sigre

This reads like yet another autocratic, micro-managing HR document. "Have a room with a door that shuts." Seriously?

How about this: hire smart people you trust, give them whatever tools and support they need to do their jobs most productively, then get out of the way.

Send me an email: ryan -at- pushlayer.com and I'll set you up. Thanks!

Definitely. From a technical standpoint, it's Rails app on Heroku (using unicorn), using Sidekiq. I've got a ton of background with Rails and scaling on this platform, though not a lot with Sidekiq. I'm very excited about the possibilities with this though, and I've used redis quite a bit. On our backlog is to do some serious load testing. I'm also quite aware of the recent RapGenius/random routing stuff.

I'm planning to do a series of blog posts about how we built the site and some cool lessons we learned.

From a marketing perspective, the plan is to make an absolutely killer product that developers will enjoy using, and will tell anyone within earshot of it. We also have a couple of cool features that haven't been tried before with push notifications that I think will be intriguing enough to land us some general tech press. I don't have terribly specific scaling plans around marketing yet, as I don't want to put the cart before the horse (i.e. I want to prove there's a product-market fit first, then spend more effort on getting the word out.

Cool! We're going to be putting in coupon codes in a day or two. I'd be happy to give you an extended discount if you'd like to give us feedback on the service. Shoot us an email (info -at- pushlayer.com) and I'll hook you up.

That's great advice, and perhaps that's really the answer. Based on what I've been directly observing, most of the "marketing" that I do is pretty mechanical: A/B testing, posting updates to our existing users and soliciting feedback, adwords experimenting, and writing blog posts and other content.

In terms of prioritization, spending my time improving the product and offloading this mechanical work just seems like the right thing to do.

Cool, and that's been our overarching strategy.

What I'm concerned about is that, as we work through the backlog of features, we also want to grow the users simultaneously. This will help us avoid a "bias of small numbers", in that our small group of initial users keep us focused most specifically on their needs, potentially taking us away from building features others might find compelling.

Hockeystick growth is for later, when we've achieved product-market fit. For now, I just want slow, linear growth to make sure we're consistently filling our backlog with compelling features that users actually want.

This is great feedback. The $25/m gets you 2500 notifications prepaid, but it's a use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing.

I'll definitely clarify that. Thanks!

It's an API you use to send push notifications to iOS devices that have your app installed.

More specifically: it (a) makes debugging missing notifications easier, as it often feels like a notification just disappears into the ether, (b) it's priced based on actual usage, and (c) it saves you a ton of time from having to deal with Apple's APNS, which in my experience can get quite hairy.

Based on our split testing and other feedback, one of the next items on our list is to rewrite the about page. Thanks for the feedback!