Hey there Product Hunt! Thanks for checking us out :)
We have multiple goals we want to achieve with GitHelp, the first one is helping busy open source maintainers to manage all the questions and support requests that comes to them from different sources like GitHub issues, Twitter, Mailing lists, StackOverflow, forums, or even requests for audio and video conversation in one place. You can think of it as ZenDesk for open source projects.
The other side of that is for the benefit of developers, by matching them with the best experts and increase their chance of getting the best answers they need as fast as possible. But we don't just depend on matching developers requests with experts. We think there's enough content on the internet from resources like Documentation, Tutorial sites, StackOverflow questions, and blogs that we can match your request with a content/link that can help you without nagging someone.
This beta version of GitHelp have the core of the product. Developers can create help requests and we match them with the open source maintainers and maintainers/hackers can reply.
What's next for GitHelp is the dashboard for maintainers to manage the all requests and collaborate on that, the matching with content, also the payment is coming up very soon. We focused on the Ruby community right now, but we'll expand to other communities soon like JavaScript. Please let us know what you think!
@ahmdrefat Hey! I think this is a really great idea. How'd you come up with it? Bad experiences maintaining open source projects?
I'm interested in seeing if people would pay for a tool to support something they do for free. Are you worried about that?
Thank you @mscccc, we really appreciate your support and that you like the idea.
The motivation behind the idea was the struggle that you have to contact open source maintainer for help, not just the top couple of them but the other guys who do most of the work in big projects.
The other thing is what I like to call premium support, when you want to pay some maintainer to help you fix/integrate/optimize part of your project related to his project, and current solution is to try looking up the maintainer email, send him email asking for that, maybe hiring him through oDesk(upwork) or whatever, but with GitHelp is way simpler and direct.
I'm not worried about the paid part because, people do that already on other services like CodeMentor or AirPair for 1:1 mentor ship, or hiring someone on from freelancing to fix some bug or something, and this were we'll compete with these guys.
Some comments on the site:
There needs to be a simple tagline at the very top of the page. All those questions? They should get answered by that tagline. I'd take your "The first code-oriented helping platform for developers" and change it to say "GitHelp - A help platform for open source developers". Simple, digestible, descriptive.
The highlighted words on the page are good, but the difference in font weight is too much. I have to cognitively focus between the two types of text, which slows down my reading speed. Since you're using Raleway, I'd try a higher weight for the baseline font. It should read better.
Those are the bigger things I see. Congrats on the launch!
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