[krammer]

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!

[tectonic]

what do you use as your data back end?

[krammer]

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.

[tectonic]

Awesome! It might be useful for you. Send me a note if you have any questions.

[krammer]

Thanks! I'll be in touch