Signing up for a free trial requires some bit of commitment. A couple of sentences isn't enough for most people to commit to a new product.
If you think about the customer journey as Research-Evaluate-Purchase, the 30 day free trial is the Evaluate stage. There isn't enough information (or any specifics) on the landing page to do any meaningful amount of research.
I'm not sure what it is you're actually selling. More documentation or practical examples would be great. I'm not willing to create an account / sign in to find out stuff like that.
Could you provide a demo of some sort on the landing page? I have been writing APIs for over a decade and still have no idea what benefit this provides. Who does it compete with? What differs it from a starter/seed project? Do I still write code or is it a visual interface? What sort of redundancy and reliability does it have, especially since I haven't heard of the project or company before?
$20/month is a bit much for a side project. For a real world project, the price is peanuts if the benefits are there, but the lack of explanation makes it a non-starter for many companies, I would imagine.
Luckily, most of that seems to be marketing and documentation, which shouldn't be too difficult to update, if the product is working correctly at least.
It's a great idea, but as other have noted, the landing page definitely needs either a lot more information or at least a couple examples of what kind of service you're actually providing.
Are you actually hosting the API I'd be building? Or just generating boilerplate code for it? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding :)
I'm wondering what all the upvotes are about? I've seen fairly decent "Show HN" submissions languish down in the 0-1 range while this one (which is being universally panned) is up to 17.
I clicked on it because I immediately thought, "oh that sounds useful". Most "Show HN"s don't immediately trigger that response in me. So I suspect the upvotes are because the idea resonates, even if the landing page needs improvement.
I signed up w/ my github creds and made a small "hello world" GET endpoint. Here's my comments & questions so far:
1) allow non-json responses
2) why would I do pass-thru? for metrics?
3) add test data generation features for mock responses
4) add at least limited scripting features for both pass-thru and mock
Looks like a good start to me and I was not particularly bothered by the current sign up.
Hello all. I just want to say thanks for everyone's feedback. It is very much appreciated. I apologize if I don't have the chance right now to respond to everyone individually but I plan to at some point. Just want to let you all know I'm reading the feedback and will hopefully make this product better. Thanks.
I signed up and played with the app. I think this would be better implemented as a library or wrapper on top of one. The "code using a mouse" idea has been tried and almost every time the verdict is: code is the preferred interface for programmers.
That said, clearly standardization is coming to the world of APIs, and code reuse/generation along with it. Have you looked at Django REST framework? They have a pretty good approach. http://www.django-rest-framework.org/