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Philip
0:11: Medium meets Minority Report
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@captnphilip Exactly!! :) -- We were worried people might think you can actually do that with the product. Those are actually my hands. Closest I'll ever come to being Tom Cruise.
Hi Hunters! I'm the marketing guy at Verst. We are all extremely pumped to get this baby out in the world and start hearing your feedback and ideas! Check out Reid Hoffman's site as an output example (www.reidhoffman.org)
Yes, we are another platform for building websites and blogs, but Verst is not another WordPress or Squarespace clone. We are aiming at a new market, the gap that exists between those beginner website tools and enterprise-grade business solutions like Optimizely and HubSpot. We call them "professional publishers," the types that create valuable content as a means to achieve tangible business results.
So, Verst is focused on integrating (*buzzword alert*) machine learning tech that allows publishers to run a data-driven content business. We are starting with built-in A/B testing, insights notifications that distill your data into actionable alerts, easy calls-to-action as a native feature, and turnkey subscriptions (coming soon). We've also built a modular design system so publishers won't have to shell out for custom templates & eventual redesigns. And lastly, we're truly mobile focused in that our Verst Mobile app matches our full desktop publishing experience (you can A/B test right from your phone), and all Verst designs are engineered to look great across all screen sizes.
We hope this platform takes much of the pain out of the current publishing experience, greatly reduces the volume & friction of tools & plug-ins required to succeed, and allows great creators to drive more signups, subscribers, purchases, etc. -- at a very "non-enterprise" price ($29).
While anyone can try Verst free for 30 days, we are happy to offer Product Hunters an exclusive discount of 20% off your entire first year, using the coupon code: hunt
Please AMA or reach out with any feedback or questions! garett@verst.com
@garettpress This was so simple and easy to use. Nice work - will see if the data driven bells and whistles are a game changer!
Some feedback:
- When publishing, selecting a category - there was no help there, so didn't really know what to choose, am I adding to a public category? Is it a personal category only? Some suggestions/examples would be helpful.
- Its taking a very long time to publish - looks as if its stuck on "Publishing..." for like 15 mins now, refreshed and re-did my post to publish, same issue. Its an article around 9 mins long. So I went to admin panel, deleted the draft and then tried to create a new one - but 'Publish" was grey so could not do it, clicked close (assuming auto-save) but it wasn't :(
EDIT: Its semi-published after several attempts. Only happened through the admin panel, not when I was editing. However my image didnt get included. Tried adding that and re-publishing and now back to having the same issue as before. 😔
Obviously some bugs related to the image uploading (its only 335kb) but this is what happens :)
@bentossell @garettpress Hi Ben,
Thank you so much for the feedback!
Re: your first bullet, category is meant as both an organizational filter (like a tag) and as a way to organize your menu (and does appear publicly). We are working right now on (a) allowing you to organize this in a more granular way (b) a way to allow sub menus (so multiple levels for the nav) and (c) add multiple tags / categories. (a) and (b) should be out in the next 1-2 weeks and (c) not to much further after that. That being said, I'll write up a modal to add there so it's clear what the intention is for now.
Re: your second bullet - we were affected by the AWS outage, unfortunately, so it appears the issue is due to that. Try reloading and clearing your cache and, in the meantime, I'll have my team investigate to make sure there's nothing strange on our end. If you have a minute / it happens again, if you could send us a screenshot of your console and a link your site to feedback@verst.com so we can see the specific error your getting, that would be super helpful.
@uvajfrank @garettpress Gotcha!
No problem, thought it was just a bug, we had issues ourselves.. my console
Hmm I would link you to my site as it was bentossell.ver.st but for some reason when I edit site settings, it has removed my slug and wont let me put bentossell
Hmm I would link you to my site as it was bentossell.ver.st but for some reason when I edit site settings, it has removed my slug and wont let me put bentossell@bentossell @garettpress perfect, thank you - i'll investigate today though i am fairly sure it's S3 since that's where we store images (and posts generally) :)
@uvajfrank @garettpress okay cool
Again re the domain, I changed it to ben.ver.st and save worked - although going to url ben.ver.st doesnt
It crashed on me, when I tried to select and delete the content of a post. Hmmm. Maybe I'll wait a few days.
@stoweboyd Hey Stowe! Thanks for testing and bug reporting! We're still recovering from the Amazon S3 outage yesterday (phenomenal timing hah) -- so there a few kinks related to that. Should be back to normal v. soon!
@stoweboyd This is a lot to ask, but if you're able to take a Console screenshot for us to debug, that would be amazing too! :)
So much nice thinking here to help writers create better content. For someone who writes on Medium these days, I wish I had the data-driven tools as well. @jasonfried should be adding this to his wish list!
@kunalslab @jasonfried Wow - your words mean a lot to us Kunal! We've spent a lot of time huddled in tiny conference rooms and talking to publishers trying to absolve them of their pain points. Glad that's coming through!
@named_none Hahah - not quite a homophone, it's not pronounced the same (unless you have a strong German accent). We realize the similarity but we're prepared to overcome it. Bet you won't forget it any time soon! :)
What is the current status, and plan, for traffic and file size limits? How far can the $29 per month take a blog? Traffic/load balancing? Oh, and what about export? We've got a property we'd love to try this on from scratch, but what happens if this fails in 6 months and we have to move our content?
@sbradweaver Hey Brad! Thanks for checking us out. 1) No file size limits currently, though if we notice abuse we'll take action 2) Traffic limits -- none, we use load balancers and have built scalability into the platform from day one (can offer more specifics if you need). Reid Hoffman's site has already gotten a fair bit of traffic and our system hasn't blinked 3) We are building export capability right now, so you can export your content if need be
@leanux_bala Hey Bala! Thanks for testing and arghhhh! We're still suffering from some weirdness from the Amazon S3 outage yesterday - and clearly it's breaking our hearts. -- If there's any way you can send us a Console screenshot of the error, we'll take a deeper look! - Cheers
I'm setting up an account now! If I like it and can get it to run all of the bells, whistles, and functions that I need I might just move my entire media company over! It looks beautiful so far, and has so many more tools than what I'm currently offered!
@tristanisham Oh dayum! Incredibly kind feedback, thanks Tristan! Email me at garett@verst.co and our team can help get you set up!
@seanbolak Hey Sean! Are you trying to connect a custom domain? Please let me know!
A few questions/comments (some of which I've already sent privately to support@)
* What's the roadmap/schedule for email? That's far more important than social for conversion. And by email, I mean collecting multiple posts into a nicely formatted newsletter and mailing it to a list that the system maintains, complete with bounce processing.
* Similarly, what's the roadmap/schedule for memberships? That will presumably use some of the same account-based capabilities as email.
* Is there any way of supporting user accounts at this point in time, membership or no?
* Comments are important, so the conversation can enhance the articles and so the site remains a destination rather than a launchpad feeding Facebook and Twitter.
* What are the traffic limits if a page goes viral? Are there overage fees or the like?
* How will this system deal with an existing content archive of thousands of articles?
* Do any of the designs work well with primarily textual content where there are few, if any images?
* What's the story with collaborative editing, which any professional publication will need as pieces go from author to editor?
* Is the infrastructure based on AWS?
* Is there an ecommerce story behind the call-to-action feature, or is just linking off to somewhere else?
cheers... -Adam
@adamengst Hey Adam! All great questions. Let's dive in:
1) Email will probably land in Q3 this year. It's one of our most requested features and was always in our roadmap because we know how essential it is, and how much of a headache it can pose.
2) I think you're talking about subscription content? That should be out in the next 2-3 months. It's being worked on as we speak. Phase 1 will be paid subscription to an email list. Phase 2 will be paid subscription to a content section on your site.
3) Right now there is no notion of user accounts, but you can collect emails on your site, so you can start building a list of subscribers
4) There are no traffic limits! And we're prepared to handle thousands of back catalog articles. We can ingest them pretty easily through our content ingestion tool.
5) We can certainly handle a text-heavy site -- take a look at this demo site: http://benevans.ver.st/
6) We don't support multi-author yet, but that's also being worked on
7) Yes!
8) Right now it's linking off-site to your Shopify, Amazon, etc. -- down the line we plan to have transaction capable CTA's
Really nice! Might try this for a side project. One question though - does Verst support a comments section on posts? Didn't notice it on any of the example sites I looked through.
@alexandercatter Thanks for checking it out Alex! We're trying to figure out where comments fit on the road map. Obviously most of the discussion happens on Facebook/Twitter these days. We're also cognizant of how quickly comments can turn into a spam farm. We won't release a solution unless we think we've improved it in some way. Is that a dealbreaker for what you're trying to accomplish? Would love to hear more!
@garettpress Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense, and spam is definitely a consideration. Not necessarily a dealbreaker, but I do think a comment system is a really important direct touchpoint with an audience, especially for individual authors for whom Verst seems well-suited. How I see it:
1. Personally, if I'm finding interesting articles through Google searches and newsletters, I don't necessarily track the author/publishing site back to social channels and engage there.
2. I also wouldn't necessarily expect it of new readers, who might be interested enough if there's a convenient/direct way to share a thought (in turn, early feedback for me as creator), but not want to take the time to track down a social conversation.
3. Especially if it's a perennial topic, I'm more interested in seeing the conversation happen directly on the page, and be able to see older replies that can stay relevant in a comment thread that social isn't really built for.
That said, understandably if a site/author is churning out a new piece for 'content marketing' daily, the comments section is usually barren, but I also am inherently less interested in a 'conversation' around that stuff. : )
Hope that's useful! Happy to chat more on it.
@alexandercatter Incredibly useful! Personally, I agree with you 100%, and I've been pushing the team in that direction. I often find myself browsing deep through comments on some of my favorite fitness/wellness blogs. Love hearing people's individual experiences and real-world feedback on the topic at hand. It's actually great to screenshot your argument here and use it as Exhibit A as I continue to make the case. :)
I understand the pushback from my team on how quickly comments sections turn into ghost towns, and how difficult they are to moderate. Perhaps in the near-term we can do a lightweight FB/Disqus integration -- but I would love for us to to bring some real innovation to the way we integrate comments, the same we we've done for optimization and analytics. I have a few ideas around engagement features that might make the feedback a lot more rich and colorful.
Lot of hate going on for these guys right now. They used a lifetime AppSumo offer to spike revenue and users, and then as soon as the refund period ended they sent out the notice about being acquired by DropBox and said they were shuttering the service in just a couple weeks. No refunds are being provided to the AppSumo buyers and all inquiries are being told to basically chase AppSumo for their dough. There is no way these guys didn't know they were shopping their company around and used these new members to make their company's bottom line look more attractive. Very disappointed a company would treat users this way and makes me reconsider any use of DropBox as well. On the bright side, AppSumo has stepped up and at least offered credits as refund on this deal. It's not the cash invested in the deal, but it is certainly better than being ignored disregarded. I'd never work with these guys or buy one of their products or services in the future.
Pros:None. (Had unrealized potential though.)
Cons:"Con" is definitely the right word...
One thing I hate in all of these is the tone of the email. It was crafted to be a good news since they were ‘acquired’ by Dropbox. Then again, when you finished reading, nothing is to be gained by the customer because they are totally shutting down the services and you only have 20 days to migrate your website.
When you re-read the whole email, it sounded like they’re gloating about their bright future, only that the customers will have to contend taking out their stuff by 21 December based on a notice given last 1 December.
Olman from Appsumo has been very gracious about this, and tne Appsumomfamily really did step up.
Yes same happened to me, How is this even possible with no refunds for the original appsumo backers!!??
It would be interesting to learn about integrations. Will it have any commenting system ? What about marketing automation tools, mainly email marketing tools.
@paulo_andrade1 Oooo great question! 1) Commenting we're hesitant on. In the past few years the conversation has shifted so heavily to Facebook/Twitter that website comments have become a bit of ghost town (mostly with promotional/spam content). We wouldn't release something there unless we can make a major improvement to the functionality and filtering. --- 2) We're about to launch an email collection box that will connect directly to your MailChimp account (or export as a .csv). However, email is something we're VERY interested in baking into the platform. We've heard that publishers spend upwards of two hours in some cases formatting their weekly newsletter and we know we can simplify/automate that in a pretty "magical" way :) -- I would bet on that showing in a few months time. -- 3) We're also opening up the ability to connect Google Analytics, but mostly, we want to build crucial functionality directly into the platform so it's all integrated and works together harmoniously, akin to the Apple hardware universe (when it used to "just work")
@garettpress , 1) I believe that most professional bloggers want to build a community around what they write about. In order to build it, you need to engage. Thats why commenting is important. You can integrate with a tool and let it optional. Even if you dont let people comment directly, a form with something like: what do you think about? and a place for the reader to put an email and a text is nice. Of course, tagging is essential so, I can tag people around their interest in my articles. 2) Dont forget to allow tagging ! Everybody is segmenting right now. With a tag, I can create a autoresponder for each article or groups of articles. Good to know that you are creating a newsletter but it would be cooler to have a simple email sequence for each post. Newsletter are a little impersonal. ... I believe people are more interested in conversations...
@garettpress another thing that is important. Don't forget the rest of the world ! Let people edit stuff. For example, today if 01/03/2017 here in Brazil. If you are in USA, it is 03/01/2017 right ? To avoid this date formatting problem, allow the option to remove dates.
@paulo_andrade1 1) I personally agree with you 100% on comments haha, I'm trying to assuage the team to get on my side as well. I just forwarded around your comment because I think you make the argument really nicely. Community is so important, and that's an aspect we haven't tackled just yet! Perhaps in the near term we can an FB/Disqus comments integration. Thanks for helping my cause :) -- 2) We are revising our current "Content Categories" system to be a "Tags" system. Definitely seeing the preference there. Can you explain the "simple email sequence" idea a little more? Very interested
@paulo_andrade1 Ahhh! Another astute catch. We're trying to do some purposeful limiting in terms of editing so that we can maintain "unbreakable design" -- basically, we've put in some rules to make sure people can't make shitty looking websites. That's why we have certain gallery styles, certain image embed options, limited fonts, etc. -- Of course we'll expand these options over time, but always within the confines of making sure nothing looks crappy :) -- However, I think international date formatting is a very logical toggle. Apologies that we haven't gotten to spend time on internationalizing the platform yet, but we will!
Looks great, I like the emphasis on testing and re-testing content to get maximum impact
@michaelenriquez Hey Michael! Thank you so much for checking it out! I like to make the comparison to Kanye West's latest album. In this day and age, once you create something, there's endless opportunity to go back and keep improving and optimizing it. Our vision is that your website and your posts will keep getting better over time, and reactively, as data/feedback floods in.
@garettpress I think the most interesting, if not the most difficult, is to start teasing away at the commonalities between all the successful blog posts. So that even after X number of A/B tests, certain patterns should emerge that the human (intuition) and your product can start picking up. So even before having to AB test it, you know that it'll succeed before you even hit publish on a post
@michaelenriquez It's like you're in our heads! That's where the "machine learning" aspect comes in. We'll be able to leverage data from all the traffic and A/B tests flowing across the platform to help publishers make the best possible optimizations. :)
@garettpress http://www.stevensimoni.com/ No content, but just tried your onboarding. But I have had my name as a domain for a long time, maybe I will get around to posting my projects and hosting with Verst now.
@steven_simoni Oh cool! The getting started content looks pretty hawt :) -- It's definitely an easy way to get started with a parked domain. I did it (work in progress) GarettPress.com
@denzil_doyle Hey Denzil! Great question. -- That is not something we offer at the moment. Of course as an engineering-centric company, we greatly admire the world of open source software. However, with Verst, we're trying to create a closed, seamless environment (kind of like Apple's hardware ecosystem) so that everything "just works" and always looks really great. -- For that reason, our design system is fully modular. You can combine any of the elements in any way you'd like, and we can be 99% sure it'll look pretty awesome, and 100% sure nothing will break or glitch out. -- Obviously, at the moment there are only a limited number of these design options we've cooked up, because we've been focused on getting the product launch-ready. -- But now we can go back to expanding our design diversity. As we add more styles the number of combinations grows exponentially. Perhaps we can open up a way to submit styles for us to integrate. -- How does this play into your Verst experience so far?