white

Hi HN,

I use ChatGPT and Claude daily for research and coding. I often wish they had direct and fresh access to discussions in the private product, marketing, ideas, and engineering news communities I’m part of on Slack, Discord, Telegram,...

So I built c8lore.com (for "community lore" :) that connects and indexes many communities once — it indexes the discussions (near real-time) and LLMs can then semantically search them, pulling relevant threads, workarounds, and insights straight into prompts. It ships with an MCP server so you can simply tell your LLM `use c8lore`.

It’s fed with some initial sources focused on these exact topics (product, marketing, ideas, engineering, ...), and I’m actively adding more. The public directory is open for anyone to browse.

I’d love your feedback:

1. Do you participate in private or semi-private communities for product, marketing, ideas or engineering (or else) discussions? Which platforms? Discourse, Facebook Groups, ...?

2. If you’ve looked at c8lore, does bringing this knowledge into your AI workflow feel useful? What’s missing that would make researching or keeping access to this information easier?

3. Which communities or types of sources would you find most interesting?

Thanks in advance — really appreciate any thoughts or suggestions!

Hi there!

I am trying to validate a problem I keep seeing at bunch of mid-size companies that run on Slack, Jira, Asana, Confluence, Google Docs, often Figma, email, ...

The pain isn’t search. Tools like Glean are good overlays for discovery.

The pain is drift: decisions or clarifications made in one place don’t get reflected in the others, so truth diverges and teams lose time reconciling.

So what I’ve observed:

* A Slack thread (or Confluence comment) clarifies a requirement, the Jira acceptance criteria and the spec never change

* A PM updates Confluence, but x-functional issues (DA, Eng, Design) under the same Epic still reflect the old requirements

* Decisions happen across multiple Slack or Teams threads (including DMs) and aren’t visible to those who need to know between threads

* “What’s the latest?” becomes a recurring standup agenda item, and PMs have to route information based on internal knowledge and changes

* Service Now incidents convert/escalated into Jira tickets without and become disconnected since then

I’m trying to gauge how widespread the "keep sources semantically in sync" problem is, and to collect adjacent challenges we should consider if we tackle it.

3 questions for HN:

1. Do you see this drift in your company, team? Where is it worst?

2. What’s your current process? E.g., manual doc comments, weekly readouts, pinning Slack messages, internal scripts, ...?

3. If you’ve tried to fix it, what failed or worked?

If this is a real pain for you, resonates with you, would you be open to a short call as a potential design partner? I’ve built a prototype and want to sanity-check problem scope and success criteria, not pitch a solution yet.

Promise: I’ll summarize takeaways back to the thread.

DM or email me. Thanks!

Our customers (mostly B2B) have been asking for PDF version of invoices, receipts and whatnot instead of the ones sent as email.

Tapdone, my side project. It's like a PDF agent listening to your emails. `Bcc` the service when you send out an invoice, and it flips that email into a PDF and shoots it back to you and your customer.

Zero fancy stuff, just a neat trick to keep the PDF-demanding crowd happy while you hack away at the real work. Happy to share and please let me know if you find it useful.

Email to PDF https://www.tapdone.com and in exchange just drop me a line with your thoughts. If it smooths out even one wrinkle in your day, I'm counting it as a win.

Hi -

I have an app. Certain stages of the funnel require some action, like send text, send email, call certain endpoint.

Instead of building everything in code, and for the sake of quicker experimentation (changing copy, adding notifications, etc), I'd like to use some "out of the box" solution:

1. A platform that I can send events to. I anticipate about 1,000 events per day.

2. Be able to create workflows, that would, based on incoming events and conditions, perform some actions.

It looked like Segment is one option, but much more expensive than I anticipated. And it's unclear whether it supports workflows.

Re-tool seems to be another option, however also at $75 per each 5,000 workflow runs, would come out expensive, easily over $500/month.

I'd prefer open-source solution, or something affordable and in cloud.

Thanks!

We are working on a product that could benefit from basic CRM functionality, like Leads and Contacts records, Marketing workflow automations (like webhooks, events), templates (emails, text messages), report, etc. Also, multi-tenancy, as I'll need separate namespace/environment for each customer of mine.

I prefer not to build it myself, but focus on a product where we actually can add value instead of reinventing the wheel.

Have you came by a good, customizable, "headless" CRM like that? Thank you.

Do you log your customer activity to any of the log management platforms, like Splunk, Datadog, Papertrail, Sentry, etc?

We do, and most of that data is focused on errors (eg., already registered, bad credit card, etc), although we do about 30% of events like "quote requested", clicked "sign up", etc).

We ended up creating a "sidecar", that processes the event, checks again our CRM in place (Hubspot, Zoho) and either proactively initiates a conversation via email, or sends transaction confirmation/error. (We store templates for different events, and adjusted to different channel - depending which one we know for the customer - like Push, SMS, email).

Would you use something like that?

If not, why not?

We've built an internal tool that allowed our business owners to create and edit the logic, that becomes executable, and no longer depends on engineering resources to modify.

Here is an example of what we use for business logic on selecting a driver for delivery from the pool (it is slightly simplified - it's essentially the set of basic operations, ifs, cycles, and set of input data, process variables, and output data).

Take a look here https://www.evernote.com/l/AA9s6U867f1GvLgIr3iOHrzJgrjkRxWe0nUB/image.png

We maintain this in the versioned diagram that can be pushed to Lambda + API gateway, and essentially the platform code relies on that endpoint to provide a response.

For the project we are using it for, it allows us to make adjustments to the process without depending on engineering; another use case is pricing -- override and experimentation.

Again, the engineering team thinks it is cool and wants to productize it. I would really appreciate any feedback or ideas.

Does your work need you to spend more than 2 hours per day in SaaS or Web-based service (either commercial, open-source or proprietary)? Dashboard, CRM, CMS, SIS, etc.

Any role: marketing, sales, operations, product, project, support, etc - all of you are using some form of SaaS product.

I have built a prototype of a service that might save you 5-25% of your time, service-agnostic. If we can't, we still get back to you and provide insights on what we've learned.

Most recently we've worked on the product in logistics and delivery management and uncovered inefficiencies and suboptimal Customer Support training processes that ended up saving ~10% of man-hours.

Please DM me or leave a comment - I would appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

I'm wondering if anyone is using any type of CRM with your startup/service? Would you mind sharing? Your startup, and CRM that you use, if any?

How do you deal with sync'ing client data between your platform and CRM? What do you use CRM for? Email followups? Reporting?

Thank you!

P.S. As of myself:

1. Yes, we use CRM with our service. 2. We use ZohoCRM. 3. We sync data from our system to Zoho. There is some data redundancy, but we've agreed to assume our service is 1-source-of-truth. (Yes, sometimes it's messy - we have no time to build both-way-sync.) 4. We use CRM for customer development, all communications, followups, state management & reporting.

I personally love Launch Ticket http://launchticker.com/ however with it now becoming a paid-only service, some people might find $10-25/mo to be too much to digest.

Solution? Use Google. Search for stories in the last 24 hours and sorted by date. It's missing the ease, look & feel of Launch Ticker, however still is a good source of information http://bit.ly/1u3UX0O

Hi -

I am running a service for new online communities and Web sites to "fake" users and their activity on the site. Basically, we act as content "filers" as well as early stage user study.

I don't have a large team to scale, so we don't advertise, but we have quite a few requests so far.

I'm wondering how many of you would be interested in getting this for your startup or community? That would be a sign for me to start "automating" parts of my business.

Thanks for feedback.

Dear fellow HNs -

I am looking for real world examples of developers choosing HTML5 over native app (or vice-verse). I would appreciate you sharing with me some of your experience with this choice.

It would be helpful to know:

1. What kind of an app? (Ie. game, service, standalone or extension to Web site, or existent product - anything about what is it and why do you built it.)

2. What did you choose and who have made that decision? (Any insight into decision making process would be great to know.)

3. Are you happy that you have made this decision or not?

4. What you wish you would knew before you've started?

5. Do you do anything of the following: a) monetization b) analytics c) collect leads d) performance-sensitive ops e) rich and interactive interfaces

This also might be a good place to showoff your app, if you have it built already. :)

Thanks!

I'm in customer discovery phase, building a product for eBay sellers, both professional and not.

However, I'm struggling to reach out to them - very few of my friends do it.

How do you reach out to markets that you are not in and/or very new to?

P.S. And if you are an eBay seller, please, please! let me talk to you for 15 minutes - I just need your Skype or phone # http://bit.ly/X2vIMA

A friend of mine runs a small shop, where he and couple of his employees/contractors do the job.

He lands a client, gets himself on retainer or on hourly rate, sends invoices out every month, tracks invoices as paid or non-paid, manages his bank account and distributions - essentially he needs to have a good understanding of P&L at any given time, as while he does some work himself, sometimes he hires other people to sub-contract to.

Essentially he needs a tool to manage his hourly and retainer-based employees, who can track their time at their rate, as well as to pass-through these timesheets to his client, billed at a different rate.

Also, he manages distributions, as some of his partners get royalty share, etc.

Currently he uses spreadsheets to track all that and I should tell - that's quite a mess. He doesn't want to get engaged with more complicated solutions, and he doesn't have accountant for anything but his taxes, at the end of the year.

Is there any one-stop shop that you are using and can recommend? Really appreciate your hints.