Show HN: Depot
depothq.comNice site, but I'm always puzzled by this idea that a business can be managed entirely with a cookie-cutter product. Surely if your business can run on something like that, it has zero competitive advantage, right?
In practice, I find that supporting all the edge cases inherent in my business made it very worthwhile to build my own such tool. But then, I guess there are many other entrepreneurs out there who don't have the tech skills to roll their own version of this... this is probably for them rather than for me, and it certainly beats spreadsheets hands down.
You are running a business and you have the time to create your own version of this app?
That's excellent. For me however, there is hardly time to comment on Hacker News :), let alone code my own CRM when I can get one for $30/month/user (at least for now).
Cost/Benefit I guess. Its not worth my time to code this up myself, but in your business, It might be.
This helps with routine tasks like CRM, time tracking, and invoicing. I doubt many companies have their competitive advantage in these domains!
Like you say, it's an alternative to ad-hoc workflows using spreadsheets, etc. and it looks like really nice alternative.
For a certain niche of businesses, sure, the CRM might be your competitive advantage, but for the vast majority, building your own CRM is as ill advised as building your own office furniture.
My partner is a photographer. Her competitive advantage stems 100% from skill. Services like these look great for managing her growing business. Just the time she'll save on creating quotes, invoices, receipts, credit notes, managing the whole lot and tracking appointments, deposits paid, amounts outstanding, etc. across different platforms seems to make this well worth the money for a small business or sole proprietor.
This has nothing to do with the actual product, which may be great, but... I am so ready for the trend of hyper-animated websites to start dying down.
I scrolled through the whole website, and while it looked great, by the time I got to the end I still had no idea what the product actually offered because my eyes were too busy watching all the little animations to pay attention to the content.
It's not necessarily the color or the animations, I feel the page as a whole doesn't do a great job of communicating what the actual product is/does.
Nice fonts and icons but it fails to bring across the message. A little more text and some screenshots would have gone a long way imho.
It's incredibly low-information. Each time you scroll to a new screenful of information you get about 10-15 words of marketing. Even clicking the "Learn more" doesn't give me any screenshots or videos.
Also that yellow hurts.
that yellow just burned a hole in the back of my eyes
I'm using f.lux and, since it's early here, I thought the site was pink and it actually looked pretty nice.
I don't agree with the comments that the site looks bad. For one, the font is amazing! The layout is extremely clear and functional, a lot of carefully crafted details make this site very polished. Thumbs up!
Totally agree. Of course it has the standard trendy animations-as-you-scroll, but they aren't actively annoying, and once you get past the landing page everything is extremely clearly presented. I think this product looks terrific.
I think the overall design does looks great; very polished and well done. Although I will admit, the background is a tad retina burning at night on a bright screen (at least for me).
I love your pricing. Or what I initially thought it was
One plan every feature - (correctly) gives me the impression that if I pay $30/month, I'll get everything your app has to offer.
Extend your reach for less(or Need Less, Pay Less) - I initially thought that this was a feature-limited lower priced tier of your app (for small startups or freelancers for example)
This made it seem as though your "One Plan" was cleverly pushing the plan you want most people to join, whilst still making lesser plans available for those who cant afford the "one plan".
This is a great because it makes me feel comfortable paying for the "one plan" (the most expensive plan) without feeling as if I'm paying too much or missing out on any key features (by choosing the lower plan). I feel you are charging me fairly for what I'll use.
And because you have your needs-based up-sells, you left room to increase revenue from heavy users.
This is excellent and I will definitely split-test this in my business against the traditional pricing grid.
slightly off-topic but is there a term for the sort of syncing between the vertical scrolling and the animations? Is there some canonical thing everyone is using to implement this?
Really like the art style, dunno how much bigger companies will want to pay their bills (i.e. invoices you send) via Paypal though, 2.x% of 5 digits is a decent amount of cash
We call it parallax scrolling, but I'm not sure thats the correct industry term.
Anyway we used a version of Skrollr for the animations: https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr
The site looks great. Not sure how it performs against your target audience, but it looks great. A couple of nitpicks though -
1. "Sign up for free 30..." button at the bottom of the home page should really be white/on/blue to match "Try depot for free" button styling in the main section.
2. "Keep up to date" is too dark and doesn't look like a hint, more like a message. Also "Submit" button is 4-5 px taller than the input field (Firefox), so altogether it looks sloppy. And it should too be white-on-blue.
PS. Tungsten doesn't look all that great on Windows and even on Mac it has this seriously wobbly baseline. Just look at the "Ingeniously simple ..." at the top of the page and focus on the bottom of it. It works against the look and feel that you are after.
Does this support an ability to set up project templates or do any kind of business process/workflow management?
I have a specific business proces/structure that I need projects to run through with various roles intersecting at various stages. Each delegate needs to know what their role is and when they need to perform it.
Can this handle something like that?
Also do you have any integrations available for Zapier? (Or Xero?) -- I'd like to send the invoices to Xero, but also, i'd like to integrate with other apps so i can send data back and forth.
If anyone from depothq.com is reading this; I'd love some more info and if possible even a skype call.
Thanks.
Hey - do you want to drop me an email ryan at depothq dot com with your use case and we'll see if the product fits your needs?
sent
FYI, the styling of the Features page (and possibly others) has some problems in Firefox, at least for me. While the inspector claims the font is Tungsten 4r, what I'm seeing actually looks a lot like Times New Roman. Looks like that difference is causing a bunch of headings to be pushed under the icons and such things.
Edit: Hmm, restarting with add-ons disabled fixed it, so presumably the problem is on my end. Will see if I can track down the culprit.
Thanks for the feedback - what version/platform of Firefox are you using?
Firefox 30.0 on Windows 7. I found the culprit though - it's HTTPS Everywhere. Not sure why since your site and font files appear to use SSL either way, but I've confirmed that iff I disable HTTPS Everywhere the fonts work properly.
Love the idea of centralizing the workflow of a project from lead to invoice in one tool. Don't like design for this use case, though - way too fancy and distracting.
Isn't it strange that for common data structures these companies still need a custom application like Depot? In the past people could survive with a spreadsheet, why isn't a spreadsheet-like tool that support small processing/linkage of data and a small editable manner of presenting that data? Wouldn't that be a universal solution, like the spreadsheet?
Is it just me, or is the password field (on the signup form) just a regular text field, rather than type='password'?
Conform from my side, it is text field. Not sure how they forgot to use password type...
It was intentional - to avoid having to use a confirm...
I gotta be honest, if I were the target audience, this would be a turn off for me. A confirmation re-type is no big deal and is kind of expected, as it's the norm. Also it's just not secure. I don't know about you, but I often have to type in my password in front of people. Or during presentations. Maybe you'll say the login field using type=password (I admit I didn't look), but I'd say that it is still concerning.
Not sure what is the reason behind it. I would suggest to use regular password field and required email field to confirm so they can recover account via email, or no need confirm email since it is visible to user.
Of course you cant have both nice UX and good security, seem like you pick UX more than security.
Generally speaking I think you did a great job with the design. My feedback would be that it is difficult to tell the buttons apart from the form fields (specifically in the footer). The gray form field for the email address is basically the same design format as the buttons.
The "Learn More" section is ... well not a place where I learned more.
A tour of some sort would be great for a brief explanation of the product.
Fabulous webdesign, though, and bonus points for SSL.
Thanks for the feedback - we'll definitely follow up on that.
You should consider self-hosting your webfonts - http://i.imgur.com/R6TsOW4.jpg
I don't know why you are in gray, but that's a valid point. I too had to switch to IE to get fonts.net to release the font files.
My question mark is:
Would you outsource all this sensitive data about your business like this? (Personally, I'd be too scared to do it.)
The screenshots are low res, need to really stress to understand each, maybe you could just post magnified shots.
Beautiful mobile site. The typesetting, colors, the way everything pops - just gorgeous.
This is the most sexy web app I've seen this year; I LOVE that design!
fonts are off on firefox/linux (debian) http://i.imgur.com/rvTUKNE.png
Thanks for the feedback - what version of Firefox so we can look into it?
Very cool site!