Comment by jaredlunde

8 months ago

Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.

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jaredlunde

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yodon  8 months ago

Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than developing them.

The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.

The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.

Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.

The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."

Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.

  • jaredlunde  8 months ago

    Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to share.

    > The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool

    I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that was the vibe.

    > it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail

    It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.