| I also loved the demo. I particularly liked the fresh database every time. I suggest that you run a background process that always ensures you have say 5 demo databases 'ready to go' so you can dish them out with no delay when a user clicks on the evaluate link. The speed of that first click really is essential. Also, you could come up with some clever hacks to share the caching for the default dashboards. Until a user makes a modification, they are essentially on a static site which has huge advantages for you under load. If you could automatically bake the site into pure HTML and switch over to a real version on the first modification that might be a big speed win when you get dug or slashdotted. Then again, it could be a premature optimisation. Well done. Very slick. Consider making your login page (http://splendidbacon.com/users/sign_in) expand into a sign up page rather than making them separate. Finally, there should be an easy way to convert the demo account into a real trial account. There could be a big button to do it in the header, or the account button could be re-labeled TRIAL or FREE ACCOUNT and could lead to a form that allowed conversion from demo to real. Right now I can't do this conversion because I don't know the password for the demo account. Keep the prices low, you have a naturally viral product here (people pulling other people in). You might want to engineer in features that draw in the dev shop's clients too (bug tracker, public project dashboards, etc) |
Also we didn't have time to do any caching, but it's a good way to learn the bottle necks :D
Thanks for the great feedback! Much appreciated!