Mocky
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organized feedback
Hiten Shah

Mocky — A window into your team's Dropbox activity and projects

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Alexander Singh
Jonnie Hallman began sharing his development process with Cushion, along with a breakdown of the costs required to run it. He also said that, incidentally, they've been great marketing tools for him. Have you considered doing something similar?
Daniel Zarick
@automaticyes Yes! Actually one of the things I'm working on right now is a blog post about what happens in the background while you set up your account so that you never see an empty page.
Daniel Zarick
Hi! I’m the guy that made Mocky, and did all the code, design, product, copywriting, sales, etc. Comment here or email me daniel@mocky.com if you have any questions at all! Mocky first launched just over two years ago as a way to get feedback on images. I used it with clients and some other people did as well, but it didn’t stick. Nobody wanted to supplant their existing workflow. I realized all my files were already in Dropbox, and all the conversation and context about the files happened in Slack. So I decided to rebuild Mocky on top of Dropbox and Slack to help tie these a little bit closer, and give my colleagues and clients more insight into what changed in our projects day-to-day, without having to manually update a tool with what I did. So the first stage of that new product is what you see here. There’s a lot more to come! Mocky will coordinate feedback and conversations about the work with your team, new platforms will be added (Box, Google Drive/Docs, Gmail, Slack files, etc), and plenty more. Hope you like it.
Tyler Selby
Cool but requires a CC to even try it out. What gives?
Dylan Jhaveri
@tyler_selby I'm betting the creator wants to start by focusing on the market of users who don't hesitate to pay for software that is going to improve their business. Smart.
Daniel Zarick
@tyler_selby Hey Tyler. Thanks for the question. The FAQ on the sign up page mentions this, but it's because Mocky is an expensive service to run and I'm only one person who is self-funding the business. So it's a bit of a give and a take... you can cancel your trial at any time and you are given ample notice before billed. All I ask is that you show your intent to pay if you appreciate the product. It's fairly standard practice for business SaaS apps. I look at it like a coffee shop: you don't expect to go in and use their free wi-fi without at least buying a coffee.
Tyler Selby
@danielzarick what's makes this service expensive to run?
Daniel Zarick
@dylanjha @tyler_selby Exactly, Dylan. There's a server cost for each team and also a support cost. As one developer it's difficult to juggle both, especially with a lot of free users who often take up a lot of time with little intention to pay. I'd love to have them some day! But I can't afford to split my attention yet.
Daniel Zarick
@tyler_selby Mocky watches as your team works in Dropbox all day and tracks changes in real time. There's no direct API for this from Dropbox, so Mocky runs in the background all day and night. If there are 10-30 people on your team working on files, times hundreds or thousands of free accounts, the amount of server and database cost can balloon quickly.
Ryan Jones
Could you tell me how this different from the recent activity view built in to Dropbox?
Daniel Zarick
@rjonesy hey Ryan, there's a few differences. Depending on where you're viewing recent activity in Dropbox (menu bar app, iOS, web, etc) you might only see files changed by you. With Mocky, you see changes by user and inside projects. Projects in Mocky are tied to folders. All of these changes can also be emailed to you or posted to Slack daily, so when you start your day you can see if anything changed you need to know about.