Show HN: I made a site that rings a bell every time you have a new customer

From the landing page: "One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in."<p>Continuation of the quote in the WSJ source: "A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off."

We used to have a computer play a gong noise when we sold something. It was just an email client that got a copy of all the receipts and played a sound when mail came in. That got really annoying so we killed it.<p>Now we have a physical gong in the office that our sales reps get to bang on. We don't learn from our mistakes.

Fair warning: a similar system nearly caused me to destroy my cellphone, the screen over my window, and the windshield of the Honda beneath it.

Philip, just know that the rate at which you put out projects of all sizes really is inspiring.

This reminded me of the Netscape FTP server rigging. They had an Indy play a cannon shot every time someone successfully finished a download. It's a small part of a much bigger story, and all of it is good as far as I am concerned.<p><a href="http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html</a>

Okay, having put Bellbot on one of my sites today I can see that the sound I chose can get irritating. So I just changed it.<p>Old sound: <a href="http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3" rel="nofollow">http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3</a><p>New sound: <a href="http://bellbot.com/sounds/bell.mp3" rel="nofollow">http://bellbot.com/sounds/bell.mp3</a>

Reminds me of Middle Men. "We just made $9.99..." <a href="http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/middle-men/we-just-made-999" rel="nofollow">http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/middle-men/we-just-made-99...</a>

A slightly less annoying suggestion: rig up a box to make a noise every time a build passes the tests on your CI server. I suggest a golf clap, or the sound of a slot machine paying out.

I have nothing useful to say, but I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one who read "Beeps when you've got customers" and immediately thought "Goes ding when there's stuff!"

Nice work! It would be very helpful if there was a special URL that could be shared with employees that want to receive the notice.<p>Perhaps also a small Win/Lin/Mac resident service, and mobile app?

I've worked with numerous retailers who use something like this. Usually an eMail server just makes a ping when a payment notification comes in.<p>During peak seasons (read: December) at an ecommerce company of mine a few years ago, we did pretty much exactly this. We used a cash register sound, though. Played it into the office and warehouse so everybody knew how fast things needed to be going. Totally worked, the faster the register went, the harder everyone worked.

There was a pretty funny scene in Middle Men regarding this very topic. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251757/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251757/</a>

We just got a new system like that for Levion. It was fun initially when you have no customers but when accounts are being made non stop it gets impossible to work. It did give our employees energy initially until they made us turn it off.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521108" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521108</a>

Last week I set up a heroku+twilio app to call me and yell whenever I curled its URL.<p>The idea was to use it to train myself to stop hitting ESC in vim, but I'm sure it's portable for other pavlovian needs.<p><a href="https://github.com/dpritchett/no-calls-please" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dpritchett/no-calls-please</a>

How does it know when I've got a new customer... a new site visitor? So confused...

This is awesome. When blackberries were in use we were able to customize our ringtones, which created the same affect. We have downloaded iPhone apps and created additional email accounts to mimic the new sign up "gong."

Hah, I remember seeing that quote from Bezos and wanting to do the same thing. At the moment, I make do with Jabber and a cron job, but a bit of semi-realtime feedback on positive activity is fun.

If you are curious what it sounds like, just hit this url: <a href="http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3" rel="nofollow">http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3</a>

At Buffer we have the mario coin noise every time a user upgrades. It's just often enough to be pleasant rather than annoying!

Great idea - nice when you've just launched. FYI, GetClicky does this as well as part of their Spy section.

Clicking on bellbot.com with headphones in... not recommended. I almost crapped myself.

You didn't include a button to hear the sound without signing up? Come on!

A cash register sound would be appropriate!

Pud, you make really useful and rad stuff

Customer != Potential customer

hey pud, did you do your own art?

lolz

If instead of a ring it taught you a new French word, then that would be something, but this would drive me insane.<p>Awesome landing page though!