sebastianhoitz

Hello everyone!

I have seen a lot of discussions in the past about the sustainability of open-source development and how this can lead to burnout with some of the maintainers. However, these are individual voices and I would like to collect a broader understanding.

I want to start an initiative to improve the situation for maintainers and for this, your feedback would be really helpful.

If you are interested, you can find more information here: https://survey.makemake.sh/

Thank you very much!

Sebastian Hoitz

I'm currently creating a statemachine driven checkout process for my startup. When I started to draw a business process for the events that can happen, it felt like I was trying to reinvent the wheel. Are there any good resources out there on standard business processes like payment including chargebacks, payment reminders etc.?

Bonus question: Can you integrate post-paid and pre-paid into one state machine or should you create two state machines and your order object decides which state machine to use?

You use Twitter, Facebook as well as email to communicate with your customers? With all these different services, it has become very hard to manage and keep track of all the conversations happening.

My co-founder and I noticed this some months ago and asked people how they would like to handle this. And so we have come up with a new solution. We launched into public beta about two weeks ago.

The problem was: We had a very hard time explaining to people how we help them and why that's relevant. We were too technical and nobody really understood exactly what it was that we did.

So we took a few steps back and really worked hard on how to explain what we actually do. We launched our new website that (we hope) does a better job at telling people what we do.

What do you guys think? Can we explain well enough what we are doing? And how do you like the video?

The new website is at http://suplify.me

Thanks, Sebastian

What would be the best way to collect usage metrics of your SaaS product?

I want to collect things like: Logins, Amount of time spent on site, clicks.

Is there an easy way to do this? Is there any service that provides the possibility to do this?

We are going to have an interview with a VC next week. This is going to be my first try at this and, to be honest, I'm really excited. I just don't want to blow it - so I would really like to prepare.

What questions could they ask that I should really know the answer to?

Please tell me what questions you got asked when being interviewed by a VC firm.

We are currently working on redesigning our app so that it looks more fresh and beautiful.

Our aim is to provide a more modern looking and visually appealing software that makes all the UI elements understandable and useful.

This is where we started from (aka current version): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5912/Jing/2011-04-07_0134.png

And this is what the design looks like on our dev server:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5912/Jing/2011-04-07_0131.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5912/Jing/2011-04-07_0135.png

We are still in an early stage of the re-design, but I just wanted to get some feedback on the current design / color scheme, since we are almost done with that.

I appreciate every feedback.

Thank you so much!

Sebastian