Tech Support Service for Software Engineers
Hello folks, today I'm launching Vertlas, which is an on demand tech support service for software engineers. It’s like Uber, but for software engineers who need help with whatever they’re working on. You can find it here: https://vertlas.com/ . If you need help with anything you're working on or have any feedback please let me know. Thanks very much!
There's no pricing on the landing page or a way to get to it AFAIK but the moment you click "Ask a question" you get a CC input field. That looks sketchy.
Also, you're claiming that you can answer tech questions. How do I know that you (or your team) is qualified? Who's behind the question answering? What kind of questions can I ask that I cannot get answers to on StackOverflow or similar sites?
I'm having a hard time seeing anyone giving you their CC info... Maybe I'm wrong. My 2c
Hi Victor,
One more question: are you a software engineer? Are you working on anything right now where you're trying to ship features and code as fast as possible? Or is your style of development much more relaxed at the moment? Thanks!
Josh
Hi Victor, thanks for the feedback! One of the next things on my to-do list is put up a FAQ, hopefully this will address some of the user's concerns you mentioned above. I will answer your points here just in case anyone else is curious: How do you know we're qualified? I am a senior engineer with 10+ years experience, and everyone I use to answer questions/provide advice on this service has been hand selected and vetted by yours truly. Who is behind the question answering? A team of engineers/developers/hackers I've sourced either through my personal network or various hiring platforms. Again, all hand picked and vetted by a senior engineer. What kind of questions can I ask that I cannot get answers to on Stack Overflow or similar sites? Stack Overflow and others have A LOT of things you can't ask about. You can see it here: https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask . The biggest problem is scope. If your question isn't narrowly scoped you are in trouble. Also there is just no substitute for a conversation with a knowledgable human. Vertlas is intended to save software engineers and teams TONS of time by getting them in touch with an expert. You could spend a week on Stack Overflow, Google, Hacker News, Reddit, etc, or 5 minutes on Vertlas.
Finally, regarding the cc info I understand what you are saying, but also I want to make sure that people will pay for the service. Would it feel less "sketchy" if I just took the user's question/advice needed, and asked them for their cc info once I have an answer ready for them? Any other ideas on what that flow should look like? Thanks again!
There is a readability problem when I view your landing page on my iPhone 11 in portrait mode. The text and the illustration in the background interfere with each other.
In landscape mode, things are better.
Fixed! If you notice anything else please let me know. Thanks!
Thanks for pointing that out! I will fix it today.
Interesting idea.
Few questions though
How will you "answer" a question. Will it be in the form of a email response/text or will it be a call or will be it something else?
What kind of questions will you answer, you might want to show a few examples. For example I a while back I was doing a project for a client which was a reporting app and needed sub second responses from a SQL query. We struggled with it for a while and had a hard time finding people that could help us, since I am not really a SQL expert and the SQL dev we had was relatively new to Postgres. So if I were to give you a query would you be able to optimize it or tell us what were were doing wrong and potential solutions to it or would that be out of the scope of what you offer?
And as a follow up to that how would you answer questions on how do we optimize X where X might be something like adding a view in SQL.
I know these might not be questions that normally pop up in a startup but we could have really used a service like yours during that time and it was the use case I thought of as soon as I saw your service, hence these specific questions. Basically if you can some how show/explain the kind of question you can and cannot answer, it would make your service easier to understand because I am assuming you cannot answer every type of question out there to begin with.
Thank you for your feedback! Initially the questions will be answered via Zoom. Eventually I would like to have that video chat capability built into the platform so everything is a smooth and seamless experience.
This is exactly the kind of question we answer. If you still want to ask that question I would put you on a Zoom call with our PostgreSQL engineer and he would explain how to implement the solution. You can make the call as long or as short as you wish. If you want him to write the query he can do that for you on the call, or if you just want to know HOW to do it he can show you - and then the rest is up to you.
For your follow up, again the process would be the same.
As far as what we can and cannot answer, we currently cannot answer every type of question, you are correct. But pretty much any type of software question we can, in fact, answer. If all goes well I would like to expand this service to other verticals, like musicianship (need help with barre chords? I got you fam), home improvement (need help from an experienced contractor regarding your floor tile?), etc, etc. I think lots of people could benefit from a quick call with an expert.
Again, thank you very much. I'm going to add these questions to the FAQ.