Show IH: Stackmash - Real-time notifications for your users activity
Show IH: Stackmash - Real-time notifications for your users activity
Hey IndieHackers!
For the last few months, I have been working on Stackmash. Stackmash lets anyone monitor the activity within their app or website, keeping everyone in-the-loop. It came about when we were building software for clients, and every one of our clients wanted to monitor their app. They did this normally via email. We tried getting them to use Slack as that could be used for something similar, as well as a few analytics tools that have similar functionality, but in the end they opted for emails. After a while, clients inboxes would be getting flooded with updates.
We then worked with a few clients and eventually built the first version of Stackmash, and our clients loved it. And we have now decided to open it to anyone to sign up.
You can check out Stackmash here: https://stackmash.com/
Have any ideas, suggestions or found a bug? Let me know!
Thanks 👍
Really clean and slick! I like it. I also don't need a slack message for everything or an email, so the use case is definitely there. And it looks like this can handle whatever notification I would like? Whether it's an API error to a button clicked?
Thanks for your feedback! Yes notifications are sent using our REST API, meaning you can setup notifications for anything. We use it ourselves to get notifications as soon as an exception is thrown so we can fix any errors as soon as they are found.
Nice! Right now I'm using Sentry.io in a pretty basic manner which is more error-reporting-like. Are you trying to compete with them at all? Or are you imagining more for just general notifications?
Not at all. Although Stackmash can be used for error reporting, we're not really competing with Sentry. We provide generic notifications and we hope that our users will find other use cases for Stackmash that we haven't even thought of yet.
Curious — where and how have you been marketing this to folks? Also, does Azure or AWS provide a tool like this out-of-the-box? I know of a company in town here that makes a similar product for VMs to monitor anything related and integrate into existing tools (https://bluemedora.com), but an an app level I guess I've always just used a Laravel package. I can see this being much more friendly + easier to setup, though!
So far we have only been offering this to our existing clients. As far as I'm aware, AWS and Azure have monitoring tools, but not similar to what Stackmash has, or at least not as simple to implement. And you're correct, we aim to make this as easy to setup as possible - we're even developing a WordPress plugin as well as a Shopify app, so development skills will not be required to start using our service. Thanks for your feedback!
Looks good solution, will check it out.I was using SignalR for notification and mealtime messaging but it uses huge server resource
Thanks! Let me know how you get on
No Ruby?
Not as of yet, but we are adding more examples soon.
I find a lot of people turn to Slack for quick messages. Do you have a marketing speal that you pass onto people if they ask?
When some of our clients used Slack, they didn't like its limitations as a notification system, which makes sense as Slack isn't built specifically for that. Stackmash gives uses the ability to easily export their notifications, organise notifications via projects and categories and lets users send their data as an array which can be viewed in an expandable dropdown list. Clients even liked the small things, like that notifications could be minimised, so they could see more notifications on their screen. Thanks for commenting!
This is a really nicely designed app/website, kudos.
Out of curiosity, let's say my app is already running Azure Diagnostics via log4net/TraceListener, is the expectation that I go in and add your listener to any event (e.g. Exception) for which I want to be notified?
Replying to myself with another thought - I don't know if this is a road you want to head down, but one killer feature for me would be to trigger events at certain points in my code (e.g. user signup, 7 days after signup, etc) and be able to design/send templates/emails based on those hooks.
That way, the marketing guy could write/design the copy for the user onboarding procedure in a nice web platform and schedule for the right point in time (even A/B test content/timing?).
Everything I've done so far is basically a custom e-mail template parser/manually send out e-mails. It's a pretty shite system TBH.
Yes you can add some code to your listeners to send a request to the Stackmash servers along with your stack traces etc. Triggering events isn't something I've thought about, so will look into that! I'm not yet sure how basic I want to keep Stackmash, but I think that having it trigger events could certainly give it more use cases. Thanks for your feedback 👍