http://www.BromBone.com<p>I posted “Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users” 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5386966). Over time, it grew to 150 (free) users, but retention was pretty much zero. I was trying to cast a wide net and offer a generic “headless browser as a service”. It turned out I had make a service that was a little helpful to many people, but didn't really solve anyone's problem completely.<p>I finally took the advise offered in that thread. I focused on a problem I understood, and solved it completely instead of just offering a helpful tool. Instead of a “hosted headless browser” BromBone is now a complete solution for people who want their javascript websites indexed by Google.<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><p>BromBone.com - The javascript SEO problem has been solved.<p>Google can't index javascript driven webpages. The accepted solutions have been:
1. Run your own PhantomJS server to render snapshots and serve the snapshots to Google (a real pain).
2. Accept that your pages won't be listed on Google.<p>With BromBone you don't have to either. You just have to make a small change to your .htaccess file.<p>BromBone crawls your websites, runs your javascript in a web browser, and saves the rendered page. When Google crawls your site, proxy the requests to BromBone, and we'll send the rendered snapshot to Google.<p>Smile. Your javascript driven website is on Google.
You have me wondering about the feasibility of offering this as a CloudFlare app.<p>If I was able to throw up a little ajax/client side JS driven app at a domain, throw CloudFlare over it (like I usually do for most smaller domains I own) and then have it all happen without even needing to change that .htaccess file, then your onto something even better.<p>I also think the pricing model may need some work. Per page seems like it could cut you off from some potential customers. For instance, I'm already thinking of a blog engine I wanted to try out more thoroughly by making it the one i use on my new blog but wasnt prepared to loose "google-ability". I Would like to be able to use a service like this but when I do my mental math it doesn't add up. I wanted to use a blog engine that will produce a large number of pages by pulling in third party service activity into my site. So its not 100% what I want, but damn its tempting.<p>If your pricing it to cover costs, might I suggest looking to optimize your stack to bring down those costs down?. If you can cut the price and make it more of a 'yeah for $X its easier than doing it myself' you'll get more takers. Right now it feels that your current lowest price per month is too high for a lot of devs to decide the $ is a throwaway expense to save them time. Id hazard, below $25, and probably with an order of magnitude more pages.<p>All that said... I may still try it out. It looks interesting.
Perhaps you could use crawl frequency in your pricing. For example daily (or even hourly) crawls for the top tier plan.<p>Most people probably don't have that many pages so I'm thinking the existing pricing tiers might not work well?<p>And maybe offer a free plan that only crawls your site 3x per year or something really slow like that.
Do you think there would be any demand for a separate service that makes it easy to screen scrape javascript heavy sites? (might be legal issues there though?)<p>(Sorry for all the comments, this concept intrigues me)
Marketing idea: How about you offer a free version but insert a link back to brombone in the crawable/rendered version?<p>As long as you were very upfront about it, it might not be too offensive.