Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wahnfrieden 1115 days ago
I've been designing a worker-owned (both the startup and the user data owned by those 'worker' users) Glassdoor alternative. Wonder about how to grow interest in it. Pay sharing is another useful feature of Glassdoor that could be done better in a worker-centric way.

Another aspect of it is to refer/resell self-hosting for users to completely own their own data (such as Bunny CDN which has very wallet-friendly prepaid schemes and a referral program) so they don't have to worry about what the service owner does. It would then be a kind of decentralized network of mini Glassdoors about the workers current or past employers, where one worker would spin it up and their peers can use. Each would decide what to leave public-facing and private-facing for the workers, and could even monetize for the workers via selling their data as Glassdoor does for things like market comp survey data so that workers could privately share comp data amongst each other and publicly sell access to extra anonymized summaries of that data.

This would be tied together into a user friendly iOS/macOS app to manage the deployment of the site. How does that sound?
1 comments
smoldesu 1115 days ago
> This would be tied together into a user friendly iOS/macOS app

Why? Providing a web client would drastically expand your potential customer-base.

link
wahnfrieden 1115 days ago
The web client would be for most users, the native iOS/macOS client would be for the smaller group that manages the deployments (would be one person at a company or in a friend group). I'm working on cross-plat Swift strategies to bring this to Windows later.
link
smoldesu 1115 days ago
I'm still confused. I can't deploy or buy your app without iOS or MacOS?
link
wahnfrieden 1115 days ago
It's a good point, I'll find a good way to start earlier with cross-plat deployment management. Between the two of us we have strong fullstack skills in web and iOS/Apple ecosystem. Apple App Store distribution and IAP are a strong part of our typical app strategies (I'm able to drive huge user growth via App Store) but this approach for this idea needs more thought because the deploy-manager person for this app wouldn't be the one we'd charge IAP to. I'm not actually sure how to make money off this idea yet.

It's also potentially linux-runnable (the management tools) with a native apple frontend, then later can explore bringing to win/web

I've been moving more of my iOS app core biz logic to JS and exploring cross plat Swift for running more across web and windows, while still leaning hard into the nice parts of Apple ecosystem, so that whatever solution I find for this is easier

We're also doing an app using https://github.com/live-codes/livecodes to move a lot more languages/envs capability into the client which might enable some good web and ios cross plat capabilities.

Anyway besides the platform question, interested in any other feedback from anyone

link