I've been using Ellipsis for a few months now. I have zero regrets about paying for it now and likely will pay them more in the future as their new features ship.
For a solo engineer like me who's working in multiple codebases across multiple languages, it's excellent as another set of eyes to catch big and small things in a pull request workflow I'm used to (and it has caught more than a few). I'd argue even as a backstop for catching edge cases/screwups that may lead to wasting my time that it's already more than paid for itself.
@gregw134 Thank you for sharing! I've never worked at Google, but really curious what the engineering context is when you say "needs a launch" in the last line.
At Kicksend, we're building apps that empower non-technical people to send & receive photos, videos, and other stuff with the people they know.
It's a directly consumer product with a lot of interesting challenges around engineering (how to push large files in realtime at scale), design (we're serious about it), and data-driven, highly measured product design and development.
We're hiring product engineers on:
- iOS
- Android
- Mac Desktop
- Windows Desktop
We're also hiring folks to help with:
- Inbound Marketing
- QA
We're VC-backed and YC S11. It's a very small team, with most folks wearing many hats. Relocation provided to the Bay Area if we decide to hire you.
Our product is designed for non-technical users. We want to empower everyday people to do things that they weren't able to do before - namely send large files, big batches of smaller files, and easily receive and organize files sent to them by people they know and care about.
Most of the work we've done these past few months was more user-experience than technical, and there's a ton more that we're going to improve as we move forward.
Here's why we're special:
Our desktop apps are killer. You can drag and drop a big batch of files in, and we take care of the rest. If someone sends you a thousand files, we make sure those are auto-downloaded, and display them in a way that's easy to browse. Since you're on HN and used to things like Dropbox, you might consider this trivial or solved, but our fleshed out desktop experience is highly visual and is something many consumers find very, very appealing.
Our webapp has a 3-step interface for sending files to any email which was a direct result of hundreds of hours of user-testing. If you've never done user-testing, trust us when we tell you that it's usually a humbling affair. The last time we were on HN, our product was terrible compared to what it is now. It's only going to improve from here on out.
The mobile apps that we're planning will change things. To date, nobody has a way to take a video on your phone, send it to a select group of people and have it downloaded on all the devices they have connected.
Our backend infrastructure is a lot more generic than most other file-sharing services, which enable us to cook up slicker features faster than anybody else.
People also seem to like our customer support.
This was long, hope this answered some of your questions. FYI, we're still iterating on everything, everyday based on user feedback.
We thought it would be useful since a lot of new startups do wind up showing their work on HN before anyone else picks them up. We were trying to show folks what to expect, and the ramifications of getting that kind of traffic coupled with a strong viral loop.
Thanks for your interest, excellent comments and support! We're still giving quick access to HN users - append +hn when you signup (ex: [email protected])
Others feel differently and are compelled to share just to get access since they like the concept enough. We did think about it quite a bit, which is why we removed the 'share to get bumped up in the queue based on your referrals' to 'just the act of telling your friends makes you important to us, and you're marked as a VIP in the db'.
Anyway, [email protected] gets you access today without having to share.
Also wrote a little UI for it. https://pradeep.md/skills