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Show HN: GetNotified – describe an event and get alerted when it happens (getnotifiedapp.com)
67 points by smailq 4257 days ago
7 comments

Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of Hooks (gethooksapp.com), an alerts-for-everything ios app. We went public beta 2 weeks ago.

Talking about MVPs, I hate myself for not having started with something like this. Instead of creating an web form where you can ask the users what they want (and giving the service, if not its not mvp!), we waited until we had an stable good looking ios app (with 35 different types of alerts, dynamic forms etc etc) -4 months of hard work.

FYI, we used surveys (we did ~1000) for validating the idea and getting new alert ideas but that's nothing compared with real users feedback. That's something you can't get until you launch something that looks real (like getnotifiedapp.com does). In two weeks we've learnt more about our app than ever before, including surveys, private testflights and so. Lesson learned (and this is something we cannot say noone told us, its at every modern startup book)

Good luck with this project!

what do you use as your data back end?
Mongo for storing notifications. MySQL for non intensive things. We developed the backend on our own.

ps. I'm a BIG fan of huginn and your work. We studied it and had a very interesting discussion on moving everything to your platform, but we already had a mature version of our backend when we found it and we are not rubyists. I can remember writing on twitter something like "We have hit the open source jackpot". Said that, we will try sooner than later to, at least, connect your agents to our platform.

Awesome! It might be useful for you. Send me a note if you have any questions.
Thanks! I'll be in touch
There are tons of notification services out there, but most of them focus on one particular niche (such as stock prices, social mentions, monitoring news sites, etc.)

On the one hand, I like how broad this is. It purports to handle a bunch of different types of events, and all you have to do is describe what you want in plain English.

On the other hand, I'm skeptical about how well a service can execute when it has to handle such a broad range of alert types.

I've written a lot of notification-type stuff (e.g. monitor a Twitter feed for when my book titles are mentioned, monitor a bank account for unusual activity, monitor a blog without an RSS feed for new posts), and it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of service. If GetNotified has to write new code for each monitoring request, I would imagine the subscriptions would have to run for a good long while before they make a profit.

P.S.: A little free copy editing help: There's a typo in "If you are in doubt, just submit the request and will let you know if it can be done or not."

Few ways we handle the notifications :

1. Find existing service that handles the job - integrate it, or just let the user know, or subscribe to it on behalf of the user.

2. Write code - automate it, script it if possible

3. Virtual assistance - let our VAs handle the monitoring if there is no other way

Hope this answers :)

Thanks for the fix!

By VA you mean something like TaskRabbit?
Is this an MVP or does it actually work automatically?

I noticed the part where it says it has to be reviewed by a human and then I thought it would be way easier to get notified by text instead of email.

Boom! Feature request ha!

If you are in doubt, just submit the request and will let you know if it can be done or not.

It sounds like they are manually writing scrapers for each request.

Honestly is looks like someone watched the How To Start A Startup video yesterday, saw how they made a one-pager in an hour to validate the idea, and just ran with it. So my guess is they're looking for how people would want to use it anyway.
Love this.

Submitted "Notify me when someone in the open source community is looking for design help"

Need this for finding open source projects to weekendhackers newsletter.

I agree with you, this is pretty nice idea. not just a simple reminder, but an " idea " reminder.
How do you expect them to fulfill this request?
Have no idea. What I have done so far is search for small project on ex. twitter. and then go through them to see what makes sense or not.
If you're interested in a self-hosted solution, much of this can be accomplished with Huginn. https://github.com/cantino/huginn
This is a great way to find ideas for a niche project. Awesome.
any ideas to make a public feed API of completed notifications? That would be really great!