Reminders API

A powerful reminder scheduling API

2 followers

A powerful reminder scheduling API

2 followers

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Reminders API, provides a powerful interface to manage and schedule reminders for your customers.. It supports custom timezones per reminder and notification alerts through SMS, Email or webhookss.

Launch tags:API•Developer Tools•Tech

Launch Team

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Dope Design 🚬🚬 How did you create Reminder? Why did you create Reminder? How long did it take to build? How do you plan to acquire customers? Sorry 😐 for so many questions... really intrigued with the product

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8yr ago

Reminders API

Maker

@dredurr Thank you! `How did you create Reminder?` It took me about 3 months from beginning to end, I bought a theme from themeforest for the homepage and tweak it a bit and integrated stripe and subscriptions on it. I hosted everything in heroku because it was the fastest and easiest solution. The api itself uses node + koa + postgres because its what I use for work pretty much all the time and im more comfortable with it. `Why did you create Reminder?` It first started as a project for creating reminders for myself (https://reminder.sh/) and later changed it to just an API and decided that maybe someone else would find it useful. `How do you plan to acquire customers?` At the moment I have one paying customer that pays for the hosting and maintenance costs of the platform. Hopefully someone else will find it useful and I can keep working on it more often :)

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8yr ago

@sabarasaba Awesome! Thank you so much for replying

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8yr ago

So a couple thoughts: Biggest problem I see is the pricing. I believe you are attempting to charge far too much. The $79.00 a month account allows for 10,000 emails (through SendGrid) and 500 SMS messages (through likely Twilio, I didn't pay to test). The hard costs at very low overall volume for you are $9.95 for the emails (though you could drop this to $5 at Mailgun instead) and $3.75 for the SMS, adding in a very generous $2 for server resources the total hard cost for a $79 customer is $15.70 leaving a profit margin of $63.30 (80% GPM). The $30 plan offers 5,000 emails so around $5 with SendGrid (Maligun would only be $2.50) and say $1 for server resources, that leaves you with $24 (80% GPM). Even taking into account the free accounts you give out (which would cost about $0.10 per customer if they used ALL of their credit) these figures seem a bit outrageous to me, but the market will decide. With email you may want to look into locking users to verified domains and having them properly setup SPF records. Also what if we want to use more than simple plain text in our emails? Can you support HTML? For SMS it would be helpful for the user to be able to either verify and send using their phone number (which can be supported through Twilio) or allow them to buy a local dedicated number. When signing up I noticed that the checkbox for agreeing to your terms was not correctly working on Safari.

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8yr ago

DropJar

@andrewjmyers Sell by value and not cost... For some potential customers, integrating SendGrid and Twilio and implementing the scheduling component of it can mean a cost of a few 100 dollars just in man hours. Also it's a bit unfair to show GPM which of course at such low quantities leaves out management and other expanses like support etc, which will leave the maker at loss.

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8yr ago

@andrewjmyers because the only way to price software is based on the cost of the infrastructre?

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8yr ago

@andrewjmyers 80% GPM is actually pretty "textbook" for a SAAS/PAAS company so I would actually argue that its priced about right. The difference is that many ProductHunt products are actually side projects and the builders are just happy to make $1,000 a month and don't want to maintain them like businesses, so they will price products low at-cost or slightly above it making 25%-40% gross margin. So on product hunt it might seem high, but compared to other "real-world" businesses, it actually seems about right. You also have to remember that you are clearly a developer and have priced out all of these individual services. Most of the clients I work with don't know what Twilio, SendGrid, Mailgun, etc are, and have no idea their costs and so they aren't comparing it in the same way that you are. When I tell someone I can set up text messages on their site, they think I am some sort of God among men, and I have charged customers 5¢ a text message before that I paid 1¢ or less for from twilio and they thought they were getting the deal of a lifetime because they don't understand all of this stuff behind the scenes. I actually see value in this product for applications that require lots of reminders and not much else. I am thinking about a Dentist office or an Oil Change shop. These guys are buying websites (often from places like Themeforest) and then go to a freelancer and asking them to integrate something like messaging for reminders. These types of sites don't need an advanced backend built just to manage reminder messaging for their customers. So if they could pay a freelancer for 2-3 hours of work to integrate this API and then pay the ongoing cost of it, i think it would be a good deal for everyone.

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8yr ago

Great use case for this would be centralized reminders for corporate compliance. For example, if an individual or a team needs to verify user access to the corporate network every six months. Something like this to orchestrate the reminders would be great. Large companies have literally thousands of these types of periodic activities, and they are typically left to the individual to remember to do. Having an app built on an API like this could definitely help corporate compliance efforts.

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8yr ago

SignOff

Looks awesome! Do you have any examples of what your users have been building with it?

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8yr ago

Reminders API

Maker

@benjieboo Thank you! At the moment https://deskbookers.com is the only paying customer, they are using this API to remind people about their meeting room bookings some time before it happens :)

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8yr ago

I tried to test it but it gives me an error status": 500, "title": "ValidationError", "detail": "Invalid input: child \"due\" fails because [\"due\" is required]" anyone try?

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8yr ago

Reminders API

Maker

@chamathis You're probably missing the due argument. See: https://gist.github.com/sabarasa...

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8yr ago

@sabarasaba no Im using postman for testing so I have due filled

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8yr ago

Reminders API

Maker

@chamathis Make sure the body of the request is `x-www-form-urlencoded` see: https://imgur.com/a/1FfiR also the headers: https://imgur.com/a/aiTAh

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8yr ago

@sabarasaba cool it is working now

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8yr ago

Pros:

does one thing well :D

Cons:

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8yr ago

Slack Themes

Love the simplicity and focus of the product, hope there will be enough demand to keep it running. One thing that I, personally, would have done would be to redirect all traffic to the.reminders.company subdomain. Most probably people won't notice but it might be a neat way to help with name recall in "You know, that reminders company" like situations. :)

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8yr ago

Reminders API

Maker

@paracycle aw man, how did I not thought about that ! its genius !

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8yr ago

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