With all my heart, I want to cheer you on. Making stuff is damn hard, and shipping is even harder. You did that, and I applaud you for it.
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
It sounds like you read the instructions but they weren’t enough. Maybe a video explainer would be better? Does the gameplay recording on this Reddit post help at all?
People really seem to like it once it clicks (Over 1100 people have finished the daily puzzle so far today) but there is a steep learning curve and I’d love to learn how to help people get past that initial hump.
Literally ignoring any and all recorded footage clearly demonstrating violence to the contrary, what kind of vocabulary judo do you have to perform to label a woman being shot to death[1] a "relatively peaceful affair." Calling anything "relatively peaceful" where someone dies by getting shot genuinely boggles my mind. By this standard, Charlie Kirk's debate was "relatively peaceful."
Yeah, an unarmed protester was killed by armed security personnel. Truly, those protesters were the greatest threat to democracy in the history of the US.
But seriously, damage from BLM riots is estimated to be over 1 billion USD and the number of fatalities during those riots was far higher than one Ashley.
Comparing killing of Ashlei Babbitt and Charlie Kirk is highly inappropriate. The former is at worst a voluntary manslaughter (and actually classified as a justifiable use of force), and second is a first degree murder, premeditated and with a deliberate intent to kill.
We can totally appreciate that everyone has their own price points. That said, I do want to clarify that Jelly is not priced per user. The starting plan is $29/mo for your entire team. Period. In the landscape of similar tools, we think that’s quite a lovely deal.
For some folks, that’s still expensive. We get it. If so (especially if you’re a nonprofit or educational institution or...) reach out to us and let’s talk!
The short story is that Good Enough has put a handful of (hopefully) delightful things into the world: https://goodenough.us/
Putting things into the world means getting emails. Being a team means juggling said emails about things amongst several people.
Enter the Shared Fastmail Account.
"Oh! A new email. Click. Oh, this isn’t really for me. Mark as unread. Or did someone else already read this, mark as unread, and think it was for me? I guess I will go talk to..." And, you know, two dozen variations on that theme. It sucked as a way to work together.
what benefits does this provide over something like Slack or Discord for small teams?
We use Slack at Good Enough. It’s nifty. We even have a Jelly + Slack integration (and we use that too)! That said, the problem I described isn’t really solved by Slack. (Maybe Discord if you’re in a space that can funnel interactions there, but obviously there’s a lot of businesses who aren’t, and there’s a lot of drawbacks to using Discord as your only communication medium.)
Email is still widely used and wildly useful. We think being able to collaborate on emails as a team, with clear expectations about who is handling what and visibility on all the back and forth, is really helpful. We’ve been using it to scratch our own itch from day one, and we suspect it will be of interest to others as well!
Let me know if any of that didn’t make sense or you have any other questions.
I now understand how this is specific to solving the problems of a shared email inbox. This isn't a problem I've had to deal with before, but indeed it appears to be a sufficiently painful problem to solve for.
I wish you the best of luck, and continue the good fight to simplify.
Yes! Jelly was born out of a shared Fastmail account. You can forward your email to your dedicated Jelly address and be jamming (sorry not sorry) in no time. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you have any questions or feedback!
Love the product and you've nailed the simple design!
Thanks for the kind words!
I'm concerned about email deliverability
As I’m sure you can imagine, we’re very concerned about email deliverability. We use Postmark to send email and deliverability hasn’t been an issue thus far, but your verification email ending up in spam is not cool. I would ask some followup questions here, but troubleshooting this on HN isn’t ideal for either of us. Any chance you could drop us a line at https://letterbird.co/jelly if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper with us? Sorry for the less-than-stellar experience thus far!
Good questions! Most of our products are built with a pretty vanilla Rails stack (what we’re most familiar/comfortable with) backed by Postgres. Beyond that, it’s just the classic engineering struggle of trying to keep things simple and maintainable while making tradeoffs to ship stuff that’s Good Enough™. :) Happy to speak to any more specifics if you have further questions!
Jelly is currently using Render, and we have automated deploys set up from Github, so just merging the PR kicks off the magic sauce.
taking off my Jelly hat
I’ve also used Kamal + Hetzner for a few other simple things recently, and it’s been surprisingly delightful (speaking as someone who has never enjoyed mucking about with deployment frameworks).
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.