Shalen

Hey HN, we are long time members of this community, and we’d love to share a new product we’re launching today called Text-a-Pro. The product is entirely messaging based, and allows homeowners to book trusted pros at flat-rate prices to get their home improvement projects done. We’re also the first to provide an end-to-end transaction on Facebook Messenger (and also by texting 776-776). We’ve built a lot of tech behind the scenes for this – including generating dynamic images at run-time for things like personalized estimates and pro recommendations. Our pricing engine is built on a canonical home project catalog and generates personalized prices based on your location and project description.

This product is only available in SF/Seattle right now. You can see a video of the end to end experience here: https://vimeo.com/141591093

And more product info here: https://pro.com/text

If you have any questions about the tech or product feedback/ideas, we’d love to chat!

Hi:

A few weeks ago someone had posted a list of websites useful for launching your startup. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark it and I'm unable to find that post. If someone recalls or knows about the post I'm talking about, I'll appreciate if you can please share the link.

Thanks, Shalen

We are longtime members of HN and this is our only submission requesting feedback from the HN community on our product, Clipboard which we have been developing for the past year. Clipboard is a service to save anything online using a bookmarklet or browser extension (think Dropbox for content on the web). Clipboard is built using open source technologies, including Riak, Redis, NGINX, Node.js, and jQuery. One of our core differentiators is how we preserve the visual look and functionality of the original source, which is evident in the sample clips from github here: clipboard.com/site/github.com and hacker news here: clipboard.com/site/news.ycombinator.com

We are still in private beta but we'd love your feedback. Visitors from HN can access and register on our site directly at clipboard.com/register?token=hn. You can also reach us via email at support@clipboard.com.

What tools, platform would you recommend if someone were to build a portal ground up with the following features:

a) Ability for users to upload (or share, link) user generated content (say, audio, video, images etc)

b) Ability for users to comment, rate and provide feedback on user generated content

c) Ability for portal owner/ admin to do analytics (page views, visitors from different countries, downloads etc)

I don't want to write everything from the scratch but instead want to leverage existing tools/platforms as much as possible.

Thanks!