all about querying
| products and customers, so I guess it's for integrating with
| eCommerce platforms? A concrete example use case on your
| website would help explain this to me a lot!
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| Browsing a bit through the doc I believe this is targeted to
| developers that build "apps" that online merchants can (buy
| and) use on their e-commerce website. I agree with alex: a
| sample app would probably make it more clear!
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| Thanks guys! Yes correct! we are targeting developers that
| are building apps/extensions for the website. Great idea
| about the sample app, will add!
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| advice from someone ina similar area: STARTER app not
| SAMPLE app. The former gives your clients a starting
| point to build production applications; the later is
| usually some throw-away sample code that quickly goes
| stale and causes nothing but support headaches. By
| extension, you will need to dedicate ongoing resources to
| keep this up to date; that's what you expect of your
| clients, so I hope you enjoy dog food!
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Doesn't the name kind of clash with some already existing,
| relatively well known software? I was sort of confused when I
| saw the name of your company.
|
| https://www.apollographql.com/docs/react/
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| Hey, haha yh good spot! We picked appollo because we help
| people launch (apollo bit) apps (app bit).
| kgraves wrote:
| this is the first time I have heard of 'apollo graphql',
| doesn't seem to be well known really.
| [deleted]
| jacobn wrote:
| Hi, I run clippingmagic.com (a SaaS to clean & prep ecommerce
| product shots) so this could be a great fit for us - we've
| talked many times about integrating with the platforms, but...
|
| A few comments & questions:
|
| 1. https://tryapollo.com fails to provide a secure connection?
|
| 2. Viewing https://docs.tryappollo.com/docs/introduction on
| mobile leads to the sidebar getting hidden - may want to copy
| your ToC into the How To Use This Doc section to not make it
| look like you have three doc pages total ;)
|
| 3. https://docs.tryappollo.com/reference#fetch-products - do I
| provide a "cursor" or a "page"?
|
| 4. The "media" object type is not separately documented. Based
| on the "Create a product" form it's {src:string, type:string} -
| what are the valid string values for "type"?
|
| 5. When I update a product, do I have to include all fields, or
| can I include only those I wish to update?
|
| 6. How do I append another product photo? How do I insert one?
| How do I remove one?
|
| 7. https://docs.tryappollo.com/reference#fetch-variant goes to
| the wrong spot on the page, it goes to Collections API section.
|
| 8. Ditto all questions for products also for variants (page vs
| cursor, media & how to do narrow updates to it).
|
| 9. https://www.tryappollo.com/pricing - your pricing page has
| as of right now no clear indication of your intended business
| model. Charge a fraction of revenue? Fixed $x/install?
| Something else?
|
| 10. Continuation of service: building an app is a non-trivial
| commitment. What happens if things don't work out for appollo?
|
| Thanks!
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| 1. Thanks! we'll fix that!
|
| 2. Thanks for the feedback!
|
| 3. Yep! it is a cursor that we return to you after your first
| query
|
| 4. Thanks, we'll better document that! The type values are
| IMAGE & VIDEO
|
| 5. No only the newly updated values
|
| 7. Ah weird, which browser you using? for me it works.
|
| 8. Ditto all questions for products also for variants (page
| vs cursor, media & how to do narrow updates to it).
|
| 9. Atm we are discussing pricing based on customers needs, on
| a direct call with them
|
| 10. We are committed to making this work. If not we are open
| to many arrangements including helping customers run Appollo
| on-prem.
|
| Phew! Thanks for all the questions haha!
| jacobn wrote:
| I keep misspelling your domain, https://tryappollo.com/ (two
| 'p's, your site) fails to provide a secure connection,
| https://tryapollo.com/ (single 'p') works fine but is a
| completely different website.
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| Yh good catch! We'll fix that!
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| At first I thought this was so you could sell retail products
| through all these different platforms.
|
| I was thinking.... WHY?!
|
| But it is actually for ecommerce plugins/apps/add-ons and the
| customers are those companies making shopify plugins so they
| can develop once and deploy everywhere.
|
| Echoing other comments - a more clear description / example or
| word other than "App" might help. I think Add-On or Plugin
| might be more clear in your one liner when referencing all the
| platforms.
|
| Good luck on the launch! Hope the "meet the batch" thing
| doesn't flop.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Disclosure: I work for an established (maybe?) competitor to
| this idea; I say maybe because it's really not clear what you
| do until I read most of this thread, nor how you do it (or
| what's planned vs. available).
|
| First, Welcome! This is a huge arena and I think there's a
| million, nuanced areas for companies to tackle and really
| focus on amazing merchant experiences. THis is a very big
| (and growing) pie.
|
| Second, I think you'd benefit from trying to increase the
| clarity of what you do and the value proposition, plus how it
| all works. For example, I'm not sure how you can provide
| broad-based api support for 3rd party developers without
| script injection or strong webhook support, but maybe you've
| got a new approach? I also admit to being skeptical when you
| mention a feature as surpassing platform rate limits; we have
| a continual pain point with shopify, query cost calculation
| and throttling as an example.
|
| Third, we also use a platform-agnostic solution, but then
| build internally on this before exposing client-facing
| services. After several years we don't support nearly as many
| platforms as you; how do you stay on top of all these
| unilateral changes? Just shopify keeps us on our toes, and
| some of the ones you mention have little critical mass making
| them unattractive.
|
| Finally, it would probably help adoption if you _at least_
| gave some indication of what your pricing is going to look
| like, even flat rate or %, or totally custom... You 're
| asking people to build solutions on top of your product
| without any sort of idea of what the long term ramifcations
| look like. That's a hard sell.
|
| Good luck with the venture!
| Eiriksmal wrote:
| What are some competitors in this space? I would be a
| customer of one of these businesses.
| Robrechtlr wrote:
| Great point, we have ran into the problem that people
| misunderstand our product before, especially when they are
| not familiar with the eCommerce app stores. I'll start
| testing out plugin/add-on and see if that improves it,
| apprecaite it!
| rsstack wrote:
| I love this. Now that you have a working version, what's next
| on your road map?
| Darrelladjei wrote:
| Thanks so much! We are building out more API endpoints so
| more customers can start building their app with our APIs. In
| particular some folks have asked for Front-end functionality
| e.g. to change the theme on the target website. If you have
| any suggestions of things you would like would love to hear
| about them!!
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(page generated 2021-07-23 23:00 UTC)