Need help with Dazah

[Dani]

Hey guys ...

Over the last year or so that I've been hard at work with Dazah, I've received multiple requests from people offering to help. I am now in way over my head, and I would be eternally grateful for anyone who might be able to offer up their time and skills.

While I continue to work on DaniWeb and the actual Dazah API itself, I have a list of people who all would like to use Dazah, but the only thing in their way is the barrier to entry. Please, please ... if anyone can help me write a Javascript plugin to get these people onboarded onto Dazah just by copying/pasting a few lines of JS code, I would be so eternally grateful.

Here's what I need:

• A JS-based chat plugin based on the Dazah API that people can copy/paste into their websites to give them functionality similar to DaniWeb's private messenger in the form of a little bottom toolbar (think Facebook); To start, it would just have group chat for all of the users of the website, I'm thinking
• You can release it as open source, or you can choose to charge for it (Depending on its complexity) ... But either way, it would be your project all the way

What I can offer:

• A ton of publicity for your plugin, access to the people waiting to use it, which can open doors for potential future clients, etc.

Any takers????? ;)

[Dani]

No takers, eh?

[Anna_10]

How much do you pay and is there a deadline for this?

[Dani]

It's not a paid gig. I'm looking for someone who wants to take on this project to create what could be a new SaaS business for themselves. In doing so, you get my full resources and marketing budget at your disposal. In other words, if you build and sell the app, I'll promote your new company for free and do everything I can do to ensure it's a success.

Darn. This post really did come off like a marketing pitch, didn't it? That's not my intention. Lol. I blame it on the fact that it's the middle of the night and I'm awake suffering from a horrible head cold at the moment.

[Anna_10]

can't you do it on your own than?

[AssertNull]

It IS a marketing pitch. Was it somehow intended as anything else? And how is that a bad thing? In advance, I have neither the skillset to deliver the product you need, nor am I in a position to benefit from the opportunity you are offering. I will, however, offer up a few thoughts on your marketing pitch (yes, it was a marketing pitch. You are offering financial incentives (contacts, the ability to charge, foot in the door, publicity) for people to help you with your project).

Taken from a Dazah outsider's view, one likely cannot complete the project without learning about Dazah, how to use it, etc., since you have to integrate your code with Daxzah, right. Yes there is an API and the whole point of an API is that you don't have to learn about what's going on under the hood, but that's if everything works perfectly This project involves communicating back and forth with you, trial and error, integrating the code, etc. Who knows how long that would take? So to sign on to the mini-project, you are banking on Dazah's success. Otherwise that time's wasted, and very likely so are the potential contacts from it.

So to sell this mini-project, you have to sell Dazah. Which you've been quite tight-lipped about. We've all been there. Lots of stuff is too hard to explain till the rollout.

As a reader knowing next to nothing about Dazah, it seems doubtful that this is just "copying/pasting a few lines of JS code". It may well be that and you are simply either swamped for time and/or not a JavaScript expert. If it IS truly that, you should highlight that much more. But a "chat" that real people could use securely online and that has to be integrated into something bigger, which the developer would have to learn from scratch, seems non-trivial. If it was trivial, there'd be no option of charging for it and you probably would not have needed the help. A chat involving three laptops in my apartment on the LAN behind the router firewall might be trivial. This not so much.

Anyway, that's my take as a non-Javascript guy who has never used Dazah and has never designed a chat in his life save for the "behind the firewall" example above where I had everything under my control. This isn't set up as a Rent-A-Coder project with an exact spec, nor have you given an estimate of the time you think is required, so the reader simply has to wonder. I realize that this was an opening gambit on your part, part of a negotiation and the more exact spec comes later.

Anyway, that's my two cents on why you possibly got no bites on this. I also would have bumped this thread before two weeks went by. I had never even seen it. If you get no nibbles in a day, two max, either your initial pitch didn't work so you need to add info, or the right people didn't see it, which means you need to bump it to avoid having it fall off the radar or you've put it in the wrong forum.

[Dani]

So to sell this mini-project, you have to sell Dazah. Which you've been quite tight-lipped about.

Have I? I thought I've been doing a good job trying to explain it and express my goals for it. At least to the best of my ability, which most likely isn't good enough. Hmm ...

As a reader knowing next to nothing about Dazah, it seems doubtful that this is just "copying/pasting a few lines of JS code".

No, no ... you misunderstood. I'm not asking for help copying/pasting a few lines of JS code. I'm asking for help writing a complete SDK that will allow the end-user to just copy/paste a few lines of JS code to begin using it.

Here's my dilemma ... I have a completed and, IMHO, very robust API. I also have an open source standalone web app that uses said API. However, I also have a handful of people who want to use the API's functionality, but they aren't developers, and they're overwhelmed where to begin or how to get started. Therefore, I need to now tackle the seemingly overwhelming task of writing an SDK.

As I've been struggling to work on both DaniWeb, the Dazah API, the Dazah web app, and now this SDK, a handful of people have been more than motivating and encouraging and reminding me that I have a community of developers eager to help me if they could ... all I need to do is ask for help. So that was the initial purpose of this thread. To basically finally come out and say, "Yes, I'm in over my head here. I need help."

I'll be completely honest ... I think the absolute biggest revelation in this Dazah journey of mine is just how far downhill DaniWeb has come over the past couple of years, and how I seem to have lost the majority of the following I've been lucky enough to have over the past 15 years. This is not meant to be any sort of burn to all of you who are still here ... but, I guess, I'm just feeling very burned out and like a complete has-been these past couple of weeks.

[Dani]

I post I feel like a complete has-been and I'm not feeling the love and ... tumbleweeds. Really makes a girl feel loved ;)

[happygeek]

There's no denying that DaniWeb has been on a downward curve for some time now, but I'm not sure how much of the 'blame' for that can be on your shoulders to be fair Dani. I think it's more a case of external factors, in particular the power Google can exert simply by deciding it will wander off in a different direction without any warning. As for you, you will always be loved by the DaniWeb faithful; it's just that the faithful are becoming a rarer breed these days.

[Dani]

It's actually not all Google's fault. There are two issues at play here. The first, as you stated, is that Google decided that it hates all forums. The second is that the ad industry went to crap. Ten years ago, all the most profitable web properties were ad-based ... Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Now, none of the most profitable web based properties are based on ads (I'm excluding Facebook and Google which were able to gain enough market share to be able to roll out their own in-house ad platforms). Today, all the most profitable online based properties are either SaaS-based or B2C.

It's simply the nature of online communities that there will always be a drop-off rate. Especially with tech Q&As, people stick around when they're taking a course, and then stop when they finish the class, etc. Therefore, it's simply been the nature of our business model to constantly pour money into advertising in order to replenish the natural drop-offs. With less money coming from ads (due to the current nature of the ad industry, unrelated to traffic dips), that meant less money being put into advertising. Thus began the cycle of less ad dollars being spent, ultimately resulting in fewer new members than the natural drop-off rate. Then it just got worse over time ...

So, all in all, the ultimate cause for the problem is that our business model has simply not kept up with the times. Of course I blame myself for that.

[AssertNull]

Have I? I thought I've been doing a good job trying to explain it and express my goals for it. At least to the best of my ability, which most likely isn't good enough. Hmm ...

You've explained different parts of it in different threads, but what you haven't done is aggregate it into a nice, easy to read, just the facts ma'am "This is Dazah and this is why it's so awesome" document and pinned it on Daniweb and on Dazah. Think Shark Tank. Think elevator pitch. You've been talking about how you are going out of business if Dazah doesn't gain traction. Imagine if you were in an elevator with Mark Zuckerberg's assistant for two floors and your entire life depended on him deciding "Dazah seems cool. We should use it". You have about seven seconds to get him interested and hand him a business card. Your job in that seven seconds is to get him to go to dazah.com, where he'll spend at most a few seconds looking for the "This is Dazah and this is why it's so awesome" page before losing interest. And that page has to get right to the point. He gets a hundred business cards a day and will only talk about a few of them to Zuckerberg. I'm not seeing a "What Is Dazah?" or "About Us" icon to click on at the very top of dazah.com. Zuckerberg's aide is not going to see it either and he's just going to go on to the next business card, just like he would if a resume or cover letter didn't get right to the point.

You've spent how many hours coding this from top to bottom? To get a return on that effort, you'll need to spend considerable time (though not nearly as much) neatly packaging it as well.

[Dani]

The elevator pitch is different based on who the audience of the pitch is.

If you manage an organization, niche group, or online community, then the elevator pitch is:

You have a collection of people. Our network curates them. Our user recommendation engine matches them. Our chat API connects them.

And the landing page for you is at => https://www.dazah.com/developers

If you don't have your own community, but instead are a developer who wants to create a third-party app or plugin for an existing Dazah-based community, then we have a different pitch for you. If you're a developer looking to create a mobile messenger exclusively for DaniWeb members, for example, or even an HR company who wants to build a customized search against the resumes that members have posted, then the elevator pitch is:

We have highly curated collections of people, a user recommendation engine to match them, and a chat API to connect them. Use our API to aggregate and connect people across audience segments in our network.

And here's the landing page for you => https://www.dazah.com/audiences

And, finally, if you're just a user of these communities, then here's our pitch to you:

We connect 1.14 million people across our network of community & lead generation apps. With our single sign-on, your profile and connections follow you across our network of Dazapps. Meet people within currently trending Dazapps in our "Dazapp Directory".

For that pitch, look no further than the Dazah homepage.

Does that do a better job explaining?

[AssertNull]

I think you have some good, succinct wording and that pitch can get you in the door, but you're shooting yourself in the foot a little bit too with some easily correctible "mistakes" for lack of a better word. This page seems to be the closest thing to a "What Dazah Is" page, the page I want to go to after the seven second pitch/paragraph worked and I've decided to spend a little MORE time learning about it.

https://www.dazah.com/developers/overview

However if I'm not a developer, I'm not getting to it from the main page or ever because I wouldn't know what to click. I have to scroll to the bottom of the main page, then click something that isn't obvious, then I have to click "Technical Overview", which brings me to the technical page, which is fine for a technical page. But what if I'm Zuckerberg's marketing guy, not a technical guy, or anyone who doesn't know what an "access token" is? Is there no page for me to go to to get an overview of what Dazah is and why everyone should use it? A NON-technical overview?

In a previous life, I was a bit of a for-lack-of-a-better-word interpreter between technical and non-technical people. They quite simply could not and would not relate to each other. The technical people, when writing things up, got way too technical way too fast and lost the non-technical people and even some of the technical people who were unfamiliar with the particular project and did not provide a good overall summary before going into the weeds/details. I'm seeing that here. You've provided a TECHNICAL overview, but no overall overview. The proof is in the hierarchy. This is the page...

https://www.dazah.com/developers/overview

THIS page doesn't exist, but should...

https://www.dazah.com/overview

When I type that address in, I get sent FROM dazah.com to Daniweb with no explanation as to why. Ditto when you click "Support Forum". If you're going to do that, open it in a NEW tab and explain what's happening. The last thing you should do to someone on dazah.com trying to learn about what it is is take them away from dazah.com to Daniweb without telling them why. You're trying to do everything you can to attract people who don't give a damn about Daniweb.

[Dani]

They quite simply could not and would not relate to each other. The technical people, when writing things up, got way too technical way too fast and lost the non-technical people and even some of the technical people who were unfamiliar with the particular project and did not provide a good overall summary before going into the weeds/details. I'm seeing that here.

That's definitely meeeee! I have a huge problem trying to speak to non-technical people. I've been selling advertising for a living for my entire career, and it was one of the biggest challenges that I faced. I would speak for a good ten minutes doing my best to explain everything, with the other person just listening and "absorbing". When they would finally speak up with an incredibly basic question that had nothing to do with anything I had just said, it was clear they didn't understand a single thing, and I would feel like I had completely wasted my time. Now I have the absolutely horrid habit with family and friends of saying, "You know what I mean?" every other sentence and requiring affirmation.

All that being said, my challenge is that there are two components to Dazah.

As a non-technical end-user, I want you to check out our homepage, comprehend a general concept of what we do at a broad level, and then browse the app directory. That's all you can do.

The rest of Dazah is an API. Outside of the API documentation, I tried my very, very best to tailor the wording to CTO-types ... people who could read what we have to offer enough to get a general gist of whether there is a use for the API, and then shoot it off to their tech team for evaluation.

The very purpose of this thread in the first place is because I'm desperately trying to add a third component ... creating an SDK that is plug-and-play and can be used out of the box.

As far as why you got redirected to DaniWeb, it's because I had the Dazah.com domain sitting idle since I was in my teens, and it was being redirected to daniweb.com all this time. Over the many years, it seemed to have accumulated backlinks and got indexed by search engines for DaniWeb content. I noticed that about 80% of the 404 pages showing up in the access log were people trying to get to daniweb, unsuccessfully. Until I can figure out what to do about it, I'm temporarily redirecting dazah.com pages that don't exist to their daniweb.com counterparts, because I don't want to lose out on the missed traffic.