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Congratulations on the work! I’ve been doing startups for +10 years but also worked in big companies. This is pretty interesting, how do we contact you?

One thing I really wish I had learned from a book is how to adapt the architecture to the current stage the company is in (something like this likely exists but IDK).

For instance, the “brittleness” of your systems must follow the “certainty” the company has on product-market fit. In other words, if the % of changing code is high then it should be cheap to change it. I could explain this in much more detail, and I have seen countless under-engineering and over-engineering issues in practice because people lack this mental model.


We're just trying hard to iterate on our messaging and HN helps us a lot with that, and we're not spamming either. The upvotes mechanism serves that purpose, the post quickly goes down if the link does not resonate with the community.

I'll try to add different interesting content next time however.


Have you consider whether that’s still a good idea if every startup did that?


Five submissions, within the last day or so, all containing your product URL; three of which are direct links.

>[...] and we're not spamming either.

Frequent, unsolicited product advertising. Yeah, you are.


I've taken that into consideration and hidden the post.

Do you still think it's OK if we post tutorials of things you can build with our platform?


You're absolutely right, we are working on providing some examples soon enough. We have two clients using it in production but their websites are behind a login wall, so I'd have to share screenshots.

What kinds of website would you be curious to see if we can handle?


I don't have a prefernce. Screenshots would be nice. But showing is better than telling, so why not also use your own tool to build a basic website that does something, even if its like a fake store or service as example?


That's great feedback, we're working on it now! Thank you so much :)


Awesome feedback, perfect. We're working on templates and onboarding! Currently we only do web apps (no mobile apps), we will adjust our copy based on your response. Thank you!


Absolutely, this is a great point. We were working with B2B clients previously so we could "get away with" not having proper onboarding/documentation.

We're working hard on this and we'll have something close to what you mentioned soon! Stay tuned :)


Thank you so much!! :) What aspects of the design did you find more appealing?


I liked the small sections that quickly showed me that this could be something useful, like the "Actions and custom code" with the simple picture on the side. It made me try the product for sure.


We're noticing lots of people are disturbed by this and we're really sorry! We have implemented Email & Password auth since then, please give it another try :)


We're about to put it online, we will have a freemium tier with a cap on performance/data/etc. Then a basic plan for $6/mo with less cap, and so on. Pro = $84/mo

* all plans have unlimited editors * all plans have unlimited end users

You'd only pay more if your MVP is picking up traction in exchange for more performance, but your apps always run regardless.-


That's incredibly competitive to be fair to you, the unlimited end users point is a great point of differentiation too.


Thanks a lot! We're really trying to make a tool for people to create JAMstack apps on, so we're basically just charging on per value on our abstractions and just enough to cover the cost for AWS.

If you're a coder and are willing to do an user testing interview, we'd love to chat and demo our features! You can see my email in my profile. Cheers


I'm one of the founders of Abstra, a hackable no-code tool focused on making MVPs quickly aimed at coders (not necessarily developers).

Could you please share some feedback? Anything is extremely valuable, thanks!


Hello, nice looking product and great copy. 2 points:

1. Make your screenshots english too, keeping the code structure and copy consistent. Unless you want to highlight i18n. But seeing Portuguese and English mixed sticks out to someone like me with a mildly severe case of OCD.

2. Can you mention the language I can use to hack or export the source code in? I assume it’s javascript but spelling it out at least once on the frontpage seems appropriate.

Good luck with it!


Thank you for the details! This is excellent, going straight into our backlog. :)


Hi, this looks really cool - slick UI and clear value proposition. Great job!

Just a couple of questions:

1) why the emphasis on “for MVPs”? It seems like it can be used to build a proper product long term. Adding “for MVPs” make it seem like end users should expect to redo whatever they’ve done if they get any traction.

2)How does this compare to Retool (or how do you intend to differentiate it)?


1) It is in fact possible but as noted previously, most people still wouldn't feel comfortable running their core business long-term on this kind of tool. However, no one worries about running their business on AWS and in fact our infrastructure is on top of them (like Heroku). So we need to grow a bit more before people are OK with that :)

2) Retool is tailored at internal tools, so you can't quite customize the UX as you'd want for something that is touching end users. Besides, it's quite expensive for the MVP use case because they price per user (we don't, our pricing page is coming soon).


I would prefer to use this sort of things for longer term but non-core functions (e.g. back office).

I agree with OP that it's a weird use case, as a focus on short-term MVP may limit user retention if you actually succeed (or is the idea that people will accidentally start to use it long term?).


Retool is a cool product but it’s for a different use case. Retool is for building internal applications, this is for building MVPs.

And I assume they are focused on MVPs because you aren’t going to run a $10m company on a no-code solution, you’re going to have your own devs. But using a tool like this can help you build your business while you get to that point.


Hi,

the idea seems interesting, but my 2 cents feedback: Allow people to use the product _without_ requiring a login, especially using third-party authentication mechanisms like Google OAuth or FB one. I do respect my own privacy and data, how do you threat users like me?


Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, this was flying under our radar. We just went with Google for simplicity because it was easier to implement and didn't realize lots of users would dislike it.

We have now implemented email & password and should add anonymous login soon!


Would you please provide other means of joining abstra, other than just google?


We have implemented this today, you can now use email & password. Please give it another try!


Are the sites created responsive?


Yes, they're fully responsive. We use Flexbox underneath and no absolute positioning (which is actually a limitation for now).


yes


Hey everyone! Founder of Abstra here. We've just launched our Beta version and we are eager for any feedback.

If you have any criticism or comments regarding Abstra I'll be online here to answer ASAP. Any feedback is very valuable for us. Thanks!


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