RailsApps

Almost everyone who works on a startup creates a simple “request invite” site before launch. If you’re a Rails developer, you will probably build it from scratch. But why? Seems to me we all could save effort with a good open source starter app.

That’s why I started building the rails-prelaunch-signup app a few months ago. It’s a useful example  application and the tutorial helps founders who are learning Rails.

Here are the features that I’ve completed so far:

• a visitor can request an invitation
• the visitor will get an email acknowledgment

As a site owner, you can

• see a graph of the growth of invitation requests over time
• see a list of visitors and send individual invitations
• send groups of 10, 50, 100, or 1000 invitations at once

Here’s the features I plan to add:

• an option to post to Twitter, Facebook or Google+ after a visitor requests an invitation
• integration with MailChimp to build an announcements mailing list

What other features would be useful?

Any requests?

I’d also like code review, if you’ve got some Rails experience.

The rails-prelaunch-signup app is available on GitHub and I’ve recently updated the “Rails Tutorial for a Startup Prelaunch Signup Site”. And I recently posted an interview with a developer who has already used the app for his startup sign-up site: “Powered Up by the RailsApps Project: XPlaygrounds.com”.