from Hacker News

Farewell Kera

by dmarinoc on 4/22/13, 8:55 AM with 27 comments

• by tzaman on 4/22/13, 10:14 AM

  I actually tried Kera for our product (https://codeable.io) and even had a Skype conversation with one of the founders, but I knew having a walkthrough guide (their product) was just a band-aid for poor UX, and as such, just a temporary solution, not really worth paying for in the long term, especially when it was easy to use one of the open source solutions and adapt them (like Zurb Joyride) to our needs.

  Nevertheless I wish the Kera team good luck on their next venture!

• by camwest on 4/22/13, 1:01 PM

  Hey folks. I'm a Kera cofounder.

  We believe in the Lean Startup. Probably more than most. We launched three separate tutorial products trying to find something that people picked up easily while still giving great results. We basically ran out of time and had to scale our team back to just the three cofounders.

  We are still kicking the can trying to get traction (albeit in a different direction).

  If anyone wants more details about why we shut down the producg I'd be more than happy to share. It's fundamentally a CAC being higher than LTV type issue.

• by Kiro on 4/22/13, 10:05 AM

  What did the service do?

• by ivzar on 4/22/13, 5:21 PM

  I had the privilege of spending some time with Max and John, two of Kera.io's cofounders during SXSW this year. They are two of the most personable and generous founders I have ever met (must be the whole Canada thing!). These guys have both the technical chops and the hustle to be huge, and I am positive that this is merely a bump in the road for them. They are going to be unstoppable with one of their next ventures, fate just didn't have Kera.io in its cards.

  Best of luck to the both of you, you guys are gonna kill it.

• by Lucent on 4/22/13, 4:24 PM

  The Demo link at the top of ptable.com is still powered by Kera's first generation demo software. It's a shame to lose it, but it seems their target demographic was more sales-oriented sites that would find high monetary value in people converting. That wasn't me.

• by noeltock on 4/22/13, 1:24 PM

  I think it's unfortunate. We had used the service for the Clickbank Powered platform and users loved it. I didn't see much value in the product they pivoted into, but the initial one was superb. Here's to hoping they open source it...

• by tpsc on 4/22/13, 11:01 AM

  It is a pity. I didn't manage to try it out but Kera really stood out in terms of design.