Thanks Adam for your advices on betainabox.com It's refreshing to have someone take an objective look of your business and provide honest, actionable feedback -- the advises showed that you have given it lots of thought and were invaluable to the growth of my business.
* disclaimer: I'm working on a service that's an entry into this space as well *
I believe the customer pain is that for many applications, it takes many iterations before the product takes off -- and for non-developers, who have to hire developers to implement each iteration, it could be cost-prohibitive to get to the take off stage. Easy application prototyping and MVP developing products allows agility in fine tuning ideas to make sure it meets a need, before spending the money to hire a developer and implementing the final, more optimized version.
It's also advantageous for developers to use these products as well -- not only is it faster to develop (no need to learn a ton of APIs), it's also easier mentally to change the product to suit a business need (after all, it's easier to toss out an afternoon's worth of work than 2 weeks', if needed)
Thank you very much for your input! It is very helpful. Yes, the wording right now are not very clear -- being a developer myself, I need to get better at describing the application for non-developers =)
Regarding not being to see the interface without signing up, I am preparing screenshots and a short screencast to use right now. Stay tuned =) I am also working on being able to let users work on their application without signing up at all, similar to how shopping carts application allow users to sign up at the end of the process, but that's longer in the future =)
Thank you for your feedback re: pricing. It's definitely something I'll consider. The current pricing might be a bit pessimistic in terms of the amount of traffic I'll receive and the support I need to provide, and I was thinking it's easier to later reduce the price than to increase if I were to underestimate =)
The calls/month comment is very useful -- a couple other users had also commented on that, and I'll work on clarifying what it is and your suggestion about using pageview is very good.
And thanks on the bug report about the sign up/login page -- I am using an onblur to validate and opening the signup causes the email field to validate -- I'll fix that =)
Thanks for your input! I love HN because of comments like yours!
Thank you -- currently, my main focus is for prototyping web application, as there are already a few big players in the mobile app prototyping space and I would like to learn more about how users prototype applications before venturing into that space -- but it's definitely something I'll consider in the future and thanks for your interest!
I would like to share a project I have been working on with you – it's still early in development, so lots of polish is needed, but I would love to get your feedback.
The problem I am trying to solve is that for many entrepreneurs who want to start their own online web application, it is very expensive and time consuming to hire developers to create their initial prototype, and as a result it's difficult to continuously fine tune and improve their ideas. Existing mockup tools are either too high-level (focusing solely on the UI and less about the functionality) or too limited (works only for a very specific type of application). That's why I have created Beta In A Box – it's an online prototyping environment that allows users to start creating their web application by first picking a recipe (a template), and implements the behavior using basic building blocks (similar to how IFTTT works by defining triggers and a sequence of activities)
The hope is that it would be valuable for entrepreneurs who are either uncomfortable with coding or would like to quickly prototype their ideas, to continuously improve their ideas and eventually hire developers to build the final design, once the idea has been validated and an investment to defining an optimized version can be justified.
Please give it a try, and let me know what you think. Thank you and have a great day building apps!