Show HN: RoleUp – Simple Identity Management
Looks nice, and solves a problem. But you&#x27;re entering a really difficult niche against strong competition from auth0 and Okta.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m a &quot;roll your own auth&quot; kinda guy. I have trouble justifying offloading a core part of my infrastructure to a third party, especially if it has a per-user cost and I have a free tier or am not charging users.<p>If I <i>were</i> to choose &quot;buy&quot; in the &quot;build vs. buy&quot; of an auth system, it would be for internal apps only. My number one criterion would be finding a reliable provider that will still exist in five years. Based on that, if I&#x27;m choosing between Roleup, Okta and auth0... I&#x27;m not going to go with Roleup. And even if there are some awesome features you have that they don&#x27;t, you don&#x27;t have a free tier to try them out.<p>Here are my suggestions:<p>- Eliminate the free trial and replace it with a free tier (something like free for your first 1000 users). Let me sign up immediately, and funnel me to the dev docs. Do not make me confirm my email before I can even see anything.<p>- Find a way to differentiate from Okta&#x2F;auth0 beyond &quot;we&#x27;re simpler than them because we&#x27;re missing so many of their features.&quot; You can&#x27;t compete on features right now; their products are just far too developed. But you can differentiate on price. Their biggest weakness is per-user pricing. Would-be entrepreneurs see that, imagine their successful product, and extrapolate how much it&#x27;ll cost them 2 years down the line. Play into those hopes; show them that your service will never cost more than a few hundred a month.<p>- Consider offering a self-hosted version. There are many approaches to pricing&#x2F;licensing for this.<p>- Consider open sourcing core parts of the implementation (maybe everything except the dashboard), or making a commitment that you&#x27;ll open source the code if you ever shut down the company.<p>- Focus on authentication for internal apps where 100% uptime 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365 is not as critical a feature as it is for user-facing apps.<p>- Target the marginally tech-savvy founders of fast growing, small startups who have a bunch of internal tools made by contractors, and want to make some kind of admin dashboard for them<p>- Build out integrations in as many languages as possible (things like passport.js strategy for logging in via Roleup)<p>- Make it clear what &quot;integration&quot; means in the context of Roleup on your landing pages. For SEO, you probably want a landing page per integration. For each one, show screen shots of the integration and using it. This page [0] is great, but it&#x27;s still unclear to me what &quot;integration&quot; means in this context. Does an integration with Zoom mean I can use my Zoom account to log into an internal app via Roleup? Or does it mean I can use my Roleup account to authenticate with Zoom? What does the process look like for devs, and for users? (EDIT: Just saw you have this for slack. I could barely see the &quot;Details&quot; link FWIW. Bring this info forward!)<p>- Setup at least one demo administration node (maybe more if you want to automate setting up for users) pre-filled with data. Make &quot;try demo&quot; your landing page call-to-action. Give the user a functioning admin dashboard with a bunch of accounts that resets its data every hour. Make sure the demo shows how it works for both admins and users.<p>- Give people reason to trust you with their most sensitive credential data. You&#x27;re a brand new company run by one person -- why should I let you handle my users&#x27; credentials? Where is the security documentation? About page? Who are you? Why should I trust you?<p>Good luck! You&#x27;ve picked a challenging product.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.roleup.io&#x2F;integrations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.roleup.io&#x2F;integrations</a>