from Hacker News

Show HN: WebMenu, a platform to discover new web apps

by rooshdi on 11/5/13, 7:49 PM with 20 comments

  • by olegp on 11/5/13, 9:40 PM

    Looks great! We're doing almost exactly the same thing at https://starthq.com

    Some initial observations:

    - you have a much better UI for the directory

    - we have more data on the apps, which we pull in automatically via API integrations

    - our launcher has a few more features, including new tab replacement extensions for most browsers

    - you seem to be targeting consumers, while we're focusing on business users

    - you're further along with the app admin & app promotion side of things, we're just getting that going and aren't planning on having that as our main source of revenue

    Can we collaborate somehow?

    For example, we already have an RSS feed of all the new apps being added to our directory. You could use that to populate yours.

    I would be happy to share all our app data with you via a REST API as well if we got something in return, such as a small link in the footer.

    You can reach me here in comments, via Twitter (handle in profile) or by signing up and using the feedback form.

  • by rooshdi on 11/5/13, 7:51 PM

    Hello all, As a bootstrapper myself, I've noticed getting exposure for new web services is hard. The major media outlets usually don't care and focus on gossip more than products. I've built a simple platform to help connect web applications with the users looking for them. I hope I can help you find new users and get reviews. Any feedback to improve the service is appreciated.

  • by bobfunk on 11/5/13, 11:54 PM

    Just added BitBalloon (https://webmenu.org/apps/bitballoon), some comments on the process:

    Really would be nice if I didn't have to manually crop & resize the screenshots before uploading. Just resizing and cropping them centered would have done a fine job in my case. Though you would probably want to disallow images that are too small so you don't get scaling artifacts.

    When you get a validation error for a screenshot, the form forgets the URL, so you have to retype that every time.

    Would also be nice with a tagging widget when entering tags. Currently there's no indication of existing tags.

    Apart from that everything looks great! Good luck!

  • by wasd on 11/5/13, 10:56 PM

    I think this is a great idea Rooshdi and I wish you the best of luck. I think creating a market place is hard because you need both buyers and sellers. As far as I can tell, you found 12 apps of each type and listed them here. I can see the clear value for sellers. What do you think the value is for buyers?

  • by octatone2 on 11/5/13, 9:05 PM

    A lot of your assets are not retina compatible. Specifically your logo image: https://d2avfbmbvwlo8q.cloudfront.net/assets/logo-fd9cab1e82...

  • by Globz on 11/5/13, 8:29 PM

    Very nice, hopefully this platform will get more attention!

  • by will_work4tears on 11/6/13, 2:00 AM

    I love these types of services! I dont yet have my own but love discovering them. I guess i'm your target audience?

  • by vanwilder77 on 11/5/13, 9:51 PM

    awesome service!

    Nicely done! Love the UI, its so clean and intuitive.

    Looking forward to publish my apps there.