Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
600 comments
In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. Someone tried to sue us. We sent the last of the Bushplugs to the Smithsonian's presidential museum. We made our investment back but didn't become buttplug millionaires.
The other alternative to the pointy nose theory was that there just weren't a lot of people who were into having W up their butt, but we felt that must not be the case.
> The other alternative to the pointy nose theory
you'd think it would have been much more successful with Obama
you'd think it would have been much more successful with Obama
Someone did this again in 2012, making 3D models based upon each of the Republican candidate polling numbers: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gop-butt-plugs-are-gallup-dat...
As the other HN Buttplug Poster who is also having problems making money with their product, I salute you.
(And yeah this is why I stay in software, manufacturing even on non-tech toys is still $$$$)
(And yeah this is why I stay in software, manufacturing even on non-tech toys is still $$$$)
What niche does your butt plug serve?
We weren't sure if our main demographic would be 'straight' Republican congressmen or angry gay Democrats - this may have been an issue.
[deleted]
Thank you for this.
Lol! Those look a lot like ours did but we didn't have color - it really makes the difference.
Did you ever think of making a Dick Cheney Dildo™ to complement the set? :)
If we had that, we 'wood' have certainly succeeded! Hey...that makes me realize the Cheney Dick could be made out of wood so the splinters would stay with you forever.
This is hilarious. Thank you for the laughs.
You should look up the pictures of it - there must still be some out there...
Almost uncontrollable LOL here
Right idea, wrong time. My friend owns a sex shop in Provincetown, MA and has sold tens of thousands of Trump-plugs over the past 4 years.
I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder.
It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.
Moral of the story: never trust big tech.
P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.
It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.
Moral of the story: never trust big tech.
P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.
I've heard that it's a good rule of thumb to not develop something that is just an extra feature of an existing behemoth (e.g. Atlassian plugins etc., but also the thing you built). If you're failure, then you've wasted time and money and if you're a success, the behemoth will just reimplement your work as a part of their platform.
Pretty much the only way to win it so make something that provides marginal revenue, which makes reimplementation not worth it for the giant (but potentially worth it for you). I suspect a lot of Unity and Unreal plugins and authoring tools reside in that niche.
Pretty much the only way to win it so make something that provides marginal revenue, which makes reimplementation not worth it for the giant (but potentially worth it for you). I suspect a lot of Unity and Unreal plugins and authoring tools reside in that niche.
Wordpress/Automattic bought up successful plugins like WooCommerce and just integrated them.
Automattic is not in the same league as FAANG, it doesn't really apply.
Marginal revenue is relative though. For the developer, if it makes $500k over the product's lifetime, it can be worthwhile. For Facebook, if it only makes $500k, it's a waste of resources.
Couldn't one expect at least a job offer?
Maybe, but working hard for months/years a chance at a job offer doesn't sound that amazing anyway.
BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"
BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"
I think that was the owner being shortsighted. If the plugin was something that a reasonable fraction of your users would like to have, then very shortsighted.
Not only you had a person that already knew much more about your product than the average potential hire, but a person that probably was interested in your product (and maybe knew what users wanted) too.
Not only you had a person that already knew much more about your product than the average potential hire, but a person that probably was interested in your product (and maybe knew what users wanted) too.
"Why hire him if he's already working for us?"
Because you do not want him to abandon the project if it is useful to you?
Because you do not want him to abandon the project if it is useful to you?
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"I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes"
This is what most dating apps do, except Tinder (trying to do a clustering in an n-dimensional space). That Tinder outclasses most other dating apps is proof that your approach wont work. We don't look for people with similar interests for dating. Unfortunately we don't chose who or what we like in a partner.
This is what most dating apps do, except Tinder (trying to do a clustering in an n-dimensional space). That Tinder outclasses most other dating apps is proof that your approach wont work. We don't look for people with similar interests for dating. Unfortunately we don't chose who or what we like in a partner.
This like the case of Amazon antitrust
current Tech giants are need to be replaced
current Tech giants are need to be replaced
> current Tech giants are need to be replaced
There's no reason their replacement will be any more moral. They should be dismantled imho.
There's no reason their replacement will be any more moral. They should be dismantled imho.
Should the tech giants really be punished for being too successful? I don't think so. They got to their size by being better. Nobody thought yahoo would ever be unseated. Yawho?
Antitrust laws have been around for a long time. Competition is essential for a free market to function optimally. You can disagree, but that's why they exist. Its not to punish anyone.
Wow that really sucks! Sorry to hear that. I suppose you would've needed patents on the idea to stop them from stealing it.
Or they were already working on it and hadn't announced, and he would have spent all the time and more money working on the patent only to see Facebook launch the same thing before he even filed it. Assuming there wasn't already a patent out there that covered this.
If you had patent, you could go after FB and have some out of court settlement.
In reality you can't. The upfront cost of defending a patent is huge, like hundreds of thousands.
Patents are fundamentally broken and really don't work like most think or want them to.
Patents are fundamentally broken and really don't work like most think or want them to.
Sounds like you should be taking this case to the Congress.
In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML.
In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables.
I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs.
I managed to sell 100 copies, for some reason 90% to India.
After some years without selling nothing, I open sourced it: https://github.com/RangelReale/htmlbutcher.
The good thing is that I REALLY learned C++ with this project, and this knowledge was the basis for my current company where I made a digitalsignage application in C++ that runs in some of the largest DOOH places in Brazil, in Windows, Linux and MAC (targets of HTMLButcher). So in the end it was a good investment!
Also take a look at the marvelous table-based design of the app website: http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html
That’s cool. Everything about the design fills me with nostalgia and takes me to the good old days of the Micro ISV, the Joel on Software forums, and my own, now unsuccessful, plans for world domination.
I would have paid a lot of money for that back in the pre-CSS days, assuming it worked well. Was it purely image-based or could it recognize when an area could be rendered without using an image (like a single color zone/etc.)?
You could select a kind for each cell, "None" would not generate an image, and you could select a cell color or html tags. It could also be "Image" or "Mask", with Mask being an inner table within a cell.
You can see this on the main screenshot on the website: http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html
You can see this on the main screenshot on the website: http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html
Can you share the name of the Digitalsignage company? I am in market for such a solution
A zillion years ago I had a housemate who was a brilliant programmer and could smoke himself into the Zone like nobody's business, and one of his weird little side ventures was a Mac app to cut up Illustrator files and lay them out in HTML using tables, because that was the state of the art.
As best I can recall, he wrote it in CodeWarrior over a couple weeks together with another guy who presumably knew Illustrator, and Adobe bought it before they had to deal with anything like a business plan.
As best I can recall, he wrote it in CodeWarrior over a couple weeks together with another guy who presumably knew Illustrator, and Adobe bought it before they had to deal with anything like a business plan.
Was it possibly integrated into Adobe ImageReady [0]? It had a feature like what you're describing where after you finished designing your website, you could define cutouts and export as images+HTML.
This is actually how I first got into programming when I was younger. I made my first site in ImageReady, but it couldn't do all the other cool stuff other sites did like comment sections and logging in, so I went on a quest to learn how to do all that and the rest is history :)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ImageReady
Edit: actually, I found an example from 13 years ago https://youtu.be/qCq0JiwMcJs
This is actually how I first got into programming when I was younger. I made my first site in ImageReady, but it couldn't do all the other cool stuff other sites did like comment sections and logging in, so I went on a quest to learn how to do all that and the rest is history :)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ImageReady
Edit: actually, I found an example from 13 years ago https://youtu.be/qCq0JiwMcJs
> he wrote it in CodeWarrior
Wow, that's a name I haven't heard in 20+ years. We used CodeWarrior Pro for my Pascal class at a local community college that I took during high school, because my high school was so small, I literally ran out of classes to take by senior year, so I had to take a programming course at a CC that was 10 miles away. Had to get a waiver to leave school before noon to go to the class because state policy was that students can't be released from school before noon, and because all my classes (all 3 of them) were over by 11:30.
Wow, that's a name I haven't heard in 20+ years. We used CodeWarrior Pro for my Pascal class at a local community college that I took during high school, because my high school was so small, I literally ran out of classes to take by senior year, so I had to take a programming course at a CC that was 10 miles away. Had to get a waiver to leave school before noon to go to the class because state policy was that students can't be released from school before noon, and because all my classes (all 3 of them) were over by 11:30.
> could smoke himself into the Zone like nobody's business
Can you elaborate on this?
Can you elaborate on this?
Smoking weed to get into the proverbial, "flow" state.
What is the Ballmer Peak[0] equivalent for weed?
[0] https://xkcd.com/323/
[0] https://xkcd.com/323/
The Snoop Summit
I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...
That's where you start. But to make it responsive it takes more work. If I remember..
For a 9x9 basic table grid you would set the width 100% of the top and bottom image do the opposite for the sides and fix the corners. All of these tricks involved choosing designs that could work.
It would have been a tool I would have liked.
For a 9x9 basic table grid you would set the width 100% of the top and bottom image do the opposite for the sides and fix the corners. All of these tricks involved choosing designs that could work.
It would have been a tool I would have liked.
Also webdesigners loved to change the layout mid-project and it was a big hassle to migrate the slicing from one PSD to another.
Not counting that some websites had dozens of PSD files, it was a pain.
Not counting that some websites had dozens of PSD files, it was a pain.
It never worked well. The html was full of issues and the kind of image slicing was for backwards compatibility with email clients. However PS did have a way to write scripts with JS and extend or even change the HTML generation.
Photoshop had a kind of high price point just for cutting up images.
I would have used this in ~2005. Seems like you were just slightly late to market. CS2's built in tool to slice PSD -> HTML kind of sucked and required a lot of post-processing work.
Apart from the table based design, did you feel any competition from services like CSSilize? Was it difficult add support for the DIV based design?
I added and AP tablebless (absolute positioning) option, but this was only simulating tables with CSS. People stopped using large and sliced images with CSS, so it wasn't worth it.
I made a plugin for photoshop around 2010 to do the exact same thing. It has a slicer tool, and an API for it, so spitting out HTML was easy, but just used it as an internal tool for one of my first web dev jobs.
It wasn't a big serious project or anything, but for my first income generating project ever I made a small single player word game for Android that I should have tried to monetise more. Android had only been out for a couple of years at the time so it was easier to get noticed then.
The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a paid version that just disabled the ads. Instead of jumping on this to release a paid version and expand the game with more features, I ran into perfectionism issues + decision paralysis releasing any changes.
The game blew up for a few weeks and I got something like 0.5 million downloads eventually but didn't do anything to monetise it more so felt like I missed a big chance.
It was a great feeling checking analytics though to see that there was literally years of collective gameplay time being logged, and I've had several emails and reviews from players saying they've been addicted to playing the game for years.
My biggest lessons are probably:
1) Doing/releasing something is always better than doing nothing so don't let decision paralysis get in the way. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".
2) Don't fear releasing or making changes because you might get bad reviews. You'll never please everyone and even the perfect app will inevitable get some brutally unfair and weird/crazy reviews.
3) Some people are obsessed with word games!
Anyway, as a lockdown project for fun, I started making a new web version for mobile + desktop. :)
https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid
The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a paid version that just disabled the ads. Instead of jumping on this to release a paid version and expand the game with more features, I ran into perfectionism issues + decision paralysis releasing any changes.
The game blew up for a few weeks and I got something like 0.5 million downloads eventually but didn't do anything to monetise it more so felt like I missed a big chance.
It was a great feeling checking analytics though to see that there was literally years of collective gameplay time being logged, and I've had several emails and reviews from players saying they've been addicted to playing the game for years.
My biggest lessons are probably:
1) Doing/releasing something is always better than doing nothing so don't let decision paralysis get in the way. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".
2) Don't fear releasing or making changes because you might get bad reviews. You'll never please everyone and even the perfect app will inevitable get some brutally unfair and weird/crazy reviews.
3) Some people are obsessed with word games!
Anyway, as a lockdown project for fun, I started making a new web version for mobile + desktop. :)
https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid
I just spent way longer playing this than I meant to. I know it's similar to a lot of other word games, but it's really fun and satisfying, and is meaningfully different than other word games I've played. Good luck with it!
Thanks! Yep, I found it interesting how slight tweaks to rules for word games gives them a really different feel and incentivises different strategies.
I need to add global high score tables. The highest score I know so far is close to 3000 which is nuts.
I need to add global high score tables. The highest score I know so far is close to 3000 which is nuts.
Fun game, even with trackpad I can do diagonal words. Nicely done.
Thanks, it's tricky to get the selection of diagonals working accurately like that. If you inspect the HTML, you can see each tile has an invisible 45 degree rotated clone on top of it that's used to detect when a tile is selected instead of the boundaries of the original tile.
Wow, what a fun game! Projects made for the fun of it tend to have a certain charm to them compared to projects made for profit.
Thanks! Yeah, that's part of what derailed me trying to make a paid upgrade for the old free version. I had to think of what features would be locked away in the paid version, how the player would be nudged to upgrade etc. It's a fair amount of coding work and planning, and it's not fun compared to working on the actual game.
FWIW, personally, I would pay for no ads and maybe brief definitions of the words that I have just crossed out, but I would be turned off by microtransactions like boosts, extra life's or skins.
Cool, thanks! Yep, I hate soulless plays like "buy gems to play more", "wait until tomorrow to get more gems to play", "invite your friends to get more gems" etc.
Word definitions would be awesome. Are there any good free sources for this? That also have offensive words flagged?
I'm not sure how to do a free version of the game that isn't so good that nobody upgrades though to be honest. With the competition on mobile now as well, I feel freeium is a must to get tractor too.
Word definitions would be awesome. Are there any good free sources for this? That also have offensive words flagged?
I'm not sure how to do a free version of the game that isn't so good that nobody upgrades though to be honest. With the competition on mobile now as well, I feel freeium is a must to get tractor too.
en.wiktionary.org might be good for this. It’s free and marks some words as vulgar.
Neat web version, but yikes did that thing light up my laptop's fans and make FF use nearly 100% of two 2.8ghz i7 cores here. Seems a bit ridiculous considering what's going on.
Argh, I'll look into it because it shouldn't do that. It's using DOM + simple hardware accelerated animations intentionally (over something like canvas) and no polling to keep CPU usage down. Runs fine on Chrome on Mac.
Yeah well, in unaccelerated scenarios like mine that translates into software rendering on the CPU, which there seems to be a whole heck of a lot of happening despite nothing really changing on-screen.
Thanks, I'll need to check some more because the Chrome performance tab is saying 95% idle when nothing is being selected as expected for me.
Either way, I'd be keen to add a battery saver mode because it's not the kind of game I'd want to devour battery on a mobile.
Either way, I'd be keen to add a battery saver mode because it's not the kind of game I'd want to devour battery on a mobile.
Cool game. Spelling June didn't register a valid answer.
Thanks! Proper nouns (generally capitalised words) are disallowed so June won't. Not sure how best to communicate this in the game though.
The original had a wall-of-text pop-up of the rules when you first started that I want to avoid and I'd rather players picked up the rules organically. Maybe showing a "proper nouns and capitalised words not allowed" message when you spelled one would be a nice approach but a list of such words would be massive and inaccurate.
I think people generally figure out this rule as they play more but I admit it's not ideal!
The original had a wall-of-text pop-up of the rules when you first started that I want to avoid and I'd rather players picked up the rules organically. Maybe showing a "proper nouns and capitalised words not allowed" message when you spelled one would be a nice approach but a list of such words would be massive and inaccurate.
I think people generally figure out this rule as they play more but I admit it's not ideal!
It is interesting because the same happened to me while trying the game.
If something happens to almost everybody, why don't you change your game?
When I design a complex system like a game or computer programs, once the system starts working on their own, it talks to me. I learn a lot from the interaction with it.
This is specially important when you have millions of users. They communicate to you what the next step is much better than the best design you could draft isolated on your own.
If something happens to almost everybody, why don't you change your game?
When I design a complex system like a game or computer programs, once the system starts working on their own, it talks to me. I learn a lot from the interaction with it.
This is specially important when you have millions of users. They communicate to you what the next step is much better than the best design you could draft isolated on your own.
Yep, I'm up for making change based on player behaviour and ideally the game would have zero instructions. Proper nouns come up often in feedback too.
Adding proper nouns has a few issues though:
- Where would you get an accurate dictionary of proper nouns? This would need to include e.g. people names, places, brand names. If it wasn't constantly kept up to date it could lead to more frustrations than just disallowing them.
- There's so many proper nouns it would bloat the game download. The English dictionary used right now takes about 3MB, which is the limiting factoring getting the game download lower than 1MB zipped. I'm failing to find an estimate but if you include proper nouns, the dictionary would be an order or magnitude bigger. Maybe less of an issue for mobile app store downloads but I want the game to load fast when shared online. A web service to check the words won't work for offline play either.
It's feeling like a "dictionary words only" message somewhere is the only practical solution. I could adapt the (single!) tutorial message at the start of the game to be "swipe in any direction to spell dictionary words" but "dictionary words" would probably be overlooked. There's no menu screen at the start because I know people are impatient. :)
Adding proper nouns has a few issues though:
- Where would you get an accurate dictionary of proper nouns? This would need to include e.g. people names, places, brand names. If it wasn't constantly kept up to date it could lead to more frustrations than just disallowing them.
- There's so many proper nouns it would bloat the game download. The English dictionary used right now takes about 3MB, which is the limiting factoring getting the game download lower than 1MB zipped. I'm failing to find an estimate but if you include proper nouns, the dictionary would be an order or magnitude bigger. Maybe less of an issue for mobile app store downloads but I want the game to load fast when shared online. A web service to check the words won't work for offline play either.
It's feeling like a "dictionary words only" message somewhere is the only practical solution. I could adapt the (single!) tutorial message at the start of the game to be "swipe in any direction to spell dictionary words" but "dictionary words" would probably be overlooked. There's no menu screen at the start because I know people are impatient. :)
Regarding size, I like to remind myself how much bandwidth it takes to watch just seconds worth of Netflix or YouTube.
Not everyone has a fast connection though and you'll try the patience of new players by making them wait just a few seconds. I also like optimising so if I can make the transfer size x10 smaller I will. :)
It's a really fun game. I was a little frustrated by some words which didn't seem to be recognized - I think 'rome' and 'zen' were two, whereas much more obscure words were accepted.
Thanks! Proper nouns (generally, words that start with a capital letter) are disallowed so Rome won't work.
Hmm, Zen was recently added to Scrabble in 2018 though as it's a proper noun but has started being used as an adjective:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zen-and-the-art-of-scrabble-dic...
Hmm, Zen was recently added to Scrabble in 2018 though as it's a proper noun but has started being used as an adjective:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zen-and-the-art-of-scrabble-dic...
Your understanding of the meaning of proper noun is inverted :)
Doh, fixed (hopefully). :)
Looks good. On my tablet PC, it's not letting me play by touch. For users with both mice and touchscreens, one has to handle the touch events that browsers have.
Thanks! Hmm, which OS and browser? When I test with the "laptop with touch" dev tools device on Chrome + Mac it works as expected so not sure how to replicate.
Chrome latest on Windows 10. The key point/problem is that because I have both mouse and non-faked touch, the touch events aren't necessarily converted into mouse events, as happens in many other circumstances. Though a lot of this is conjecture.
Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold.
It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corners to stay in budget. I was unsuccessful in recruiting a team - partly because I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away. In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
I attempted to carry on but the shutdowns of tourism in Hawaii and sheer exhaustion over my co-founder mistakes led to shuttering this project we thought would be the next AirBnB.
All told, this was a budget MBA program for me which ended up costing about 1/4 what a quality MBA would have cost me and probably taught me far more.
Lessons learned were: 1) the importance of a founder agreement 2) the importance of doing enough due diligence to understand the true scope of a project and then doubling or tripling the amount of work it will take to achieve that scope 3) the importance of working with the right people and refusing to settle when it comes to product or team
It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corners to stay in budget. I was unsuccessful in recruiting a team - partly because I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away. In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
I attempted to carry on but the shutdowns of tourism in Hawaii and sheer exhaustion over my co-founder mistakes led to shuttering this project we thought would be the next AirBnB.
All told, this was a budget MBA program for me which ended up costing about 1/4 what a quality MBA would have cost me and probably taught me far more.
Lessons learned were: 1) the importance of a founder agreement 2) the importance of doing enough due diligence to understand the true scope of a project and then doubling or tripling the amount of work it will take to achieve that scope 3) the importance of working with the right people and refusing to settle when it comes to product or team
Wow, sounds like a rollercoaster. You sure got some stories out of that one though!
I like the concept a lot, shame you never got to find out if it would have worked.
I like the concept a lot, shame you never got to find out if it would have worked.
Really powerful experience that I am grateful for (though I wish my hair would grow back - lol). At the moment working on a much more manageable project with a great team (Iwahai.com) and maybe in the future there will be an opportunity to revisit the ZguideZ concept. I still love the idea, but managing a worldwide network of independent guides is more than I want to take on at the moment.
AirBnB has something like that called "Experiences." I'm not saying that to be critical; if anything it should be affirmation that you were onto something, i.e. there really is a market for such things.
https://www.airbnb.ca/host/experiences
During the pandemic, AirBnB has also been helping people organize online experiences.
https://www.airbnb.ca/host/experiences
During the pandemic, AirBnB has also been helping people organize online experiences.
Definitely a market for it. Another Hawaii company, Shaka Guides has a similar concept though with voice-actor recorded tours and they seem to be doing well. Our concept was to have locals sharing their history and knowledge on a self-guiding tour.
"Experiences" isn't the same as this idea at all.
AirBNB Experiences is things like "Come swimming with dolphins" or "come on a wine tour".
This idea seems more like the voice-guided tours you can get in museums etc but creating a market for them. It's probably a decent idea, but possibly complementary rather than competitive with what AirBNB is doing.
AirBNB Experiences is things like "Come swimming with dolphins" or "come on a wine tour".
This idea seems more like the voice-guided tours you can get in museums etc but creating a market for them. It's probably a decent idea, but possibly complementary rather than competitive with what AirBNB is doing.
Amazon has recently launched a virtual experienced platform and it’s actually quite fun. (when not hamstrung by technical difficulties)
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=19419898011
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=19419898011
This idea seems really similar to Detour, created by Andrew Mason and later acquired by Bose: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/24/bose-acquires-andrew-mason...
The idea of running it through a pair of AR sunglasses is wild! We were doing it strictly on smartphones - some of the biggest headaches came as a result of Apple's App Store process - we had to rework everything and since the back end was independent that meant we had to rework the android version as well.
I really liked Detour. Had some interesting walking tours of SF thanks to this app.
> I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away
This is, unfortunately, very common in startup communities. There are a lot of people who attach themselves to startups, discover that they're not interested in putting in the work required, and then decide to coast as long as possible when they realize it's not so easy for their partners to cut them out.
These people are often very charismatic and are experts at inflating their previous credentials. Always do a deep dive on potential cofounders' backgrounds, including backchannel references. Always establish cofounder agreements and, most importantly, at least a 1-year vesting cliff on any equity, no matter how much you like the other person. If they aren't pulling their weight at the 9-12 month mark, do everything to remove them from the company before they have any vested equity.
> In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
Mental illness is also, sadly, disproportionately represented in startup communities. I think it's a combination of factors: People who suffer from certain untreated mental illnesses like you describe are more likely to be unable to maintain a normal career, so they seek out alternative career paths like startups where they don't technically have to report to a manager. Certain mental illnesses can also come with bouts of grandiose thoughts, delusions of grandeur, a penchant for risk-taking, and other traits that can easily be confused for confident, ambitious startup personalities.
This is a perfect example of the importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs, as well as due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.
This is, unfortunately, very common in startup communities. There are a lot of people who attach themselves to startups, discover that they're not interested in putting in the work required, and then decide to coast as long as possible when they realize it's not so easy for their partners to cut them out.
These people are often very charismatic and are experts at inflating their previous credentials. Always do a deep dive on potential cofounders' backgrounds, including backchannel references. Always establish cofounder agreements and, most importantly, at least a 1-year vesting cliff on any equity, no matter how much you like the other person. If they aren't pulling their weight at the 9-12 month mark, do everything to remove them from the company before they have any vested equity.
> In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
Mental illness is also, sadly, disproportionately represented in startup communities. I think it's a combination of factors: People who suffer from certain untreated mental illnesses like you describe are more likely to be unable to maintain a normal career, so they seek out alternative career paths like startups where they don't technically have to report to a manager. Certain mental illnesses can also come with bouts of grandiose thoughts, delusions of grandeur, a penchant for risk-taking, and other traits that can easily be confused for confident, ambitious startup personalities.
This is a perfect example of the importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs, as well as due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.
I think this was a great idea btw, sorry that it didn't work out. Before covid I always used to try and find audio walking tours for cities, and alternative ones to the normally rather dry official ones for museums, but there really isn't much out there.
> due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.
> importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs
I'd argue it's more important to work with someone you've worked with in the past and know you can trust and will work hard. The operating agreements and due diligence are there for the worst case scenario, but from your story it seems pretty clear they were questionable co-founders to start with.
I'd argue it's more important to work with someone you've worked with in the past and know you can trust and will work hard. The operating agreements and due diligence are there for the worst case scenario, but from your story it seems pretty clear they were questionable co-founders to start with.
I built a really simple way to poll 50 random people in the US.
It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour.
I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, but I think there's something here I just haven't marketed it to the right audience yet :)
My goal is to make this usable via Slack next year and let teams use it to trial new marketing campaigns or other run other small tests before launching. https://www.thisorthat.ai
It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour.
I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, but I think there's something here I just haven't marketed it to the right audience yet :)
My goal is to make this usable via Slack next year and let teams use it to trial new marketing campaigns or other run other small tests before launching. https://www.thisorthat.ai
Heh, I built something similar years ago. Even got a YC interview. It was called decisioncandy. Originally targeted logos but switched to apparel...
I think the Slack idea is brilliant though, and I could totally see that taking off for a wide variety of things.
I think the Slack idea is brilliant though, and I could totally see that taking off for a wide variety of things.
Super interesting. Any other ideas from your testing, or feedback from the YC interview on where there could be traction here? If you're willing to share, of course :)
Hmm certainly willing to, but I don't have much. Mostly just that professional graphic designers didn't seem like the right audience since they already have networks of peers who can give better feedback. Oh, and the apparel-industry-specific stuff from below.
But something like an engineer asking a colleague which web design they just hacked up looks better would be a much better fit.
But something like an engineer asking a colleague which web design they just hacked up looks better would be a much better fit.
I had an idea once about something similar, I called it Design Picker, where you'd basically use some combination of crowdsourcing and "algo" to help you make design decisions. I had the domain for years, but I could never come up with a version of the concept I thought actual designers would actually use, so I never built it.
Did your YC feedback yield hints as to why you were rejected (I am presuming)?
Yes, a very clear answer! The problem we were solving was that apparel firms have really long lead times: they design their lines for a season 9-12mo before the customer buys it. That means they can't iterate on their designs; DecisionCandy would let them do so in a lightweight way, by showing their sketches/previews of pieces to their customers, and doing a "which do you like more" survey to score the items.
The problem here is that it takes 9-12mo to find out whether the app does any good, and YC is a 3mo program! We were only just about to sign a pilot deal at the time, so the timing wouldn't have made sense.
And indeed, that long of a feedback loop is realistically too slow for a VC startup. We closed up and I "pivoted" to something totally different a few months later.
The problem here is that it takes 9-12mo to find out whether the app does any good, and YC is a 3mo program! We were only just about to sign a pilot deal at the time, so the timing wouldn't have made sense.
And indeed, that long of a feedback loop is realistically too slow for a VC startup. We closed up and I "pivoted" to something totally different a few months later.
Perhaps entrepreneurs wanting feedback on ideas could be good niche to start with?
If there's anything I learnt from discussing my ideas with family, friends and others, it's that finding the right people to bounce your ideas off of is crucial.
I think Will Wright (famous game designer) described this phenomenon well. To paraphrase, every time he would try to describe a new game to someone else, that person would create a game design in their head and play their game in their head, and then tell you what their thinking is. However, what you want, is someone to play _your design_ in their head. That's very hard to do without a prototype. For example, basically everyone told him that idea for The Sims is terrible. Only when they played his game did they see the light.
I think Will Wright (famous game designer) described this phenomenon well. To paraphrase, every time he would try to describe a new game to someone else, that person would create a game design in their head and play their game in their head, and then tell you what their thinking is. However, what you want, is someone to play _your design_ in their head. That's very hard to do without a prototype. For example, basically everyone told him that idea for The Sims is terrible. Only when they played his game did they see the light.
Interesting. How do you incentivise the opinion givers to actually consider the options instead of just efficiently (randomly) selecting an answer?
How about a reward for choosing the "correct" answer.
If the side with the most votes is the side you chose, you get 2 points. If the side with the most votes is not the side that you chose, then you get only a single point.
If the side with the most votes is the side you chose, you get 2 points. If the side with the most votes is not the side that you chose, then you get only a single point.
Hm.. I worked on a piece of software with similar needs of polling random people for their opinion. Have you considered using Amazon Mechanical Turk?
I imagine some bias would be there, but probably manageable. In return you'd get the ability to poll way more than 50 people for a very reasonable price.
I imagine some bias would be there, but probably manageable. In return you'd get the ability to poll way more than 50 people for a very reasonable price.
It says on their site they are using Mechanical Turk:
> To do this, we take your question and use Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform to survey 50 random people.
> To do this, we take your question and use Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform to survey 50 random people.
Thanks! This is why I keep saying that all my good ideas are already taken! ;)
Have you tried removing the free trial?
I like this idea! And not only because I have a long-running art project called This Like That.
But I'm not sure about using Mechanical Turk. If the goal is to have unbiased opinions, is that a good place to source them?
I would assume MT participants are trying to complete tasks as fast as possible. If I'm on MT and you ask me "A or B?" my incentive is to give you an immediate answer. I have no incentive to align that answer with my actual opinion.
Also I wouldn't expect MT to give me a particularly random sample. I mean, if I'm wondering how my B2B SAAS logo is perceived, is an answer from MT going to overlap much with the opinions of my target audience?
It seems like a fun thing to try as a toy, like rolling dice only with humans. I'm just not sure I'd use it for any question I really cared about.
But I'm not sure about using Mechanical Turk. If the goal is to have unbiased opinions, is that a good place to source them?
I would assume MT participants are trying to complete tasks as fast as possible. If I'm on MT and you ask me "A or B?" my incentive is to give you an immediate answer. I have no incentive to align that answer with my actual opinion.
Also I wouldn't expect MT to give me a particularly random sample. I mean, if I'm wondering how my B2B SAAS logo is perceived, is an answer from MT going to overlap much with the opinions of my target audience?
It seems like a fun thing to try as a toy, like rolling dice only with humans. I'm just not sure I'd use it for any question I really cared about.
Make it useable by asking people to answer questions in exchange for getting to ask their own question?
Reaching critical mass may be harder, but I think it would be more random than mechanical turk.
Reaching critical mass may be harder, but I think it would be more random than mechanical turk.
Agreed, answering in return for ask credits is a good idea. Maybe 10 answers = 1 question or something like that. If you make the ratio too large then people will just select anything to get their credits. Another option is to only award a credit if their answer was in the majority.
You can also charge people for the ability to ask a follow up question like why they made the decision they did.
You can also charge people for the ability to ask a follow up question like why they made the decision they did.
I participate in a poll/survey portal as a reviewer. Just to give you an idea of how it works: we the participants are free to register and get some points after every completed poll/survey (the amount of points depend on how long it took). With these points we can access to a "shop" of small prizes, like headphones, small cameras, books, etc. I assume that the companies making the polls are the ones paying and probably they select the demography of the people to survey (we're asked about this info on the polls). Maybe a model like that can work for you too.
Love this idea but are the surveys randomized or quality controlled at all? I have tried 4 surveys, all different and the results seem weirdly consistent. Option A always seems to win out with ~60% of the vote (60%, 64%, 60%, 57%). I even reversed the two images in one test and whatever was in position A won.
Thanks for flagging this! I had quality tested a month ago (nothing scientific) and tried multiple different image variants, placement (A vs. B) and they did remain consistent. That said, I refunded your orders while I take a look at quality control. Thanks again for trying out and letting me know.
NN-512 (https://NN-512.com) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets
The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activations, etc.)
The free/open core supplies all the basic operators, but many users would need extensions of the core to support their particular networks (or even just software to feed their parameters into the system and get results out) and hardware companies benefit from the software's existence because they sell chips and NN-512 makes the new vector units on their chips more useful
But it didn't work out that way. NN-512 did generate offers to work on other projects (a generous offer from Intel, for example) but nothing that extends NN-512
Why? There are numerous free end-to-end deep learning tools developed by large, company-sponsored teams (Nvidia, Facebook, Google, Intel, etc.) so a specialized tool that requires integration effort is unattractive. That's my guess. So beware, if you're working along similar lines
The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activations, etc.)
The free/open core supplies all the basic operators, but many users would need extensions of the core to support their particular networks (or even just software to feed their parameters into the system and get results out) and hardware companies benefit from the software's existence because they sell chips and NN-512 makes the new vector units on their chips more useful
But it didn't work out that way. NN-512 did generate offers to work on other projects (a generous offer from Intel, for example) but nothing that extends NN-512
Why? There are numerous free end-to-end deep learning tools developed by large, company-sponsored teams (Nvidia, Facebook, Google, Intel, etc.) so a specialized tool that requires integration effort is unattractive. That's my guess. So beware, if you're working along similar lines
I saw this in one of your other posts and it seems super interesting to me.
1. Improve the web site slightly (add a contact method and pricing info) and make it clear that it's a company offering an enterprise software tool. Programmers will be viewing the site, so it doesn't need much more than is there already.
2. Charge a flat $7,500/year for a commercial usage license and increase it as the functionality increases. Offer email support and updates. Many programmers can buy a $7,500/year piece of software without their management even asking a follow up question.
3. Write some blog posts showing how to use it and why it's good. Some benchmarks (LOC, performance, etc) vs alternatives would be a good source of posts. Real world examples that people can copy/paste to start with is probably the most useful.
4. Submit the blog posts to HN and some subreddits.
5. Profit (maybe)
1. Improve the web site slightly (add a contact method and pricing info) and make it clear that it's a company offering an enterprise software tool. Programmers will be viewing the site, so it doesn't need much more than is there already.
2. Charge a flat $7,500/year for a commercial usage license and increase it as the functionality increases. Offer email support and updates. Many programmers can buy a $7,500/year piece of software without their management even asking a follow up question.
3. Write some blog posts showing how to use it and why it's good. Some benchmarks (LOC, performance, etc) vs alternatives would be a good source of posts. Real world examples that people can copy/paste to start with is probably the most useful.
4. Submit the blog posts to HN and some subreddits.
5. Profit (maybe)
I work in the space and was impressed with NN-512 as there's a painful gap in inference cost between CPU and GPU that doesn't have to exist. Intel and AMD are really missing a boat here, most other companies have enough cash they just go to GPUs, academics rarely sling low level code even in CUDA let alone AVX-512, and other than Fabrice Bellard's work few I've seen few go that low level.
My suggestion would be to focus on an initial use case where a very limited low cost / high efficiency CPU model can provide massive advantage. NN-512 should be the framework that expands from that Redis like core. The limited use case tactic is what I'm focusing on[1], mainly as I have a particular application and have less technical brilliance than yourself so need to focus ;)
An aged but still relevant example is the early word2vec work which was (and still is) frequently better to throw onto CPUs than GPUs. A well tuned implementation is not only advantageous on CPU but can win out in many scenarios where cost / latency / ... are important.
Congrats on the project though! I'd be curious for your thoughts for the future if you ever want to chat =]
[1]: Initial experiments written up as a tutorial with Rust and ISPC for a specific CPU based NN task - https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01E8RNH7HRRJT2A63NSX...
My suggestion would be to focus on an initial use case where a very limited low cost / high efficiency CPU model can provide massive advantage. NN-512 should be the framework that expands from that Redis like core. The limited use case tactic is what I'm focusing on[1], mainly as I have a particular application and have less technical brilliance than yourself so need to focus ;)
An aged but still relevant example is the early word2vec work which was (and still is) frequently better to throw onto CPUs than GPUs. A well tuned implementation is not only advantageous on CPU but can win out in many scenarios where cost / latency / ... are important.
Congrats on the project though! I'd be curious for your thoughts for the future if you ever want to chat =]
[1]: Initial experiments written up as a tutorial with Rust and ISPC for a specific CPU based NN task - https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01E8RNH7HRRJT2A63NSX...
In your [1], are your input/output arrays aligned the same for the fastest SIMD and ISPC runs?
Not in that codebase as it was a tutorial / wanted to ensure it's callable from safe Rust code so stuck with `_mm256_loadu_ps`. That code was just playing with dot product like lookup over vectors on CPU. The code I'm more interested in is trying to cram models into ~L2/L3 cache such that a CPU optimized model can be trained on GPU to be deployed on CPU.
How about a tool that generates C (or Java or X) code from TensorFlow or PyTorch models? That way you can train a model offline, and then export it to your preferred language for serving/production. For bonus points, figure out how to get the generated code to use the GPU properly.
Addressing your last sentence, I am actually a GPU programmer by trade. GPUs are my specialty, and much of my professional work has been in Nvidia's CUDA
But AVX-512 is a real step forward, if you look at the price/performance ratio for real-world workloads. So AVX-512 is the focus of NN-512
GPU cloud compute is almost unbelievably expensive. Even Linode charges $1000 per month, or $1.50 per hour (look at the GPU plans: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#row--compute). It's really hard to keep that GPU saturated, which is what you need to do to get your money's worth
An AVX-512 Skylake-X cloud compute instance costs $10 per CPU-core per month, or 2 cents per hour, at Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/). It's easy to saturate that core
Think about it this way: a GPU is really just a cluster of SIMD units with fast memory. A GPU thread variable is just like a SIMD lane, and a GPU warp variable is just like a SIMD vector register
Nvidia's SIMD pseudo-instructions are called PTX and they are like a 1024-bit version of AVX-512. An AVX-512 core is like a general purpose CPU with a 512-bit GPU core built in
So paying for a single AVX-512 core is like paying for part of a GPU (16 threads), plus the general purpose compute you need to keep that GPU part supplied with work
But AVX-512 is a real step forward, if you look at the price/performance ratio for real-world workloads. So AVX-512 is the focus of NN-512
GPU cloud compute is almost unbelievably expensive. Even Linode charges $1000 per month, or $1.50 per hour (look at the GPU plans: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#row--compute). It's really hard to keep that GPU saturated, which is what you need to do to get your money's worth
An AVX-512 Skylake-X cloud compute instance costs $10 per CPU-core per month, or 2 cents per hour, at Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/). It's easy to saturate that core
Think about it this way: a GPU is really just a cluster of SIMD units with fast memory. A GPU thread variable is just like a SIMD lane, and a GPU warp variable is just like a SIMD vector register
Nvidia's SIMD pseudo-instructions are called PTX and they are like a 1024-bit version of AVX-512. An AVX-512 core is like a general purpose CPU with a 512-bit GPU core built in
So paying for a single AVX-512 core is like paying for part of a GPU (16 threads), plus the general purpose compute you need to keep that GPU part supplied with work
I've been interested in your project. I don't think you're realizing the potential of the parent's suggestion.
You motivate the work through bottom-up construction, but I don't think you have a clear explanation for who the users are. They must be:
1) Sure they are only going to use models that are supported by NN-512. This is a big jump for me and many people who want to do transformers, LSTMs, etc. and not just what NN-512 costs. 2) They have to be price sensitive. But if you want larger companies, they will rarely just have one use-case that NN-512 supports; they will probably have a ton of use-cases that NN-512 supports. 3) They want to target AVX-512. If they are a medium or larger company they probably want to have tooling around this, to support model development and later deployment.
Those are my thoughts in general.
I currently need to be able to target and deploy on PC and Mac CPUs from the past 10 years. (I know, this is specific.)
I think parent is saying that individual devs are more likely to try NN-512 if they don't have to learn a new API, since most of them want to have the flexibility to fool around before committing to a new tech or bringing it in-house.
I guess my suggestion is really try to specifically define who the user is for NN-512 and what NN problems they are trying to solve, and let that shape the roadmap.
You motivate the work through bottom-up construction, but I don't think you have a clear explanation for who the users are. They must be:
1) Sure they are only going to use models that are supported by NN-512. This is a big jump for me and many people who want to do transformers, LSTMs, etc. and not just what NN-512 costs. 2) They have to be price sensitive. But if you want larger companies, they will rarely just have one use-case that NN-512 supports; they will probably have a ton of use-cases that NN-512 supports. 3) They want to target AVX-512. If they are a medium or larger company they probably want to have tooling around this, to support model development and later deployment.
Those are my thoughts in general.
I currently need to be able to target and deploy on PC and Mac CPUs from the past 10 years. (I know, this is specific.)
I think parent is saying that individual devs are more likely to try NN-512 if they don't have to learn a new API, since most of them want to have the flexibility to fool around before committing to a new tech or bringing it in-house.
I guess my suggestion is really try to specifically define who the user is for NN-512 and what NN problems they are trying to solve, and let that shape the roadmap.
My original thinking was that companies needing to use transformers, LSTMs, etc., would want to fund the development after doing the simple work to evaluate NN-512's ResNeXt or DenseNet performance on their hardware
Same with development of tooling (network conversion, parameter import). It just takes a lot of time/effort for me to write the code. It's easy to say that support for AVX, AVX2, etc., would be nice, but that's months of hard work (unfunded)
I guess we agree that a niche tool like NN-512, that has a reduced feature set (trimmed to allow one person to complete it and release it for free), has trouble competing with the huge, free, flexible, multi-target tools funded by large companies
In retrospect this is obvious!
Same with development of tooling (network conversion, parameter import). It just takes a lot of time/effort for me to write the code. It's easy to say that support for AVX, AVX2, etc., would be nice, but that's months of hard work (unfunded)
I guess we agree that a niche tool like NN-512, that has a reduced feature set (trimmed to allow one person to complete it and release it for free), has trouble competing with the huge, free, flexible, multi-target tools funded by large companies
In retrospect this is obvious!
TVM can do that for you: http://tvm.apache.org/
Just wondering, what makes NN-512 superior to Intel's oneAPI DNN library?
For example: try to find a deep learning framework that uses Intel's oneAPI DNN library and achieves 80% of the performance of this: https://nn-512.com/browse/DenseNet121
Tell me if you can find one
Tell me if you can find one
I had a similar idea last year, but clearly I'm not talented nor experienced enough to do it. Congratulations dude, this rocks.
Your project is seriously cool, I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.
If I remember it correctly, I initially wanted to build a LinkedIn alternative; but then it morphed into a IMDB alternative to give credit to where it's due
https://theymadethat.com
Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone
and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a...
You can also use it to figure where something was used https://theymadethat.com/things/3r1/storyboard/show_used_for...
Different versions of a product also have their own profiles https://theymadethat.com/things/6wy/apple-macintosh/show_ver...
I'm still maintaining it, with some modest future goals of making the UI more mobile friendly
https://theymadethat.com
Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone
and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a...
You can also use it to figure where something was used https://theymadethat.com/things/3r1/storyboard/show_used_for...
Different versions of a product also have their own profiles https://theymadethat.com/things/6wy/apple-macintosh/show_ver...
I'm still maintaining it, with some modest future goals of making the UI more mobile friendly
This is cool. Are all of the entries manually added, or are you also pulling in information from outside structured sources like Wikipedia?
Thanks. Data was manually added to dogfood the UX. It's improved a little from that.
Programmatically importing data is actually my next "big" goal. It'll be hard to maintain quality though when I start on this route.
Programmatically importing data is actually my next "big" goal. It'll be hard to maintain quality though when I start on this route.
I and a few classmates in business school built a service to print people's top 5 instagram pics (top = #comments + #likes) every month and mail it to them as a nice physical keepsake. I was really flabbergasted that we couldn't get even 10 customers, we spend nearly $1,000 on ads before calling it quits (if we had had 10 customers we may have kept iterating but the setback was big enough to decide to just stop, and it only took a few weeks to build). Part of what was happening at the same time was the move towards stories, videos, and posts with multiples images, so it would have become way more complex than initially planned anyway and none of us were engineers.
The year before that I "invented" a mouthwash that was all powder based so you could travel with it despite travel liquid restrictions, the kickstarter campaign raised a decent amount but about a 1/3 shy of what it would have cost to place the minimum order with the packaging company (the power would be in tea bags), so I also nixed that but that was a fun side project
I’m currently subscribed to a service that allows me to select 8 pictures every month and have them printed and sent to me. They supply new albums at extra cost when the current one is full (have 3 so far, over about 1.5 years).
Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing. Mine is targeted at young parents though, maybe that makes a difference?
Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing. Mine is targeted at young parents though, maybe that makes a difference?
My family uses famileo.com (Europe only I think) which is basically that, selecting recent photos and add texts to make "articles" and they send your "family newspaper" to your older relatives each month.
My grand-parents love it, so yeah there's a market for this kind of things (at least as long as this generation lives).
My grand-parents love it, so yeah there's a market for this kind of things (at least as long as this generation lives).
We use famileo too, it's great. Our idea with that side hustle was total automation so people don't have to even choose the pictures, and perhaps that's where the product market fit was lacking. The hypothesis was that 1. most people think they'll choose pics but in reality they rarely do and rarely print any, and 2. in the "choose and print" market there was too much competition to begin with, from printing for pennies at walgreens or online via shutterfly, to recurring services like famileo
Here's the video I made, for what it's worth: https://youtu.be/93XUnsrG18g
Here's the video I made, for what it's worth: https://youtu.be/93XUnsrG18g
curious, have you had any successes ? (respectfully)
I have, I built a subscription coloring book business when they became a huge fad. It was profitable (between $500 and $1,000 a month in net profit) and I sold it after 10 months when I needed to relocate outside of the country for work so the burden of managing it would no longer be worth it.
I also joined somebody else's side hustle in the employee engagement space (tips for managers and a simple tool to keep track of staff info like birthdays, favorite food, etc.) that was acquired by a larger but still very small company in that space. Both "exits" were not in the low 5 digits so nothing notable but a nice feeling
What did you sell it for if you don’t mind my asking?
Chroma Club (the coloring book one) was just $3k, I had about 2 weeks to unload it because I didn’t want to have to handle closing and refunding subscriptions (some people prepaid for 6 months etc.) and it was faster/easier to sell than unwind, so a bit of a fire sale. The other one was about 10x that amount.
My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/
It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my app, or you are going to pay ten times more to a late fee bill
After the Windows app failed, I doubled down on the niche, by making it a Linux app.
I thought as plan B, if I do not find users, I could sell it to the library itself. I thought that was a sure sale, because the library had bought software from me before, but they did not want an app
Then I made it open-source, so I do not have to deal with it anymore, but no one understands Pascal code. It only lead to much more work. Now I have been working on it almost every free hour for 14 year. And I really should not have written my own HTML parser for it
It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my app, or you are going to pay ten times more to a late fee bill
After the Windows app failed, I doubled down on the niche, by making it a Linux app.
I thought as plan B, if I do not find users, I could sell it to the library itself. I thought that was a sure sale, because the library had bought software from me before, but they did not want an app
Then I made it open-source, so I do not have to deal with it anymore, but no one understands Pascal code. It only lead to much more work. Now I have been working on it almost every free hour for 14 year. And I really should not have written my own HTML parser for it
> But you cannot go to a library without it.
Why is this? Did you arrange some kind of exclusivity deal with libraries in an area to manage borrowing so that people have to use it?
Why is this? Did you arrange some kind of exclusivity deal with libraries in an area to manage borrowing so that people have to use it?
I think GP means that people should want to use the app because it can save them from having to pay late fees, not that people need to use the app. Like saying "Yelp, cannot go to a restaurant without it".
> because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore
Is this a German thing, an urban thing, or really a true statement universally? I ask because prior to covid lockdown, we made at least weekly trips to our public library and it always had a steady stream of patrons.
Is this a German thing, an urban thing, or really a true statement universally? I ask because prior to covid lockdown, we made at least weekly trips to our public library and it always had a steady stream of patrons.
[deleted]
Compared to almost anything else not involving libraries
There are more people reading books than there are people reading books from a library. If I had just made a tool (in English) to keep a list books without involving (German) libraries, it would probably be much more successful and only take a hundredths of effort.
And worse, I did not target libraries in general, but libraries in my city. Anything limited to one city has a too low user base. I planed to expand it city by city, by selling it in one city to cover the travel cost to the next city, so I can lend books there, actually test it, and make sure everything remains bugfree.
The alternative option, expert users can use it with any library, by editing the config XML files to include their webpage URL and server parameters, seems to have been too confusing for people
There are more people reading books than there are people reading books from a library. If I had just made a tool (in English) to keep a list books without involving (German) libraries, it would probably be much more successful and only take a hundredths of effort.
And worse, I did not target libraries in general, but libraries in my city. Anything limited to one city has a too low user base. I planed to expand it city by city, by selling it in one city to cover the travel cost to the next city, so I can lend books there, actually test it, and make sure everything remains bugfree.
The alternative option, expert users can use it with any library, by editing the config XML files to include their webpage URL and server parameters, seems to have been too confusing for people
The current trend in libraries is to abolish fines and waive any past fines. It has been shown to increase usage of the libraries.
> basically no one goes to public libraries anymore.
I do. This surprises me.
I always think a weekly trip to the library is good for the soul, just to be reminded of all the knowledge that's out there waiting to be discovered. Good reminder to watch less Netflix :-)
I do. This surprises me.
I always think a weekly trip to the library is good for the soul, just to be reminded of all the knowledge that's out there waiting to be discovered. Good reminder to watch less Netflix :-)
In my locale, the public library has shrunk in size to about 40% of its size 20 years ago. And it now includes a coffee bar and lunch café. The current selection is mostly popular books. For all topics I know something about, the non-fiction books seems to cater to children, lay-people, and beginners.
The library has pivoted to social work, helping low-literate people, offering a safe space for teenagers to study, and a place for the elderly and 30+ women to meet. Those are all good reasons to exists, particularly because many of the visitors cannot go anywhere else, but I miss the library of my youth. I loved spending hours moving through the stacks, discovering all kinds of oddities and new things. But that seems passé. Even in the university library the amount of books has shrunk a lot and the depot with a lot of older stuff is now off-limits.
The library has pivoted to social work, helping low-literate people, offering a safe space for teenagers to study, and a place for the elderly and 30+ women to meet. Those are all good reasons to exists, particularly because many of the visitors cannot go anywhere else, but I miss the library of my youth. I loved spending hours moving through the stacks, discovering all kinds of oddities and new things. But that seems passé. Even in the university library the amount of books has shrunk a lot and the depot with a lot of older stuff is now off-limits.
I haven't been in a library for a long time, but in 90s I never had this issue. We had a "card" where librarian would stamp the date. Books had a paper on the back where they would stamp the issue date and return date.
It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany?
I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".
Libraries might be more interesting customers but they have little reason to reduce late fee bills as it is extra income to them. You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.
Hope you enjoy working on it.
It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany?
I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".
Libraries might be more interesting customers but they have little reason to reduce late fee bills as it is extra income to them. You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.
Hope you enjoy working on it.
>It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany?
It should be. The due dates are all listed on the webpage
And some libraries even send reminder emails before the due date
But that is how they got me. I got used to their reminder mails, and then - "Our mail server had a failure and now you have to pay 60€"
>I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".
I wish someone had told me that before I wrote it
But there is also the secondary feature of keeping a record of read books. I read a lot of incomplete series before I had it, and now I want to read the rest of the series, but I do not remember what the series was.
>You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.
They are the worst. They have much less patrons than public libraries, and almost never answer emails. I think I might have gotten email PTSD from them.
>Hope you enjoy working on it.
I enjoyed it 13 years ago. But not anymore.
It should be. The due dates are all listed on the webpage
And some libraries even send reminder emails before the due date
But that is how they got me. I got used to their reminder mails, and then - "Our mail server had a failure and now you have to pay 60€"
>I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".
I wish someone had told me that before I wrote it
But there is also the secondary feature of keeping a record of read books. I read a lot of incomplete series before I had it, and now I want to read the rest of the series, but I do not remember what the series was.
>You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.
They are the worst. They have much less patrons than public libraries, and almost never answer emails. I think I might have gotten email PTSD from them.
>Hope you enjoy working on it.
I enjoyed it 13 years ago. But not anymore.
I am fascinated by hardware with poor software support so I built two highly unsuccessful native mac apps: MASS and LabelScope to work with weight scales and label printers. You can read their defunct websites at https://semireg.com/mass/ and https://semireg.com/labelscope/
Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focused cursor point via keyboard accessibility APIs.
LabelScope printed to label printers but wasn’t a design app or a driver. Instead, like MASS it floated above other apps as a “scope” which would real-time capture and dither the image inside the virtual label. Double-click would send the dithered image directly to the printer using the printer’s native commands via USB (no driver).
Fast forward a few years and I started on ANOTHER label printer app based on Electron. I’m happy to report it’s a healthy business and growing! Learn more at https://label.live
Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focused cursor point via keyboard accessibility APIs.
LabelScope printed to label printers but wasn’t a design app or a driver. Instead, like MASS it floated above other apps as a “scope” which would real-time capture and dither the image inside the virtual label. Double-click would send the dithered image directly to the printer using the printer’s native commands via USB (no driver).
Fast forward a few years and I started on ANOTHER label printer app based on Electron. I’m happy to report it’s a healthy business and growing! Learn more at https://label.live
Could you say more about why you think the original mac apps "failed?" Small market? Lack of promotion? Cost too high? What?
Oh, definitely due to a small market WITHIN a small market. When users acquire speciality business hardware they don't reach for macOS. I'm trying to change that... one device at a time. MASS and LabelScope were mostly proof of concept. They failed in the sense that they were the cost of the education to do better. With Label LIVE (my newest app), I built an actual design app, targeting a much broader market (cross-platform to boot).
[deleted]
I had a similar idea for a web based version about 8 years ago. Even ran some Google Ads with a MVP landing page to gauge interest (there was).
Finally never got around to building it.
Is this a sustainable business for you now? Or just a side project?
Finally never got around to building it.
Is this a sustainable business for you now? Or just a side project?
Yes, it’s ramen profitable, bootstrapped and growing. It’s just me at the moment and I’m still juggling full-time mobile app and IOT consulting. Since Label LIVE is a React app wrapped in Electron I’ve given a lot of thought to bringing it into a proper SaaS via browser but just don’t have the time.
Nice. Congratulations!
A suspect a browser based SaaS version will knock the socks off of what you have now in terms of conversion.
Try and find some time to build it.
A suspect a browser based SaaS version will knock the socks off of what you have now in terms of conversion.
Try and find some time to build it.
Wouldn’t it be hsrd to get the browser app to play nice with printers?
Yes, it’s a big challenge. There are three solutions I see:
1) Rely on PDF and browser print APIs, which means you give up direct USB access and even some paper size API which is kind of a deal breaker for thermal printers.
2) Rely on a browser extension of some sort. This might work, and I haven’t researched this much, because I find it clunky and error prone, bad UX and at mercy of browsers.
3) Use the existing app as an “agent” that receives “print jobs” from the cloud. This would be similar to ShipStation Connect and Google Cloud Print. This has potential but would need all sorts of engineering and UX to become seamless.
1) Rely on PDF and browser print APIs, which means you give up direct USB access and even some paper size API which is kind of a deal breaker for thermal printers.
2) Rely on a browser extension of some sort. This might work, and I haven’t researched this much, because I find it clunky and error prone, bad UX and at mercy of browsers.
3) Use the existing app as an “agent” that receives “print jobs” from the cloud. This would be similar to ShipStation Connect and Google Cloud Print. This has potential but would need all sorts of engineering and UX to become seamless.
I was thinking about building the same kind of native Mac app as MASS and I never heard of it... my bad. Did you have prior USB programming experience? How did you learn to interface with the scales? Did you reverse engineer them? What’s the best way to learn to do this sort of USB programming on the Mac? Thanks in advance for your answers.
TLDR: Small wins over the course of months and months of trial and error.
I never considered myself a hardware integrator until I accidentally became one. Oops, e.g. fake it until you make it. Looking back at college, I received barely passing grades in my C and assembly coursework. Sure, I "understand" bitwise operations and bit shifting and LSB/MSB... but it still feels foreign to me, like every time I got something to work I celebrated that I made any progress at all. Me the imposter.
There were times in developing all these apps that I seriously thought, "well, I'm stuck, this is the end" and I just kept working a few hours at a time... If anything, troubleshooting and not getting fatally-frustrated is my super-power. These hard-won-solved-problems led me to build something "simple" for the user, which is its own very special reward (aka dev dopamine and serotonin).
I loved building these apps. I never thought I'd make any money. And my relative success with Label LIVE is just a rewarding icing on the cake of enjoying this kind of puzzle-solving. I mean, native Node modules, WASM... are their own special kinds of hell. The kind of hell you forget quickly and you have better written your future self decent documentation. Makes me nervous just thinking about finally adding Apple Silicon support. hands sweat
I never considered myself a hardware integrator until I accidentally became one. Oops, e.g. fake it until you make it. Looking back at college, I received barely passing grades in my C and assembly coursework. Sure, I "understand" bitwise operations and bit shifting and LSB/MSB... but it still feels foreign to me, like every time I got something to work I celebrated that I made any progress at all. Me the imposter.
There were times in developing all these apps that I seriously thought, "well, I'm stuck, this is the end" and I just kept working a few hours at a time... If anything, troubleshooting and not getting fatally-frustrated is my super-power. These hard-won-solved-problems led me to build something "simple" for the user, which is its own very special reward (aka dev dopamine and serotonin).
I loved building these apps. I never thought I'd make any money. And my relative success with Label LIVE is just a rewarding icing on the cake of enjoying this kind of puzzle-solving. I mean, native Node modules, WASM... are their own special kinds of hell. The kind of hell you forget quickly and you have better written your future self decent documentation. Makes me nervous just thinking about finally adding Apple Silicon support. hands sweat
Can you please please PLEASE support Brady printers? They're specialised label printers used in the laboratories. The software they use called LabelMark is no longer supported except lots of labs still have label stocks. So they're stuck used the pos software. To make matters worse its not supported on win10.
I'm happy to be your lab rat and customer for life because we are never going to stop using the printers. I've completed the survey on your site. Shoot me an email if you want any more details.
Btw every lab I've been in has used Brady printer
I'm happy to be your lab rat and customer for life because we are never going to stop using the printers. I've completed the survey on your site. Shoot me an email if you want any more details.
Btw every lab I've been in has used Brady printer
Replied! Thanks for the suggestion.
1990 Refilling toner cartridges for laser printers. I had someone else doing the refilling for me, so in terms of execution this was pretty much pure sales calls and I found that I wasn't good at that.
1992 A 1U rack mounted utility component for pro touring musicians that included a direct input (DI), tuner, metronome, front and rear rack lights, and surge protected outlets. NAMM attendees loved it. So did all the musician's that I worked with on the road at the time. But it turns out there's a lot to building physical products, especially ones that include custom electronics. We got a PO for 25 units from Guitar Center, but didn't have the chops to get it together and deliver. In the end it came down to capital and we had none left.
2000 A SaaS solution (then known as an ASP) for project management for commercial construction. Not sure what went wrong here. Probably lack of sales competency. A peer and competitor at the time, eBuilder, just sold for $500 million 2 years ago. That was a long ride. We shut down in 2008.
1992 A 1U rack mounted utility component for pro touring musicians that included a direct input (DI), tuner, metronome, front and rear rack lights, and surge protected outlets. NAMM attendees loved it. So did all the musician's that I worked with on the road at the time. But it turns out there's a lot to building physical products, especially ones that include custom electronics. We got a PO for 25 units from Guitar Center, but didn't have the chops to get it together and deliver. In the end it came down to capital and we had none left.
2000 A SaaS solution (then known as an ASP) for project management for commercial construction. Not sure what went wrong here. Probably lack of sales competency. A peer and competitor at the time, eBuilder, just sold for $500 million 2 years ago. That was a long ride. We shut down in 2008.
I think your 1U rack unit would still be something a lot of gigging musicians would want. You could probably add in a few other things to that space too.
An app for finding the best hotels for traveling with kids.
It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the images through Google Cloud Vision APIs to re-order the images putting first the ones with children, pools, playgrounds, etc.
With that done, just an app to find hotels by searching anywhere.
It was more built for personal use but ended up being quite attractive. But marketing apps is hard so never really pushed it. Then, also... covid happened.
It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the images through Google Cloud Vision APIs to re-order the images putting first the ones with children, pools, playgrounds, etc.
With that done, just an app to find hotels by searching anywhere.
It was more built for personal use but ended up being quite attractive. But marketing apps is hard so never really pushed it. Then, also... covid happened.
Rumour is due to covid a babyboom is coming, so soon there will be a lot of potential for your app.
There might be a baby boom after Covid-19, but right now, we are expecting a baby bust. Economic uncertainty is leading people to delay having children, at least in certain countries.
Had a similar idea to mine the booking.com data for cheap hotels. Kinda like Scott's cheap flight but for hotels.
I started the project but life got in its way.
I started the project but life got in its way.
You can share it here! You have our attention :)
this is a good idea. Keep it up.
People are starting to travel, atleast in India. There will be a surge in tourism as soon as the vaccine reaches its potential.
Most people in my circle are dying to travel. So stick around man
People are starting to travel, atleast in India. There will be a surge in tourism as soon as the vaccine reaches its potential.
Most people in my circle are dying to travel. So stick around man
https://wifimask.com - WifiMask VPN. The little money that comes in is spent on server costs basically. I spent 3 years building it, spending too much time on trying to build "perfect" Apple apps, instead of quickly going online with an MVP and validate first. Besides that there are a lot of VPN's out there and competing with the "big boys" with big marketing budgets is hard, especially when they can provide things like Netflix US streaming. I can keep it online forever this way, it's "bootstrapped", so no screaming investors who want to see money, but I stopped working on an Android and Windows app, I see it as a lost case and these days I'm focused on my webhosting: joostwebhost.nl and secret future projects. ;-) (And I'm available as a freelancer) I learned a lot from it though, more then I ever learned at an employer. I'm pretty sure I can apply the knowledge to a future successful project.
The whole internet's full of VPN service but there's still a big market for it. There's a service I used a couple of years ago that allowed me to basically connect to the internet through this particular VPN without having any data plan. I don't know how they did it but it still seems weird that the service worked this way on the contrary to what I understand VPNs actually do or how they work. After a little bit of googling, finally got the name it was called Your Freedom
Interesting, this was probably due to "DNS tunnel mode":
https://www.your-freedom.net/index.php?id=dns-tunneling
I will look into this more, thanks! :-)
I guess based on https://github.com/yarrick/iodine ? You could also run your own server.
I bought lacktivity.com with the hopes of building something that would make fun of people for being inactive so much. Then I looked into what it takes to build a mobile app and gave up. I'm not a dev. But it was going to feature such gems as
"Congrats, you've been inactive for 4hrs 32m: A new record!"
"Lacktivity has crashed due to sheer boredom."
"Wow, 100 steps in an hour! Next time, try taking the longer route to the fridge."
"Putting the fitness tracker on your dog and then playing fetch in the house is no way to go through life."
It was a fun idea, but I totally lack execution.
Domain for sale if anyone wants to pick up the idea.
"Congrats, you've been inactive for 4hrs 32m: A new record!"
"Lacktivity has crashed due to sheer boredom."
"Wow, 100 steps in an hour! Next time, try taking the longer route to the fridge."
"Putting the fitness tracker on your dog and then playing fetch in the house is no way to go through life."
It was a fun idea, but I totally lack execution.
Domain for sale if anyone wants to pick up the idea.
This would have made bank on iPhone back in 2008 when novelty apps (eg BeerMe) were big.
I've spent a whole bunch of time on CoolBeans (now OpenBeans http://www.openbeans.org), a "distribution" of NetBeans.
I assumed it would be possible to do a lifestyle business out of catering to a subset of the over 1M NetBeans users. Turns out it is not so easy.
I spend some money for a Windows machine to digitally sign builds, the macOS dev certificate and hosting. But the bulk of the cost was the time it all took.
PS: The .xyz domain in combination with the Windows antivirus solutions (looking at you ESET) was a major annoyance. Switched to .ORG just in time for the whole debacle there.
I assumed it would be possible to do a lifestyle business out of catering to a subset of the over 1M NetBeans users. Turns out it is not so easy.
I spend some money for a Windows machine to digitally sign builds, the macOS dev certificate and hosting. But the bulk of the cost was the time it all took.
PS: The .xyz domain in combination with the Windows antivirus solutions (looking at you ESET) was a major annoyance. Switched to .ORG just in time for the whole debacle there.
Why didn't you get a .com address? Reminds me of this oldie:
http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
Seems obvious in retrospect. I didn't believe the name is so important, CoolBeans was nice enough and .xyz was being promoted as the new .com :)
I made a baby names app in 2010-2011, mostly driven by my and my wife's inability to settle on a name for our first child. The system learned n-grams from names you liked, and other info like name origins etc. I tidied it all up into what I hoped was a tasteful Mac app, used some free Google Ad credit, and it was very satisfying to see that people used it, but it was never popular enough to pay its own way, despite briefly being the number one lifestyle app on the UK Mac App store.
I would have done better if I'd tweaked the algorithm more, done an iPhone version, or just taken it seriously, but it mostly came out of a personal need and in the absence of clear signs it was valuable it was easy to let go (especially when later sandboxing rules for Mac apps broke some fundamental stuff around persistent documents).
You can see some screenshots at:
https://twitter.com/lemonwatcher/status/1286082683412582403
I would have done better if I'd tweaked the algorithm more, done an iPhone version, or just taken it seriously, but it mostly came out of a personal need and in the absence of clear signs it was valuable it was easy to let go (especially when later sandboxing rules for Mac apps broke some fundamental stuff around persistent documents).
You can see some screenshots at:
https://twitter.com/lemonwatcher/status/1286082683412582403
Back in the early days of Flash, I realized it could be more than just for cute animations, and coded a library of UI widgets to enable Windows-like UX inside of a Flash app. I then made a sample CMS using it that let you drag/drop panels and widgets into a page and it spit out HTML, so non-designers could design web pages.
Sadly, the next version of Flash showed that they were thinking the same thing - all those UI widgets I made were built-in on their next release, which came out the day after I finished my first version.
Lesson learned - know the roadmap of the products you are consuming.
Sadly, the next version of Flash showed that they were thinking the same thing - all those UI widgets I made were built-in on their next release, which came out the day after I finished my first version.
Lesson learned - know the roadmap of the products you are consuming.
During the previous crypto craze a few years ago I built a .net service that continuously scanned 100s of sites for crypto news for specific keywords (configuration of sites and keywords stored in xml files) and texted me alerts when keywords hit, in an attempt to apply an event-based investment strategy to the crypto space. Given the immaturity of the market, small events often led to irrational spikes, and I made some money on quickly acting before the news became too widespread.
I started getting too many alerts so I built a machine learning based system to weed out uninteresting/unrelated stories (basically a spam filter, was 98%+ effective). By this time the service had a database of 100,000+ headlines for crypto stories, so I had good data for the filter. I built a UI to quickly allow me to train the ML algorithm by manually rating stories as good/bad and give me the ability to train/retrain/enhance the models on an ongoing basis as my crypto interests changed.
When the market crashed I lost interest. Was already full time on something else as well. I had visions of deploying the system publicly as a SaaS product, allowing people to sign up, and replacing the config/xml files with a nice web-based UI, and then charging something for it.
I started getting too many alerts so I built a machine learning based system to weed out uninteresting/unrelated stories (basically a spam filter, was 98%+ effective). By this time the service had a database of 100,000+ headlines for crypto stories, so I had good data for the filter. I built a UI to quickly allow me to train the ML algorithm by manually rating stories as good/bad and give me the ability to train/retrain/enhance the models on an ongoing basis as my crypto interests changed.
When the market crashed I lost interest. Was already full time on something else as well. I had visions of deploying the system publicly as a SaaS product, allowing people to sign up, and replacing the config/xml files with a nice web-based UI, and then charging something for it.
Why didn't you use the Google service (sorry can't remember the name) that warns you when your keywords appear somewhere on the web?
I didn’t trust that it would be fast enough and don’t think it could send text alerts. Minutes counted in these cases. Also architected it to plug in any source, not just websites (tweets, discord, dark web, etc.).
I would like to use this. Any way to get access?
There isn’t at the moment. Curious what part interests you?
I made a flexible, light-weight, card-based drag-and-drop kanban-ish planning tool called StoryWall and posted the MVP on Hacker News literally the same week Trello was released.
Managed to take all the wind from my sails.
Managed to take all the wind from my sails.
StoryWall name sounds like an outliner app, maybe you should have pivoted into that.
My wife has a side project selling antique maps. I built her a shopify site about 1 year ago that costs €30 p/m but it's hardly generating any revenue. I spent maybe 10 hours on it and she has spent about € 2000 on inventory. https://utrechtaandemuur.nl
have you considered localizing and selling it to english speaking countries too? cool looking maps but not all that accessible.
This looks good! There are some minor UX tweaks that you should do for a better starting point to the site. I'm assuming:
1. The initial site hasn't changed since launch.
2. If it has, then its been due to intuition vs data.
From my quick glance, this has potential and she should be able to sell her entire inventory €2000. It would be good to know what the digital marketing strategy has been to build awareness and drive sales from her target audience as well as a better understanding of her customer and industry.
In any case, she has something and I hope she doesn't give up.
1. The initial site hasn't changed since launch.
2. If it has, then its been due to intuition vs data.
From my quick glance, this has potential and she should be able to sell her entire inventory €2000. It would be good to know what the digital marketing strategy has been to build awareness and drive sales from her target audience as well as a better understanding of her customer and industry.
In any case, she has something and I hope she doesn't give up.
Nuce business. I didn't see an English version of the site.
This is very niche. I question who would really want to buy antique maps, except as for wall art.
Can you venture into other things to sell on Shopify instead?
Can you venture into other things to sell on Shopify instead?
If you were the world leader in antique maps, you’d make a pile of money from that niche. Being able to search for authentic maps for anywhere in world, sorted by time period — that would be a big hit in certain circles. You could ask who would buy first edition printed books — but that’s also a pretty large niche with lots of passionate customers. For example, I’d be interested in old aviation charts or wartime maps from World War II or the US Civil War/etc.
It's not as niche as you might think. I think the problem is that there are already lots of other websites selling antique maps. For example:
- https://www.raremaps.com/
- https://artsourceinternational.com/
- https://www.swiftmaps.com/product-category/antique-maps/
- https://www.raremaps.com/
- https://artsourceinternational.com/
- https://www.swiftmaps.com/product-category/antique-maps/
Is it accurate to assume the target audience is only Dutch-speaking people? This is cool but I haven't wanted antique maps of the Netherlands specifically.
Not just Dutch speaking but looks like it's specifically the city of Utrecht. Which is pretty specific, though the hostname tells you as much if you speak Dutch (it translates to 'Utrecht on the (your) wall').
Wondering: why did you choose to focus on one city?
Why not switch to WooCommerce and I host it for you for €49/year. ;-)
Get the prints into retail spaces - book shops and boutiques.
Store Locator as a SaaS. There are some successful products in this space, I just didn't execute on sales.
User created API consuming dashboards, I drove lots of traffic to it but it was a really niche product and I just don't think there was a path to revenue with such small numbers.
Static pagebuilder before Square and the like had that kind of thing dialed. Still proud of the technical achievement, had some users, but it never took off. I couldn't afford to market it.
A more traditional digital agency I started with some colleagues. It went well, and then it fell apart when one member grossly mismanaged the money and then took some big clients on his way out. I regret not sticking with it, but it was really demoralising that such bad behavior was rewarded and we were left with nothing. Many lessons learned though, I would never allow it to happen again.
Many other small projects that just waned or never got built to completion. I do all of this on my own and with my own money outside of any tech bubble, so it is pretty easy to get derailed. I have been at it for more than 10 years.
User created API consuming dashboards, I drove lots of traffic to it but it was a really niche product and I just don't think there was a path to revenue with such small numbers.
Static pagebuilder before Square and the like had that kind of thing dialed. Still proud of the technical achievement, had some users, but it never took off. I couldn't afford to market it.
A more traditional digital agency I started with some colleagues. It went well, and then it fell apart when one member grossly mismanaged the money and then took some big clients on his way out. I regret not sticking with it, but it was really demoralising that such bad behavior was rewarded and we were left with nothing. Many lessons learned though, I would never allow it to happen again.
Many other small projects that just waned or never got built to completion. I do all of this on my own and with my own money outside of any tech bubble, so it is pretty easy to get derailed. I have been at it for more than 10 years.
What did store locator do? We’re hosting costs too much?
I made a tool called Diskache, which would combine an SSD with an HDD into a hybrid drive around 2015. You did not have to use the entire disk(s) for that. It worked on any two drives on Windows. But my marketing skills got me 0 customers beyond myself.
The target audience was supposed to be gamers (back then typical SSD was 150GB and GTA V was 55GB alone). I even got greenlit on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61003...
The target audience was supposed to be gamers (back then typical SSD was 150GB and GTA V was 55GB alone). I even got greenlit on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61003...
Hybrid SSDs were available in 2007, Apple's Fusion drive in 2012, along with ReadyCache/ReadyBoost/ExpressCache/ReadyDrive (remember when some laptops came with a 32GB SSD in addition to their HDD?), the number of people willing to pay what this product is worth, but not just buy a bigger SSD instead, is probably very slim.
Also tail end of a niche but long flooded market. I wouldn't beat up your marketing skills too badly for it I the Steam page probably would have gotten a decent number of conversions if the demand had been there.
Hm. At the time of the release there were no alternatives not bound to specific hardware (e.g. Intel RST on specific chipsets). I am not even sure there are now. AFAIK, Intel RST is dead, and AMD has no alternative either.
I built https://pagewatch.dev (a service to test your site for responsive/layout issues) over the last year.
I have a few customers but it is growing much slower than I expected. If I were to start building it now I would spend much more time building some kind of audience, just driving even a few visitors a day is hard starting from scratch.
I spent about 6 months building Itinee (https://itinee.com) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it or done any more development on it. I might revisit it once things get back to normal. I don't plan to do much more development until I get user feedback, though
How'd you come to the pricing model? To me only having 24 hours before losing data would probably preclude me from putting effort into trying it out. Have you thought at all about a freemium model?
I gotpartway through building a travel planning app a few years ago, and I had thought the best way could be to allow 3 trips to be planned, then your trial ends unless you subscribe. Or you could severely limit the functionality in a perpetually free version while the paid version has all the bells and whistles.
All the best for when travel is common again as I really like this idea and think there’s untapped potential.
All the best for when travel is common again as I really like this idea and think there’s untapped potential.
Yeah, the issue I see with something like that is that realistically, someone could easily take several years to take 3 trips.. seems a bit tricky to convert free customers to paying customers.
Thanks for the feedback and well wishes!
Thanks for the feedback and well wishes!
Pretty much by waving my finger in the air :) I originally started with something subscription based, but it felt a bit inflexible. For example, if I offered 6mo subscriptions, people probably wouldn't purchase a subscription if they were planning a trip to take in the next month, because you're "wasting" 5mo.
Now, it could be that my prices are too high, but that was sort of my rationale--I thought it would be better to let people pay for what they need.
I think a freemium model could work, but at this point I don't think I have any real features that would meaningfully distinguish the free version from the paid version. I did consider limiting like the number of days your trip can be for "free" users--I might revisit this in the future.
Really appreciate the feedback!
Now, it could be that my prices are too high, but that was sort of my rationale--I thought it would be better to let people pay for what they need.
I think a freemium model could work, but at this point I don't think I have any real features that would meaningfully distinguish the free version from the paid version. I did consider limiting like the number of days your trip can be for "free" users--I might revisit this in the future.
Really appreciate the feedback!
Interesting concept, although the pricing structure seems at odds with budgeting. I would say 6-month or 12-month subscription blocks make more sense to allow for planning and budgeting.
Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is not my forte. My thought process was basically this:
- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)
- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).
So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.
- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)
- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).
So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.
How about something like a quasi-log scale, e.g.,:
$19 for 6 weeks,
$39 for 6 months,
$79 for 12 months and
$99 for three years?
That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.
I received a similar suggestion years ago from someone else, and it worked very well. It's effectively bigger discounts for longer & larger service plans up front. I found it effectively shifted the conversation from "How can I get a discount /beat you up on your price?" to "Ok, what is the right plan for our project"?
This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.
Good luck!
This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.
Good luck!
They're suggesting a pricing model from the perspective of running this business instead of a pricing model from the perspective of using this service. Subscriptions are worth way more to a (tech) business than one-off purchases.
I'm coming at it from someone who does regular budgeting and subscribes to software for that. Big communities built around that so there is potential also.
The pricing comes off as aimed at those planning big one-off trips not regular annual vacation. Those one-off trips are nice, but would be more sporadic and wouldn't you prefer a regular annual subscribing user over a one-off?
It generally costs more to gain a new customer.
At $35 for 6 months, that would be $70 annually if I wanted that. As what I'd consider an "add-on" product, it's far too much. Maybe something like $4.5/m or $45/yr.
The pricing comes off as aimed at those planning big one-off trips not regular annual vacation. Those one-off trips are nice, but would be more sporadic and wouldn't you prefer a regular annual subscribing user over a one-off?
It generally costs more to gain a new customer.
At $35 for 6 months, that would be $70 annually if I wanted that. As what I'd consider an "add-on" product, it's far too much. Maybe something like $4.5/m or $45/yr.
Yes! Budgeter here as well :) My YNAB subscription is well worth it, BUT I use YNAB at least weekly. That was a big struggle I had with coming up with a pricing model that made sense here--realistically, it seems like most/many people will only be actively using Itinee for relatively brief periods of time throughout the year, which, at least if I were the customer, would make me wary of long subscriptions.
As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.
I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.
As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.
As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.
I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.
As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.
> To save your changes, purchase a trip slot for as low as $10
Yet the price directly to the right of that says "Trip Slot $5".
Yet the price directly to the right of that says "Trip Slot $5".
Thanks for the catch! I updated the language to "...purchase a trip slot and editing access for as low as $10"
Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.
Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.
Ah, I see, that makes more sense. I had not realised that a "trip slot" was a read only thing although on reflection that's pretty obvious. I thought the monthly price was unlimited slots...but that makes no sense given it's the same price.
Looks quite interesting. I'm curious if market product fit is there, you are trying to sell an app to people who are looking to travel cheaply.
Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.
Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.
My grand vision is actually a "trip itinerary search engine" so people can search for "Barcelona for 2 people for $1000 or less" and get all the matching itineraries.
But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.
One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.
Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.
But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.
One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.
Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.
I would be the target audience, but from the front page I don't see what value it brings over a spreadsheet. I won't register just to found out that. Does it automatically calculate travel costs?
Thanks for the feedback! In my view, these are some of the biggest advantages of Itinee over my previous spreadsheet planning:
- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.
Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.
I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.
- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.
Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.
I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.
Estimate travel costs weren't apparent from the front page, there is no mention of it and the example plan (picture) only use walking.
I just found the Chicago itinerary in the blog post. It should be accessible from the front page.
I don't see enough value added over spreadsheets / custom Google maps to worth the money, but I'm pretty happy with our current system.
I just found the Chicago itinerary in the blog post. It should be accessible from the front page.
I don't see enough value added over spreadsheets / custom Google maps to worth the money, but I'm pretty happy with our current system.
This is great feedback! I definitely think it's a harder sell for someone who already has a system that works for them.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!
Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!
Just prior to smartphones, I founded a startup called Puhrump that allowed people to call into a call center and have the operators google anything for them. It was a way to solve bar bets and find things out before the internet was in everyone's pocket. Unfortunately, the internet appeared in everyone's pockets before we had completed our seed round of funding. Great idea but a couple of years too late.
Reminds me of Cha Cha. And wow it’s been a long time since I thought about Cha Cha.
http://eruvstat.us - a website for Jewish communities to use to send notifications about the status of their eruv.
I have a couple cities using it for free at the moment, but would like to get more signed up to at least break even on hosting costs. It's a pretty niche service, and so far it seems like there isn't much interest...
I have a couple cities using it for free at the moment, but would like to get more signed up to at least break even on hosting costs. It's a pretty niche service, and so far it seems like there isn't much interest...
This reminds me of a video from "Half as interesting", is this also an eruv?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPYp3lOOOrg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPYp3lOOOrg
Yep! As that video shows, eruvs are built with lots of poles and wires, which can come down due to construction or bad weather. It's important for observant jews to confirm that the eruv is "up" before they rely on it to carry on Shabbat
Very impressive actually, do you know if the poles and ropes are all on private property or is it allowed to have them on "public ground"?
Judaism never fails to impress me since since I discovered the YouTube series from Peter Santenello about hasidic jews (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YTmrCLeidc&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...)
Judaism never fails to impress me since since I discovered the YouTube series from Peter Santenello about hasidic jews (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YTmrCLeidc&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...)
That's actually a very important part of eruv construction. In order to build an eruv, you need permission from the city government. Every 20 years or so, the Rabbi in charge of a city's eruv will meet with the mayor and have a ceremonial "rental" of the property encompassed by the eruv, and will pay the city a dollar.
Eruvs often make use of existing walls, utility poles and cables which are on public property, but if any extra poles or wires are needed they are paid for entirely from donations.
Eruvs often make use of existing walls, utility poles and cables which are on public property, but if any extra poles or wires are needed they are paid for entirely from donations.
I tried to launch a Kickstarter for a project called CoinCard. Basically it's a leather, credit card sized holder for coins where each coin slips into a perfectly sized slot for that coin. I still use one the prototypes in my wallet today. I learned a ton about leather and manufacturing, a bit about videography, and what it takes to launch a kickstarter (much more than you think). Ultimately not enough people wanted one, though a few begged me to make them one at any price.
I still think a large manufacturer of wallets could easily popularize this as a standard wallet insert, but so few leather manufacturers are in the US anymore I couldn't even contact them to give away the idea.
I still think a large manufacturer of wallets could easily popularize this as a standard wallet insert, but so few leather manufacturers are in the US anymore I couldn't even contact them to give away the idea.
[deleted]
I always thought that something like that would work well in the EU, seeing how popular coins are in there. Not so sure about the US.
I built a hotel PMS system in 9 months without trying to sell it first to hoteliers (no industry experience, talked only to 1 hotel owner). Found out it's hard to sell it, even if almost/fully free.
https://hoteliera.com/
Might want to retool it for self-storage businesses. There are a ton of independent self-storage locations (at least in the US) and they predominantly use hotelier software/SAAS. But what makes yours different is that it's modern and looks good. This is a HUGE plus for client-facing services, especially bill paying.
Yes, they're cheapskates. And there's a ton of them, so initial sell is high touch. But there's been a lot of modernization among them, yet their client-facing web presence really isn't being served. So once you've got them, I'd expect to be able to hold on to them--low-touch--for a very, very long time.
Just an idea...
Yes, they're cheapskates. And there's a ton of them, so initial sell is high touch. But there's been a lot of modernization among them, yet their client-facing web presence really isn't being served. So once you've got them, I'd expect to be able to hold on to them--low-touch--for a very, very long time.
Just an idea...
Thank you, I'll look into it!
I probably have about 20 domains registered that I've never done anything with. Eg wherewasthistaken.com - the idea being you have a photo, eg from your parents, and you don't know where the photo was taken. So you post it on the website and people can comment if they recognise where it was taken.
So, something like GeoGuessr?
Oh man... I have no idea how many domains I've bought over the years. Hundreds... none have gone anywhere.
I spent $1.4 million of my own money attempting to dethrone Craigslist in 2007.
Didn't work.
Didn't work.
Would you mind elaborating on that; besides running out of money, what were the things that went wrong? Or the things that didn't happen when needed to?
We had a bunch of good ideas the world didn’t care about. For example, actual user IDs and a feedback system. We launched it as an add-on for radio station websites and learned that they were an endless source of feature requests, which we foolishly granted. Finally, it didn’t scale well because a lot of behind the scenes content moderation was necessary.
Mostly I blame myself for not validating the idea properly. If “The Mom Test” book had been around at that time I could have saved that money and a lot of strain on my marriage. I feel strongly that it is by far the most important business book to be published in the last three or four decades.
Mostly I blame myself for not validating the idea properly. If “The Mom Test” book had been around at that time I could have saved that money and a lot of strain on my marriage. I feel strongly that it is by far the most important business book to be published in the last three or four decades.
Hard agree on the Mom test. Sorry you spent all that cash, hope that you got something out of it.
Omg ,
Sorry to hear. that
Life is a beach.
Full of surprises.
This's one of great life lesson
I ever read
May force with you
May force with you
You’re very kind, thank you. That’s business! The upside would have been high, so I accepted the risk. Still alive, still have most of my health and family. I’m a fortunate man.
I must have finished like 15 projects that was meant to be generating money and was technically capable to do that.
Biggest failure was SAAS for organizing wineries and generating reports for carious government bodies. There are various old software from 90s that do that or you can use paper books (depending on country you are not allowed to use excel).
I've spent around 3 years of fulltime work but it turned out farmers do not care about software. They might use some old desktop software or just hope that inspection is not going to come. Software is still up and running and there are some paying customers, but it just doesn't make sense to spend much time working against the wind. Also my addressable market is not big enough to support additional development.
Biggest failure was SAAS for organizing wineries and generating reports for carious government bodies. There are various old software from 90s that do that or you can use paper books (depending on country you are not allowed to use excel).
I've spent around 3 years of fulltime work but it turned out farmers do not care about software. They might use some old desktop software or just hope that inspection is not going to come. Software is still up and running and there are some paying customers, but it just doesn't make sense to spend much time working against the wind. Also my addressable market is not big enough to support additional development.
Don’t wineries need to apply pesticides to their orchards?
I would gather that some of the pesticide-applying-drones, from a few Chinese drone manufacturers, might be useful to them.
Is this something you can pivot to?
I would gather that some of the pesticide-applying-drones, from a few Chinese drone manufacturers, might be useful to them.
Is this something you can pivot to?
Sure, there are plans you need to adhere to, so you can get quality you need (and you need to keep records of what, when and how much you spray and calculate if you are within limit, depending on country and form of agriculture practice you adhere to). This is already in the app.
Drones for spraying is buzzword for past few years, but it isn't going to work for many different reasons both technical and legislative. At the end the act of spraying is not pain point for vineyards: the current technology is dependable, easy and proven. (Speaking as a certified farmer)
Drones for spraying is buzzword for past few years, but it isn't going to work for many different reasons both technical and legislative. At the end the act of spraying is not pain point for vineyards: the current technology is dependable, easy and proven. (Speaking as a certified farmer)
We also made software for farmers and we have an awe-inspiring 1 (one) user!
Same as your experience: farmers don’t care about software or computers in general
Same as your experience: farmers don’t care about software or computers in general
https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :)
As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.
As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.
Remove the views unless you have thousands/hundreds of views. For me, the main thing is to get the traffic for job applications then work on the sales of the jobs. Just now it's a case of asking for $20 for 20 views of which 1 may apply. That seems like a hard sale to make.
What are you selling? Job posts?
I hear monster charges something like $300 for a job post for 1 month. And $400 for 2 months.
I would think at this rate, that there would be a lot of competition.
Craigslist ran for years just on job posting fees in San Francisco alone.
I hear monster charges something like $300 for a job post for 1 month. And $400 for 2 months.
I would think at this rate, that there would be a lot of competition.
Craigslist ran for years just on job posting fees in San Francisco alone.
Problem is having enough traffic to make the customer willing to pay $300.
For $300, monster probably gets you 100k+ pageviews a month. As a scrappy indiehack project, you're probably getting 1k at best.
For $300, monster probably gets you 100k+ pageviews a month. As a scrappy indiehack project, you're probably getting 1k at best.
https://weworkremotely.com/ is a pretty big remote job board that is likely siphoning away most traffic
yeah, I think you need to be a recognizable brand and have tons of traffic to be able to make real money out of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Something similar: https://launchafrica.io but still have hope! Jobboard for startup and tech jobs in africa
I'm pretty sure I made the first website that sold bitcoins directly to users. It was called "btcnow" and it launched in maybe June or July of 2011. I pretty much glued a google checkout widget to a Bitcoin dispenser, but people loved it. You could use your normal google account to buy coins, and three seconds later they were in your wallet. I was selling maybe a hundred or so bitcoins a day for a couple years, but the insane levels of fraud ensured that it was never profitable. It didn't really matter, the goal was always to make it as easy as possible for people to get started playing with Bitcoins.
Eventually BitInstant came around they actually had people that were paid to deal with this stuff, so they did pretty well. Then the dude that ran it went to jail, so I'm pretty happy with the fact that I got out when I did. Coinbase came around shortly after and they did a much better job than I ever could.
It was never more than a hobby project, and I would twiddle with the website, buy coins to restock the dispenser, answer support emails all on the train to and from my day job every day. Good times.
Eventually BitInstant came around they actually had people that were paid to deal with this stuff, so they did pretty well. Then the dude that ran it went to jail, so I'm pretty happy with the fact that I got out when I did. Coinbase came around shortly after and they did a much better job than I ever could.
It was never more than a hobby project, and I would twiddle with the website, buy coins to restock the dispenser, answer support emails all on the train to and from my day job every day. Good times.
I built a tool [1] for collecting audit logs from all your SaaS tools (Dropbox, Github, Okta, GSuite, Zendesk, etc) and pushing them into your log collection tool of choice (Splunk, Sumologic, Elastic, etc). It solved a personal pain point I had but I was never able to find any customers for it.
[1]: https://logsnitch.com.
[1]: https://logsnitch.com.
The only option I have is to enter my email, which I'm not doing without seeing some examples of usage, pricing, etc. May I suggest putting together a standard one-page brochure-type landing page?
A card game to introduce SQL and Data Science - rowsandtables.com
It's a physical game requiring at least 2 people so it's a tough sell this year. Still managed to sell about 100 copies though.
It's a physical game requiring at least 2 people so it's a tough sell this year. Still managed to sell about 100 copies though.
I’ve only taken a glance, but as a CS-teacher of 16 and 17 year olds, this looks great! I have no clue how to target high school teachers with ads, but if you can, this’d probably be a very interesting niche!
(Although SQL isn’t fashionable enough these days I’m afraid, perhaps the same idea for blockchain will get all the hype :rollingeyes:)
(Although SQL isn’t fashionable enough these days I’m afraid, perhaps the same idea for blockchain will get all the hype :rollingeyes:)
Interesting, so which technologies do 16 and 17 year olds learn in HS CS courses?
That really depends on the high school in question, in NL the mandatory curriculum is laughably bad, mostly due to a lack of competent CS teachers. We teach JavaScript, basics of HTML and CSS, React & React Native, PHP (although I’m trying to get them to replace that with JS) , algorithmic complexity (to the level of handwavy big-O notation and some sorting algorithms), basics of UML, PostgreSQL, C in the context of Arduino, state machines, and for the advanced students I try to throw in a bit of TLA+ (mixed success there). We try and use a project based system where the students pick a project with an actual company and implement a proof of concept level solution. Last year that was a warehousing robot, this year a smart home solution to lower energy costs in social housing. Other non company related projects are a rubiks cube solving bot using LEGO Mindstorms along with a TLA+ proof it could actually achieve every position and would terminate (I did help out a bit on the TLA+ stuff ofcourse).
The trick is to never tell students how advanced the stuff they're doing is, get them excited and they'll go further than you can imagine.
But then again, I am also lucky enough to teach at a combined middle/high school that basically took the last 3 years of the curriculum (15-18yo) and shoved them into the first three (12-15yo) so I basically get free reign since they covered the final exam stuff in the first three years already. I don’t know of any other high school in the country that has this model and teaches at this level. In fact, that is the only reason I teach part-time at all: I wouldn't want to be an actual teacher, but they needed somebody with a deep enough technical knowledge, and had me in the picture both as an ex student (from before they introduced this CS-stuff though, I still deeply envy my own students) and as a 'client' of the students from my previous employer. Eventually I agreed to teach one day a week.
Generally you can expect basics of HTML, CSS, PHP, and if you’re lucky a bit of Arduino-C out of high schoolers, if they get CS at all (it’s very much optional for schools to provide a CS track in NL)
The trick is to never tell students how advanced the stuff they're doing is, get them excited and they'll go further than you can imagine.
But then again, I am also lucky enough to teach at a combined middle/high school that basically took the last 3 years of the curriculum (15-18yo) and shoved them into the first three (12-15yo) so I basically get free reign since they covered the final exam stuff in the first three years already. I don’t know of any other high school in the country that has this model and teaches at this level. In fact, that is the only reason I teach part-time at all: I wouldn't want to be an actual teacher, but they needed somebody with a deep enough technical knowledge, and had me in the picture both as an ex student (from before they introduced this CS-stuff though, I still deeply envy my own students) and as a 'client' of the students from my previous employer. Eventually I agreed to teach one day a week.
Generally you can expect basics of HTML, CSS, PHP, and if you’re lucky a bit of Arduino-C out of high schoolers, if they get CS at all (it’s very much optional for schools to provide a CS track in NL)
Wow! Well, add me to the list of people jealous of your students! Not so surprising to discover you are in the Netherlands, however, as it seems to fit the mental model I have from my limited exposure to your country. :)
Awesome. Love the idea, I've built a card game to teach innovation (www.intrapreneurs-game.com) so I appreciate the effort that goes into designing a game, I'm currently trying to get my game developed as an app because I'm doing some remote workshops in 2021 and want to use it, thanks for sharing
I made a face mask and t shirt website filled with items I designed. Let's just say that I haven't quite met my quarterly sales goals... https://ronamerch.co
Having a site that is less busy might be helpful....all the motion on your site makes me want to click away immediately.
with all due respect (and it's due - ecommerce is hard work), lose the animations...
As soon as I landed on your page, I wasn't thinking "I wanna buy t-shirts and masks!" I was thinking, "Boy, I've got motion sickness and I hope I don't puke."
Let me just say... I'm not a "motion sickness" type. But looking at your page still gave it to me.
As soon as I landed on your page, I wasn't thinking "I wanna buy t-shirts and masks!" I was thinking, "Boy, I've got motion sickness and I hope I don't puke."
Let me just say... I'm not a "motion sickness" type. But looking at your page still gave it to me.
Wow, I clicked because of your comment and I concur, you're not being dramatic, it's pretty overwhelming animation
I think it’s kind of awesome, in its own weird way.
Oh wow. Okay. Yes, ditch the animations. I genuinely cannot stand to use the site :(
You weren't kidding. I underestimated the effect the site would have on me.
You weren’t kidding that they weren’t kidding, I almost vomited.
Some less harsh criticism:
- zigzag circle looks like a visual field migraine before the spinning, cut both replace the logo with something slightly more unique.
- moving text is distracting.
- objects moving left to right and right to left (if you’re dead set on having moving things pick one direction).
- what’s the difference between this and redbubble/zazzle etc?
Some less harsh criticism:
- zigzag circle looks like a visual field migraine before the spinning, cut both replace the logo with something slightly more unique.
- moving text is distracting.
- objects moving left to right and right to left (if you’re dead set on having moving things pick one direction).
- what’s the difference between this and redbubble/zazzle etc?
Wow, I just had flashbacks to homestead.com sites.
If you want, I can help you get the <blink> tag working again.
It honestly looks like a low effort scam website.
This feels like a high class GeoCities throwback... Made me both nostalgic and motion sick :D
Sorry, but those animations are BAAAAD. Arguably worse than https://www.lingscars.com/ .
that's an amazing website! Thanks for sharing.
Have a look at the source code; the warning message is amazing
Wow. I never thought to look at the source.
https://www.lingscars.com/ is so bad that it has gone all the way around the dial back to good (for some value of good).
https://www.lingscars.com/ is so bad that it has gone all the way around the dial back to good (for some value of good).
Your site looks like a satirical fake, nobody in their right mind is going to actually buy something through that.
the animations and aesthetic are lots of fun, assuming you intend them to be a kind of retro hip nod to an older web era. all these people hating on it have no sense of joy. but i think it might not be right for a site that sells medical gear for a pandemic. also, its hard for me tell based on the masks whether you are extremely online and irony poisoned (very likely) or a right wing grifter (very unlikely but possible)
Ha, glad you had fun! I'm definitely irony poisoned. I'm not sure if it would have the same punch if not for the inappropriateness of the content matter though.
I'm honestly wondering if this is top-tier HN trolling. If so, well done.
I began releasing my own Android apps in 2011, and the first several had little or no success.
One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction.
My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few features, but blurbs saying to contact me if they wanted more features. The lesson here is what people wanted. In my mind, I was thinking of how to handle tough technical challenges and new features with domain specific functionality. But what people want was simple. A recently opened files menu. To expand database browsing to database searching. To then expand searching to allow case insensitive searches. To again expand searching to allow wildcards. This was all fairly simple, the features I thought people wanted were much more complex. I would not have learned this lesson if the market had been more mature, if people had another option to use.
I did other niche apps without lessons learned other than that niche markets are small.
Then I had my success (for me a consistent $2000+ in revenue a month without much maintenance work needed on my end meant success). The difference between my success and the previous apps I did was I aimed for a broad mass market, not a niche one, and there were some significant competitors. This is a startup lesson that is heard often - don't aim for a niche market just to avoid competition. There were two main differentiators for me - my app was a book reader, but I did a lot of work to make sure it was easy to browse, search and download tens of thousands of Project Gutenberg books (which I hosted for speed). The other differentiator is I focused on EFIGS languages, not just English, so I was #1 result for libro and libros (books in Spanish) for a long time, and also did well in France, Germany, Italy etc. Project Gutenberg having done the legwork of a supply of many foreign language books helped.
So the main lesson was to aim for the mass market for the Android form factor, and try to find a way to differentiate from competition. People appreciated my niche Access database app, but it took some weeks for me to make $20 advertising revenue from it. Many more people wanted to read Alice in Wonderland and other books.
One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction.
My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few features, but blurbs saying to contact me if they wanted more features. The lesson here is what people wanted. In my mind, I was thinking of how to handle tough technical challenges and new features with domain specific functionality. But what people want was simple. A recently opened files menu. To expand database browsing to database searching. To then expand searching to allow case insensitive searches. To again expand searching to allow wildcards. This was all fairly simple, the features I thought people wanted were much more complex. I would not have learned this lesson if the market had been more mature, if people had another option to use.
I did other niche apps without lessons learned other than that niche markets are small.
Then I had my success (for me a consistent $2000+ in revenue a month without much maintenance work needed on my end meant success). The difference between my success and the previous apps I did was I aimed for a broad mass market, not a niche one, and there were some significant competitors. This is a startup lesson that is heard often - don't aim for a niche market just to avoid competition. There were two main differentiators for me - my app was a book reader, but I did a lot of work to make sure it was easy to browse, search and download tens of thousands of Project Gutenberg books (which I hosted for speed). The other differentiator is I focused on EFIGS languages, not just English, so I was #1 result for libro and libros (books in Spanish) for a long time, and also did well in France, Germany, Italy etc. Project Gutenberg having done the legwork of a supply of many foreign language books helped.
So the main lesson was to aim for the mass market for the Android form factor, and try to find a way to differentiate from competition. People appreciated my niche Access database app, but it took some weeks for me to make $20 advertising revenue from it. Many more people wanted to read Alice in Wonderland and other books.
Is there really a large enough market that would want to fiddle with an Access db file on their Android phones?
What I learned is there was not. I got the idea for it one day and four days later I released the first version. One reason for doing it, despite an unknown but probably small market, was I could do it so quickly (I used an free open source Java library to handle the database). The success for that app was a very small one, it paid the $25 fee for me joining as a Google Play (then Android Market) programmer. The app which allowed people to read books was a larger market and was the real success.
Two years ago we built this tool https://imagetranslate.com to translate and recreate images such as banners, advertisements, brochures etc.
It is being used by individuals as of now. (freelance translators, marketers, ecomm resellers) . But we wanted to integrate it with a bigger localisation tool as it would be of much more value for their day to day translation jobs. We couldn't close a deal there.
It is being used by individuals as of now. (freelance translators, marketers, ecomm resellers) . But we wanted to integrate it with a bigger localisation tool as it would be of much more value for their day to day translation jobs. We couldn't close a deal there.
I self-published (through Amazon) a book of hexadecimal sudoku puzzles. I think I coined the term 'hexadoku'... there are other similar books now, but I think I was the first. It's made me maybe $100 a year for many years. I did have the forethought to label it 'volume 1', but haven't followed up on that.
I just realized a week ago that I should have made an app out of it. I checked and somebody's grabbed the name already.
I just realized a week ago that I should have made an app out of it. I checked and somebody's grabbed the name already.
Someone else may have nabbed the app name, but "Original Hexadoku" by kbelder, author of Hexadecimal Sudoku Puzzles, is surely a selling point in the (admittedly presumably small) market space. Go for it :)
Why not call your app "Hexadoku - Hexdecimal Sudoku"?. There is no reason not do do the app just because someone grabbed the name.
I built an Alexa skill and put a lot of work to take it from hackathon project to polished product but even now it only gets 6-10 unique users a day. I keep chipping away on it but no idea how to market it further.
For the curious - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharman-What-Animal-Am-I/dp/B081GV8...
For the curious - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharman-What-Animal-Am-I/dp/B081GV8...
Built a modern comparison engine for tech products (https://picked.arnaud.at)
Feedback and conversion were amazing but SEO was lacking since Google hates search engines. I needed written content (or advertising) to compete with classical review websites.
Bittersweet, but I learned a lot and it got me my first job in the bay so I don't regret it!
Feedback and conversion were amazing but SEO was lacking since Google hates search engines. I needed written content (or advertising) to compete with classical review websites.
Bittersweet, but I learned a lot and it got me my first job in the bay so I don't regret it!
Easy fix. Cache all searches or last 200 or so... That way, google indexes the serps page, or use amazon product api to bring in reviews from amazon, etc... Then that content would be searchable wouldn't it?
Also, maybe rely less on google, more on social media. Seems lots of businesses don't use google at all any more for growth but social nets, launch pages, ads, groups, etc...
Create your own subreddit and a bot to crosspost all comparisons as images, linking back to the post.
Edit: Also, cut back on vue/react stuff unless you can create a static page version which search can index better. The write some blog posts featuring some of the top products if you do want some of the organic traffic from google.
I use laravel/livewire for front-facing pages that need indexed, phoenix/liveview or just rails + turbolinks would be good enough probably.
Also, maybe rely less on google, more on social media. Seems lots of businesses don't use google at all any more for growth but social nets, launch pages, ads, groups, etc...
Create your own subreddit and a bot to crosspost all comparisons as images, linking back to the post.
Edit: Also, cut back on vue/react stuff unless you can create a static page version which search can index better. The write some blog posts featuring some of the top products if you do want some of the organic traffic from google.
I use laravel/livewire for front-facing pages that need indexed, phoenix/liveview or just rails + turbolinks would be good enough probably.
Thanks for the tips! Marketing was clearly my weakness here.
(Unfortunately scraping Amazon is forbidden in their ToS, I got banned from the affiliate program for it)
Tech-wise you'd be surprised, the website is 90% static! It's simple vanilla JS and PHP, with a homemade framework, hence the great performance.
(Unfortunately scraping Amazon is forbidden in their ToS, I got banned from the affiliate program for it)
Tech-wise you'd be surprised, the website is 90% static! It's simple vanilla JS and PHP, with a homemade framework, hence the great performance.
Webmix.io - a site to see many pages of the same type for web design.
For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration.
The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.
For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration.
The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.
This sounds like a project that would benefit from some kind of clustering algorithm using machine learning. Is that how you did it?
It sounds like a project someone would use a clustering algorithm for, where a moderated user submission would be better.
Perhaps, but it's not so easy to generate user submissions. Scraping would quickly get you a lot more data to work with.
I agree but no, it’s manual data entry at the moment.
https://saaspages.xyz/ does that as a way of driving traffic to their paid product, a landing page builder.
Thank you I have been looking for something like this. At one point I was going to build something like this using automated screenshots on a list if startups
https://www.bithub.com
A cryptocurrency exchange, that I've been working on for several years now. It's up and running, allows you to swap 60+ currencies. So far, it has processed a grand total of 1 transaction. The transaction was made by... me.
No idea what to do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A cryptocurrency exchange, that I've been working on for several years now. It's up and running, allows you to swap 60+ currencies. So far, it has processed a grand total of 1 transaction. The transaction was made by... me.
No idea what to do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After a quick look, I was going to comment that "how it works" doesn't really explain what's special about it and then I noticed the bit about scouring other platforms.
Maybe you could go heavy on that and present it as some kind of price optimiser rather than just another exchange?
My first thought was that it looks just like all the AMMs and so you're not really pushing what makes you different.
Maybe you could go heavy on that and present it as some kind of price optimiser rather than just another exchange?
My first thought was that it looks just like all the AMMs and so you're not really pushing what makes you different.
Built a SAAS app that automatically generates trading strategies from price/volume data. The strategies were optimized to achieve high Sharpe. However, it turns out that high Sharpe has little value in predicting out of sample performance. Stopped development short before trying to monetize. The app is still up at turboquant.com
A historical good Sharpe is usually a prerequisite, but not a guarantee of having good live performance.
I'm sure you're aware of overfitting backtestes and it sounds like that's what you were doing.
I'm sure you're aware of overfitting backtestes and it sounds like that's what you were doing.
You can find patterns without necessarily overfitting to them. It's more a question of correlation vs causation. Looking for patterns reported in research papers would be more promising. But cannot automate that.
More than 6 years back, I left my job without any idea of what I'd do. I just couldn't work anymore and leaving was the priority.
After months of doing nothing much, I decided to implement a game (which I came up with in school, and had also created a basic version in college). I had an electronics background, so I did know programming basics and had to write Perl scripts at work. However, I didn't know much of Java (had a course in school) and Android. Somehow, over the course of a year, I made the app.
The main game idea I had in school was simple inspiration from tic-tac-toe. Make squares instead of lines on a 4x4 board. While writing the code, I was ever trying to make it impressive. So, I came up lots of choices - larger board sizes (up to 12x12) for both tic-tac-toe and the square ones, with blocking moves.
To monetize, I added ads. After release, I got about 0.12 dollars or something over few months. I just removed the ads instead of trying to salvage it. I had bought a domain/hosting, so financially, it was a loss.
In hindsight, biggest issue was UI/UX and not knowing how to promote. I'm still proud of the code I implemented for computer moves.
App is no longer on play store (because it stopped working on newer versions), but you can still see screenshots here: https://github.com/learnbyexample/squaretictactoe
I wanted to re-implement in Python later, started it but never finished. May be next year ;)
After months of doing nothing much, I decided to implement a game (which I came up with in school, and had also created a basic version in college). I had an electronics background, so I did know programming basics and had to write Perl scripts at work. However, I didn't know much of Java (had a course in school) and Android. Somehow, over the course of a year, I made the app.
The main game idea I had in school was simple inspiration from tic-tac-toe. Make squares instead of lines on a 4x4 board. While writing the code, I was ever trying to make it impressive. So, I came up lots of choices - larger board sizes (up to 12x12) for both tic-tac-toe and the square ones, with blocking moves.
To monetize, I added ads. After release, I got about 0.12 dollars or something over few months. I just removed the ads instead of trying to salvage it. I had bought a domain/hosting, so financially, it was a loss.
In hindsight, biggest issue was UI/UX and not knowing how to promote. I'm still proud of the code I implemented for computer moves.
App is no longer on play store (because it stopped working on newer versions), but you can still see screenshots here: https://github.com/learnbyexample/squaretictactoe
I wanted to re-implement in Python later, started it but never finished. May be next year ;)
Congrats on trying something new after your burnout.
I built an LED framework for ESP32, and started building LED lamps that use it. I’ve sold more than I expected, but made less money than I’d hoped.
It’s taken years and countless hours of my time but it’s really fun and I’ve learned a lot.
The project is expanding into an IDE and online pattern gallery, and all sorts of fun additions. People are joining and making really impressive works with it. But it can be tough to keep the momentum going sometimes.
What has been nice is that even when I was the only person using it, the result was still something I could enjoy - there’s no network effect required to make something cool for my living room.
Turning a side project into a business is tough. I’ve been working with a factory to produce them in quantity. This has been a struggle. “Hardware is hard”, and manufacturers are not fun to work with, at least compared with software.
But at the end of the day the thing is in people’s houses and they like it.
Here’s the lamp I’ve been making: https://shop.soulmatelights.com/products/square and the IDE I’m building is at https://editor.soulmatelights.com/tutorial
It’s taken years and countless hours of my time but it’s really fun and I’ve learned a lot.
The project is expanding into an IDE and online pattern gallery, and all sorts of fun additions. People are joining and making really impressive works with it. But it can be tough to keep the momentum going sometimes.
What has been nice is that even when I was the only person using it, the result was still something I could enjoy - there’s no network effect required to make something cool for my living room.
Turning a side project into a business is tough. I’ve been working with a factory to produce them in quantity. This has been a struggle. “Hardware is hard”, and manufacturers are not fun to work with, at least compared with software.
But at the end of the day the thing is in people’s houses and they like it.
Here’s the lamp I’ve been making: https://shop.soulmatelights.com/products/square and the IDE I’m building is at https://editor.soulmatelights.com/tutorial
The light looks great in the video and the price seems reasonable.
You should really add more photos and videos though. Or include a YouTube video showing how to setup the light and use the app. I wouldn't mind spending $150 on a light, but I definitely wouldn't buy one based on the two sentence description and the short video you have on the product page. I'm left wondering...
1. Is the app required for setup or can I just plug it in?
2. Do I need the app to change modes, or are there any buttons on on the light? Does it even have an on/off button or does it need to be unplugged or turned off with the app?
3. Does it stand by itself? How thick is it? Can I hang or lean it on the wall? Or is it thick in the middle and I need to hide it in a corner like in your video?
4. The front looks clean and simple, but what does the side and back even look like?
5. Can I have it display a solid white light if I'm reading and don't want all the changing colors? (I'm assuming the answer is "Yes" now that I viewed the editor tutorial)
6. How bright is it? Like a typical monitor?
I can't find answers to these questions, any contact information to get those answers, or any photos of the light. I can't possibly buy it. On a side note...
1. The editor looks really cool. I'm surprised this isn't showcased on the site anywhere, or any examples from the gallery. Once I viewed the editor and some examples, I realized what is actually possible.
2. It looks like your site is unfinished. One of the slides on your homepage says, "Introduce customers to your shop with lifestyle imagery and product photography." I was thinking about that for a while, wondering how this light with only 196 LEDs could display product photography in shop windows. After scratching my head I realized this must be some default Shopify slide, and not something you wrote.
Random marketing strategy...
YouTube/Twitch streamers are obsessed with colorful background lighting. They also love customizing their stream. Get this in the hands of some famous streamers and show them how they can play animations or pixelated versions of their stream logos. They'll get lots of viewers asking where the light is from and how they can buy one. Or, setup a referral program so streamers mention it during their stream or in their descriptions.
You should really add more photos and videos though. Or include a YouTube video showing how to setup the light and use the app. I wouldn't mind spending $150 on a light, but I definitely wouldn't buy one based on the two sentence description and the short video you have on the product page. I'm left wondering...
1. Is the app required for setup or can I just plug it in?
2. Do I need the app to change modes, or are there any buttons on on the light? Does it even have an on/off button or does it need to be unplugged or turned off with the app?
3. Does it stand by itself? How thick is it? Can I hang or lean it on the wall? Or is it thick in the middle and I need to hide it in a corner like in your video?
4. The front looks clean and simple, but what does the side and back even look like?
5. Can I have it display a solid white light if I'm reading and don't want all the changing colors? (I'm assuming the answer is "Yes" now that I viewed the editor tutorial)
6. How bright is it? Like a typical monitor?
I can't find answers to these questions, any contact information to get those answers, or any photos of the light. I can't possibly buy it. On a side note...
1. The editor looks really cool. I'm surprised this isn't showcased on the site anywhere, or any examples from the gallery. Once I viewed the editor and some examples, I realized what is actually possible.
2. It looks like your site is unfinished. One of the slides on your homepage says, "Introduce customers to your shop with lifestyle imagery and product photography." I was thinking about that for a while, wondering how this light with only 196 LEDs could display product photography in shop windows. After scratching my head I realized this must be some default Shopify slide, and not something you wrote.
Random marketing strategy...
YouTube/Twitch streamers are obsessed with colorful background lighting. They also love customizing their stream. Get this in the hands of some famous streamers and show them how they can play animations or pixelated versions of their stream logos. They'll get lots of viewers asking where the light is from and how they can buy one. Or, setup a referral program so streamers mention it during their stream or in their descriptions.
Hi! Thank you for this feedback. I totally missed it.
> I definitely wouldn't buy one based on the two sentence description and the short video you have on the product page
Quite right. We've done all our advertising so far through Instagram, which is a much more visual medium.
> 1. Is the app required for setup or can I just plug it in?
You can just plug it in. It'll cycle through its patterns
> 2. Do I need the app to change modes, or are there any buttons on on the light? Does it even have an on/off button or does it need to be unplugged or turned off with the app?
There's one button at the back that does both! Holding it down changes the brightness, and pressing it once changes the pattern.
> 3. Does it stand by itself? How thick is it? Can I hang or lean it on the wall? Or is it thick in the middle and I need to hide it in a corner like in your video?
It stands by itself, and it has a hook on the back. Both look quite nice, but hiding the cable is a little tricky on the wall. I need to figure out white cables.
> 4. The front looks clean and simple, but what does the side and back even look like?
It's a "shadow box". The sides are white, the same as you can see on the front. The back is a piece of hardboard with the controller mounted to it.
> 5. Can I have it display a solid white light if I'm reading and don't want all the changing colors? (I'm assuming the answer is "Yes" now that I viewed the editor tutorial)
Actually yes, the app has a mode where you can set a colour with a colour picker. It makes a surprisingly good reading light.
> 6. How bright is it? Like a typical monitor?
It's brighter than that. It's very bright and eye-catching. Most people run it at about 50% battery.
> I can't find answers to these questions, any contact information to get those answers, or any photos of the light. I can't possibly buy it. On a side note...
The website is much more of a placeholder. We have found that advertising on Instagram is much more effective! We've mostly sold these lights to Instagram fans and friends of friends. Which works great for the quantity we're producing. I wouldn't want to sell too many too quickly and have to support them. It's still a work in progress.
> 1. The editor looks really cool. I'm surprised this isn't showcased on the site anywhere, or any examples from the gallery. Once I viewed the editor and some examples, I realized what is actually possible.
Thank you! It's very powerful. There is actually a demo on the homepage, but it's only visible on medium-to-large displays because of the way it renders.
You know what, I see what happened here. You've hit our Store homepage instead of the main website homepage. https://www.soulmatelights.com/ has much more info for you. I need to do a better job of linking them!
> I definitely wouldn't buy one based on the two sentence description and the short video you have on the product page
Quite right. We've done all our advertising so far through Instagram, which is a much more visual medium.
> 1. Is the app required for setup or can I just plug it in?
You can just plug it in. It'll cycle through its patterns
> 2. Do I need the app to change modes, or are there any buttons on on the light? Does it even have an on/off button or does it need to be unplugged or turned off with the app?
There's one button at the back that does both! Holding it down changes the brightness, and pressing it once changes the pattern.
> 3. Does it stand by itself? How thick is it? Can I hang or lean it on the wall? Or is it thick in the middle and I need to hide it in a corner like in your video?
It stands by itself, and it has a hook on the back. Both look quite nice, but hiding the cable is a little tricky on the wall. I need to figure out white cables.
> 4. The front looks clean and simple, but what does the side and back even look like?
It's a "shadow box". The sides are white, the same as you can see on the front. The back is a piece of hardboard with the controller mounted to it.
> 5. Can I have it display a solid white light if I'm reading and don't want all the changing colors? (I'm assuming the answer is "Yes" now that I viewed the editor tutorial)
Actually yes, the app has a mode where you can set a colour with a colour picker. It makes a surprisingly good reading light.
> 6. How bright is it? Like a typical monitor?
It's brighter than that. It's very bright and eye-catching. Most people run it at about 50% battery.
> I can't find answers to these questions, any contact information to get those answers, or any photos of the light. I can't possibly buy it. On a side note...
The website is much more of a placeholder. We have found that advertising on Instagram is much more effective! We've mostly sold these lights to Instagram fans and friends of friends. Which works great for the quantity we're producing. I wouldn't want to sell too many too quickly and have to support them. It's still a work in progress.
> 1. The editor looks really cool. I'm surprised this isn't showcased on the site anywhere, or any examples from the gallery. Once I viewed the editor and some examples, I realized what is actually possible.
Thank you! It's very powerful. There is actually a demo on the homepage, but it's only visible on medium-to-large displays because of the way it renders.
You know what, I see what happened here. You've hit our Store homepage instead of the main website homepage. https://www.soulmatelights.com/ has much more info for you. I need to do a better job of linking them!
So many!
1. homepagr.com: a tool which lets you organize bookmarks and show them on your "new tab" page. I use it extensively, but have gotten 0 adoption, even when I made the price free. (I've since taken down the landing page, but it still works!)
2. audioremarks.com: I've taken down the site, but it was a service that let you upload audio clips and leave annotations at specific timestamps. Made at the start of the pandemic for music students and teachers to do remote lessons and leave feedback. Nobody used it.
3. spry.store: Also taken down. It let you create an e-commerce website from a google sheet. Didn't realize that there were already players in this space, and it's hard to compete in the ecommerce website builder market.
In all of these cases, it was pretty clear from the beginning that nobody would use it: when I talked about the idea to friends, nobody said "wow this is neat!" They all said "huh, okay, why not just use x instead?"
There are two contradictory pieces of advice on HN: one, to talk to customers relentlessly, and two, that "ideas that seems silly are the ones likely to be big." Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!
1. homepagr.com: a tool which lets you organize bookmarks and show them on your "new tab" page. I use it extensively, but have gotten 0 adoption, even when I made the price free. (I've since taken down the landing page, but it still works!)
2. audioremarks.com: I've taken down the site, but it was a service that let you upload audio clips and leave annotations at specific timestamps. Made at the start of the pandemic for music students and teachers to do remote lessons and leave feedback. Nobody used it.
3. spry.store: Also taken down. It let you create an e-commerce website from a google sheet. Didn't realize that there were already players in this space, and it's hard to compete in the ecommerce website builder market.
In all of these cases, it was pretty clear from the beginning that nobody would use it: when I talked about the idea to friends, nobody said "wow this is neat!" They all said "huh, okay, why not just use x instead?"
There are two contradictory pieces of advice on HN: one, to talk to customers relentlessly, and two, that "ideas that seems silly are the ones likely to be big." Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!
> Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!
You still want some core users that love the product, even though many bigger players dismiss it as a toy. Think Bitcoin, Google, Apple (In the very early days, it all sounded like silly/toy ideas, but a core group of users loved them)
You still want some core users that love the product, even though many bigger players dismiss it as a toy. Think Bitcoin, Google, Apple (In the very early days, it all sounded like silly/toy ideas, but a core group of users loved them)
I'm currently taking stab #4 at an ebook writing app.
My first couple attempts sucked and never saw the light of day.
My 3rd attempt launched and was called Paperback Writer. No one was remotely interested in using it, so I eventually shuttered it. (Didn't even have any free users to be worried about.)
That was a few years ago, and my conviction about what would make for a good ebook writing app have only grown stronger. There are glaring shortcomings in all of the existing solutions: Scrivener, Vellum, Sigil, iBooks Author, Calibre... they all kinda suck for writing and publishing novels in particular.
So I'm now working on version 4 of the idea, this time rechristened as PaperbackAuthor: http://paperbackauthor.com
(I still like the name "Paperback Writer" better, but it's a nightmare SEO-wise. When you google "PaperbackAuthor", my twitter handle comes up first. So I consider that an early win.)
I have no idea if this one will attract any users, but I'm passionate about it and need to get it out there. If only so that I can stop thinking about it.
My first couple attempts sucked and never saw the light of day.
My 3rd attempt launched and was called Paperback Writer. No one was remotely interested in using it, so I eventually shuttered it. (Didn't even have any free users to be worried about.)
That was a few years ago, and my conviction about what would make for a good ebook writing app have only grown stronger. There are glaring shortcomings in all of the existing solutions: Scrivener, Vellum, Sigil, iBooks Author, Calibre... they all kinda suck for writing and publishing novels in particular.
So I'm now working on version 4 of the idea, this time rechristened as PaperbackAuthor: http://paperbackauthor.com
(I still like the name "Paperback Writer" better, but it's a nightmare SEO-wise. When you google "PaperbackAuthor", my twitter handle comes up first. So I consider that an early win.)
I have no idea if this one will attract any users, but I'm passionate about it and need to get it out there. If only so that I can stop thinking about it.
Recent Failure
-- I'm not getting customers.
I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online.
So, I built https://pipecontent.com
-- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link)
-- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine.
Feedback appreciated.
-- I'm not getting customers.
I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online.
So, I built https://pipecontent.com
-- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link)
-- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine.
Feedback appreciated.
I like this idea a lot! From poking around it seems like your execution on the pdf generation is high.
My (possibly useless) .02 -- I would not pay for this as is. What I would pay for though is an API that reliably converts internet articles to markdown of the same quality your pdf generation seems to have. A couple years ago I poured 3 or 4 months into a site that let users select time-boxed streams of articles clustered by topic (i.e. "give me a 25 min list of content about Glacier National Park for my subway commute") By far the most challenging part of this project was formatting content in a readable way from various sources, which it seems like you have done VERY well here.
Anyway, congrats on shipping something, regardless of customer base that's very impressive!
My (possibly useless) .02 -- I would not pay for this as is. What I would pay for though is an API that reliably converts internet articles to markdown of the same quality your pdf generation seems to have. A couple years ago I poured 3 or 4 months into a site that let users select time-boxed streams of articles clustered by topic (i.e. "give me a 25 min list of content about Glacier National Park for my subway commute") By far the most challenging part of this project was formatting content in a readable way from various sources, which it seems like you have done VERY well here.
Anyway, congrats on shipping something, regardless of customer base that's very impressive!
I like this idea because it's hard to read quality long form content online. (like you said).
My side project in the past have always been good (sarcasm), but it's the marketing / advertising side that I always seem to fail at miserably. When that fails, then the project seems to dry up and I move on to the next half idea.
I don't know exactly how to market something like this, but I like the idea if that matters. Maybe something in the way of talking to a marketing person to find new avenues to drive traffic?
Your website loads fine in my mind, it might be slow but I didn't notice until someone said something. I was able to quickly see your value prop. Website speed can be fixed, the key is your product is interesting.
Best of luck!
My side project in the past have always been good (sarcasm), but it's the marketing / advertising side that I always seem to fail at miserably. When that fails, then the project seems to dry up and I move on to the next half idea.
I don't know exactly how to market something like this, but I like the idea if that matters. Maybe something in the way of talking to a marketing person to find new avenues to drive traffic?
Your website loads fine in my mind, it might be slow but I didn't notice until someone said something. I was able to quickly see your value prop. Website speed can be fixed, the key is your product is interesting.
Best of luck!
Looks cool but it took 6.5 sec on my pc to load the entire website and even more on mobile. And I have a pretty decent connection. Maybe that's where you lose some audience?
Same, I think it is just because of the 50 page PDF in display (though it does load asynchronously from the rest of the page).
I don't mind the idea, but I think there's wayyy to much friction in getting content from the internet to paper. There's just not much value proposition from re-printing the content I can read online, quicker than I can get it in a magazine form.
The best use I can think for your service is for businesses who want to produce and send out magazines (maybe with content from their industry) in an automated way.
The best use I can think for your service is for businesses who want to produce and send out magazines (maybe with content from their industry) in an automated way.
https://tab.bz - I use it and lots of people enjoy it. So I guess I didn't build it just to make money, as I'm still running it regardless.
Wrote an addin for Excel which offloaded workbook computation to the GPU for about 10-20x speed improvement.
Posted a video demo on YouTube and keep getting the few odd messages once a month asking if it’s available for sale but I’m still clueless on how to properly validate whether it’ll sell.
To make it a complete product would require a lot of time which I don’t have right now
Posted a video demo on YouTube and keep getting the few odd messages once a month asking if it’s available for sale but I’m still clueless on how to properly validate whether it’ll sell.
To make it a complete product would require a lot of time which I don’t have right now
> Posted a video demo on YouTube and keep getting the few odd messages once a month asking if it’s available for sale
This is your validation! People are literally reaching out to you asking if they can give you money for it.
This is your validation! People are literally reaching out to you asking if they can give you money for it.
I can't tell you how many places I've worked that rely heavily on excel scripts and they're so unbearably slow. These are core functions of the companies and even higher ups use them. There's 100% a market for this and it affects the decision makers so they'll definitely shell out for it.
Hyades (https://hyades.info/)
I wanted a not-too-intrusive Github notification system that would give me a broad overview of what happened in my starred repos (i.e. repos for which I'm only a consumer), as some kind of ‶real-time″ changelog. Indeed, I star quite a lot of e.g. emacs packages and other small utilities, which don't have a strict release schedule/changelog cycle, so it's easy to miss a new feature.
So I developed a service that would send me a weekly newsletter of ‶what happened″ (issues, releases), and I decided to make it public, as I assumed I was most probably not the only person with such a need. I never planned on making actual money out of it, but I thought it could recoup hosting costs, which it didn't.
But on the other hand, I learned quite a bit while doing it, so it's probably still a net win.
I wanted a not-too-intrusive Github notification system that would give me a broad overview of what happened in my starred repos (i.e. repos for which I'm only a consumer), as some kind of ‶real-time″ changelog. Indeed, I star quite a lot of e.g. emacs packages and other small utilities, which don't have a strict release schedule/changelog cycle, so it's easy to miss a new feature.
So I developed a service that would send me a weekly newsletter of ‶what happened″ (issues, releases), and I decided to make it public, as I assumed I was most probably not the only person with such a need. I never planned on making actual money out of it, but I thought it could recoup hosting costs, which it didn't.
But on the other hand, I learned quite a bit while doing it, so it's probably still a net win.
Not a bad idea. Congrats!
I was thinking of building something like this but rather for people I follow on GitHub: their contributions, comments, PRs and so on. A kind of a way to learn from one’s GH peers.
I was thinking of building something like this but rather for people I follow on GitHub: their contributions, comments, PRs and so on. A kind of a way to learn from one’s GH peers.
I like it and would use it. For paying customers, they probably come from places like github marketplace. I think you should work on getting it out of the door.
> So what's a side project [...] that hasn't actually earned you money?
There was a time when I dreamed that my "side project" - Scrawl-canvas[1][2] - would bring me fame and fortune, or maybe a few sponsorships, or a job ...
> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?
There's a number of very well established Javascript libraries for the HTML5 canvas element (Konva, Fabric, EaselJS, Two, Three, Pixi, Processing/P5 ... and many others) and, seriously, the world didn't want to know about yet another one.
> What would you do differently if you did it again?
Actually, nothing! The primary goal of my work when I started it was to have a project on GitHub which I could use to help leverage me into the world of professional web development. My library helped me land my first full-time gig, so in that sense it achieved its goals 100%
> How much time/money did you spend building it?
18 months full time before I managed to get a job. Since then, maybe 2-3 days a month (if that) on maintenance and feature development. The upside of having an unpopular JS library is that nobody bothers you with questions about how to do stuff.
For the past 18 months I've spent a lot more time on the project - approaching full-time in some months - rewriting it from scratch, giving it a new focus, etc. The work has helped me come to terms with all the new Javascript shiny, and the ever-evolving Web API standards
> What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
I'm not in the business of "salvage" - nowadays I work on the library partly to keep my coding skills sharp (next on the to-do list is learning Rust/WebAssembly to see if I can make the library run a bit faster), but mainly because it's creative and fun[3] and after this year we all need a bit more fun in our lives!
[1] Scrawl-canvas GitHub - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
[2] Scrawl-canvas home page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
[3] My creative coding collection on Codepen - https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv
There was a time when I dreamed that my "side project" - Scrawl-canvas[1][2] - would bring me fame and fortune, or maybe a few sponsorships, or a job ...
> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?
There's a number of very well established Javascript libraries for the HTML5 canvas element (Konva, Fabric, EaselJS, Two, Three, Pixi, Processing/P5 ... and many others) and, seriously, the world didn't want to know about yet another one.
> What would you do differently if you did it again?
Actually, nothing! The primary goal of my work when I started it was to have a project on GitHub which I could use to help leverage me into the world of professional web development. My library helped me land my first full-time gig, so in that sense it achieved its goals 100%
> How much time/money did you spend building it?
18 months full time before I managed to get a job. Since then, maybe 2-3 days a month (if that) on maintenance and feature development. The upside of having an unpopular JS library is that nobody bothers you with questions about how to do stuff.
For the past 18 months I've spent a lot more time on the project - approaching full-time in some months - rewriting it from scratch, giving it a new focus, etc. The work has helped me come to terms with all the new Javascript shiny, and the ever-evolving Web API standards
> What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
I'm not in the business of "salvage" - nowadays I work on the library partly to keep my coding skills sharp (next on the to-do list is learning Rust/WebAssembly to see if I can make the library run a bit faster), but mainly because it's creative and fun[3] and after this year we all need a bit more fun in our lives!
[1] Scrawl-canvas GitHub - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
[2] Scrawl-canvas home page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
[3] My creative coding collection on Codepen - https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv
I built an online course to help students self-study for AP exams. The idea was to build extremely high-quality courses for AP exams and then create amazing tools/assessments which would allow students to self-study for the exams. One of my signature tools was an adaptive assessment tool that would tell students when they're ready to take the exam. If the student wasn't ready then they would get a mixture of lectures, videos and small assessments to teach them the concepts needed to pass the exam.
I eventually closed the service down because the reality is the edtech market for these type of products is very small.
I eventually closed the service down because the reality is the edtech market for these type of products is very small.
https://developerjobs.world
It's a job board site specifically thought for developers. All the jobs are scrapped from companies' carreer sites.
I stopped adding companies/countries because the visits to the site are underwhelming, not more than a couple per day. I unexpectedly got "many" visits from Nigeria even though there are no jobs from that country. Maybe I could try adding Nigerian jobs; if anyone has a github link with tech companies from Nigeria similar to the ones that exist for other countries I could scrape them
It's a job board site specifically thought for developers. All the jobs are scrapped from companies' carreer sites.
I stopped adding companies/countries because the visits to the site are underwhelming, not more than a couple per day. I unexpectedly got "many" visits from Nigeria even though there are no jobs from that country. Maybe I could try adding Nigerian jobs; if anyone has a github link with tech companies from Nigeria similar to the ones that exist for other countries I could scrape them
Way back in the early-ish days of iPhone (around the 4 and 4s), I created an app called TenTwenty.
It allowed you to quickly and easily share your location with anyone. Also gave weather conditions at said location and nearby landmarks to look for in order to help find it. Worked cross platform as well.
Everyone who used it thought it was great. However, not a whole lot of people used it. Originally sold it for 99 cents and eventually switched to a free, ad-based version.
Made about $1000 in total over a couple years and pulled it from the app store once Apple implemented pin drops and location sharing natively.
It allowed you to quickly and easily share your location with anyone. Also gave weather conditions at said location and nearby landmarks to look for in order to help find it. Worked cross platform as well.
Everyone who used it thought it was great. However, not a whole lot of people used it. Originally sold it for 99 cents and eventually switched to a free, ad-based version.
Made about $1000 in total over a couple years and pulled it from the app store once Apple implemented pin drops and location sharing natively.
[deleted]
Digital time-stamping service called CertTime.
Here's the post-mortem - https://swapped.ch/certtime
Here's the post-mortem - https://swapped.ch/certtime
Great read, thanks.
https://www.musictaco.co.uk - Find the cheapest place to buy albums online (you can also track your favourite artists and it will email you when they have a new release)
To be fair, I built it primarily as a way to teach myself Rails, and in this regard it was a great success. But in the back of my mind I figured I might be able to make some affiliate revenue out of the traffic but it never took off.
It has failed so far because: it is a small niche (most people just use Spotify these days), I haven't marketed it very well and haven't found the niches where likeminded people hang out (building is definitely easier than marketing). I could definitely do more on the homepage to explain the features, particularly around tracking artists and being notified when they release new albums, but at the end of the day I just haven't been able to market it (nor did I spend a lot of time on this aspect of it). For a long time it only worked in the UK (an even smaller audience compared to the global market), although I did just roll out an update for it to work in the US, but have not done anything to advertise the fact.
Feedback welcome!
To be fair, I built it primarily as a way to teach myself Rails, and in this regard it was a great success. But in the back of my mind I figured I might be able to make some affiliate revenue out of the traffic but it never took off.
It has failed so far because: it is a small niche (most people just use Spotify these days), I haven't marketed it very well and haven't found the niches where likeminded people hang out (building is definitely easier than marketing). I could definitely do more on the homepage to explain the features, particularly around tracking artists and being notified when they release new albums, but at the end of the day I just haven't been able to market it (nor did I spend a lot of time on this aspect of it). For a long time it only worked in the UK (an even smaller audience compared to the global market), although I did just roll out an update for it to work in the US, but have not done anything to advertise the fact.
Feedback welcome!
I would imagine most people are going to buy the music where they usually buy it from. And with just three sites it compares I could just check these sites by myself. So for now it lacks a bit of content.
However, something I would like to see and i think could be more niche-oriented would be similar as this but for physical releases. Discogs does have some retailers, but they need to manually upkeep their inventory in there. If you could scrape physical releases and show where I can order album X for the cheapest (shipping included) or even see where it is available to buy, that would be a service I would love to use.
However, something I would like to see and i think could be more niche-oriented would be similar as this but for physical releases. Discogs does have some retailers, but they need to manually upkeep their inventory in there. If you could scrape physical releases and show where I can order album X for the cheapest (shipping included) or even see where it is available to buy, that would be a service I would love to use.
I used to do just that (check them manually) and so built this to scratch my own itch :) It used to have Google Play as well but they sadly moved out of the digital music purchasing space.
Regarding Discogs - I don't have any interest in physical media unfortunately so will leave that problem for someone else to solve.
Regarding Discogs - I don't have any interest in physical media unfortunately so will leave that problem for someone else to solve.
My understanding is that Discogs has mainly eaten this market. And my experience is that the same items on eBay are consistently higher priced on average (sometimes much more.)
Just a heads up to OP... Discogs is definitely a mom-and-pop endeavor in more ways than one. If one were nimble enough, I am almost certain they could not keep up with a more featureful competitor that shaved off the (many) pain points of buying/selling in their marketplace. Inventory (and want-list) management being a great example.
When I was at uni, we played a lot of drinking games, and sometimes (when we didn't have cards or anything) played a mobile one called Picolo. It's just like if you took the rounds out of games like ring of fire and truth/dare and turned it into an app. Only problem was it had some super buzzkill questions, like "What's worse, slavery or war?", and I thought I could do a better job.
Very simple app really, had a list of questions to run through, stuck peoples names into the question etc, but my issue came with the Android store. I called it "Beercules: Drinking game", but even after months (and a rating between 4 and 5 stars) you couldn't find it in the store unless you searched that full name. Searching Beercules or Drinking game didn't even put it at the bottom of the list, it just didn't exist. Oh, and then they updated the ToS and took the game down due to me not having a privacy policy, and gave no guidance on what that even is, never mind how to complete it, so i just gave up on it. I never expected it to be super successful, but I'd hoped it would have been given a chance.
Very simple app really, had a list of questions to run through, stuck peoples names into the question etc, but my issue came with the Android store. I called it "Beercules: Drinking game", but even after months (and a rating between 4 and 5 stars) you couldn't find it in the store unless you searched that full name. Searching Beercules or Drinking game didn't even put it at the bottom of the list, it just didn't exist. Oh, and then they updated the ToS and took the game down due to me not having a privacy policy, and gave no guidance on what that even is, never mind how to complete it, so i just gave up on it. I never expected it to be super successful, but I'd hoped it would have been given a chance.
I built a doctor appointment booking website for the Australian market in the early 2010s. I wasn’t much of a web developer back then, so it wasn’t great. I ran out of money and had to go back to work because I had three other mouths to feed. The nail in the coffin was a big, well-funded competitor entering the market. The timing was right, but I lacked the money required to continue putting my time into it.
Back in 2010 I have worked in a support department and didn't have much experience with programming. One of my tools back than was Oracle SQL Developer[0] a java application that worked a little slower than I would like to on my new MacBook Pro at that time, so I tried to make my own client for oracle database[1]. I had some sales right after publishing to Apple app store, but the application needed bug fixing and that was reflected in app reviews. Very quickly I've lost an interest working on my app and shut it down. It felt nice to be able to jump start my sales for App store so quickly but the whole experience with Apple ecosystem wasn't pleasant. Close and locked down. I didn't want to invest my time developing apps for it.
0: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldevel...
1: https://github.com/letitcrash/nora
0: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldevel...
1: https://github.com/letitcrash/nora
Here are three of mine:
- https://linqable.pro/ - https://podradio.live - https://arounda.world/
All three built in 2020 with the awesome Elixir Phoenix. Hopefully, at least one of them will take off in 2021.
- https://linqable.pro/ - https://podradio.live - https://arounda.world/
All three built in 2020 with the awesome Elixir Phoenix. Hopefully, at least one of them will take off in 2021.
The best I have to share with you is a mediocre "sort of successful but only if you don't count my labor cost" project.
I've been working part-time but consistently on Alchemist Camp for three years now and it still earns less than 1/3 per hour of what I could previously contract for as a dev.
I think the biggest reason is because I optimized for multiple constraints. I didn't choose the market or the product purely for the immediate economic opportunity. I was also optimizing for increasing my skill with the tech stack I saw (and still see) as most advantageous for a startup founder to have skill with. On top of that, I was optimizing for a third constraint of something that I could do with a maximum of two hours a day of keyboard time.
If you're curious about the project, I just shared a full break-down today: https://questinglog.com/2020-year-in-review/
I've been working part-time but consistently on Alchemist Camp for three years now and it still earns less than 1/3 per hour of what I could previously contract for as a dev.
I think the biggest reason is because I optimized for multiple constraints. I didn't choose the market or the product purely for the immediate economic opportunity. I was also optimizing for increasing my skill with the tech stack I saw (and still see) as most advantageous for a startup founder to have skill with. On top of that, I was optimizing for a third constraint of something that I could do with a maximum of two hours a day of keyboard time.
If you're curious about the project, I just shared a full break-down today: https://questinglog.com/2020-year-in-review/
I built https://www.tomati.io/ to rate restaurants (mostly in Canada and west coast US) based on their health inspection scores.
Turned out the demand wasn't there and it's not super fun maintaining scrappers for a bunch of crappy government run inspection websites.
https://app.scrollkeeper.com a subscription SaaS for storing, managing and sharing academic papers. I wrote it because everyone I knew had a problem storing their papers. I did manage to get one yearly paying customer though and I have enjoyed using it to manage my own papers.
Been working on https://tryquilt.com, a production service that creates a 1hr polished video interview about a loved ones' life, for about a year now. We did user research, figured out ops and how to tell the stories in a way that folks end up happy with-- with small launches on a few subreddits and a few partnership attempts. Total cost has been in the low $1,000s (mostly test production folks and interviewers + software) with no returns yet. Big sink timewise, on and off between breaks for the day-job. Might use a full CMS (probs Wordpress) from the get-go and maybe something like Webflow or Shopify for faster market testing next time. Also a lot to be done to make the production process leaner (it's been good learning tho!).
Will probably push more, just after the holiday window, then expand to an adjacent market where there are more clear triggers for purchase.
Will probably push more, just after the holiday window, then expand to an adjacent market where there are more clear triggers for purchase.
"Oh By"[1]
I built this in 2016 and, in fact, it has made some money ... a handful of people have, indeed, purchased custom Oh By Codes. But very few.
I remain convinced that there is a collection of interesting, compelling use-cases for Oh By Codes but I, and others, have not come up with them yet ...
[1] https://0x.co
I built this in 2016 and, in fact, it has made some money ... a handful of people have, indeed, purchased custom Oh By Codes. But very few.
I remain convinced that there is a collection of interesting, compelling use-cases for Oh By Codes but I, and others, have not come up with them yet ...
[1] https://0x.co
I don’t see why anyone would pay to have whatever hosted on a random unknown domain. Nobody would see 0xJonh and think “oh I better check that out on 0x.co”
It's cool, but I don't think it would work like you think until it got like 1000x more popular.
It's pretty much common knowledge now that if you see a QR code, you scan it with a phone app, and it takes you to a webpage or something. It's maybe a little inconvenient to have to scan it with a phone at visible range, but you don't have to remember a bunch of funny codes, and if you get one wrong, it breaks entirely with no indication of where the mistake is.
Meanwhile, nobody knows that if they see 0xABCDEF, that means they should go to the URL https://0x.co/ABCDEF with the closest web browser.
It might be handier if it could generate a printable webpage or PDF or something that had the QR code for the URL and also the full URL with the short code. Now you have a solution for easily putting messages in QR codes that also has a fallback for users who don't have a phone, don't have a phone app, don't want to mess with their phone that minute, etc.
It's pretty much common knowledge now that if you see a QR code, you scan it with a phone app, and it takes you to a webpage or something. It's maybe a little inconvenient to have to scan it with a phone at visible range, but you don't have to remember a bunch of funny codes, and if you get one wrong, it breaks entirely with no indication of where the mistake is.
Meanwhile, nobody knows that if they see 0xABCDEF, that means they should go to the URL https://0x.co/ABCDEF with the closest web browser.
It might be handier if it could generate a printable webpage or PDF or something that had the QR code for the URL and also the full URL with the short code. Now you have a solution for easily putting messages in QR codes that also has a fallback for users who don't have a phone, don't have a phone app, don't want to mess with their phone that minute, etc.
Yes, there is a very classic chicken-and-egg problem here.
The platform/idea really doesn't work unless masses of people are trained, as you suggest, to recognize 0xABCDEF as discoverable on 0x.co.
We'll see ...
The platform/idea really doesn't work unless masses of people are trained, as you suggest, to recognize 0xABCDEF as discoverable on 0x.co.
We'll see ...
When Twitch Prime was originally released one of the major issues was reminding people that their token was available. I built primeminder as a tool to remind people to renew their Twitch Prime subscription via email notifications: https://github.com/gravyboat/primeminder, the plan was to eventually advertise in the body of the emails once the user base was large enough.
The second was a remote job board like weworkremotely called remote-first (https://github.com/gravyboat/remote-first). This was when weworkremotely was younger and I was pretty dissatisfied with the fact they didn't even support searching for jobs, it was just a messy list that was a pain to search so I thought I could do better to solve this.
Both projects failed.
The second was a remote job board like weworkremotely called remote-first (https://github.com/gravyboat/remote-first). This was when weworkremotely was younger and I was pretty dissatisfied with the fact they didn't even support searching for jobs, it was just a messy list that was a pain to search so I thought I could do better to solve this.
Both projects failed.
I launched mergecaravan.com to deal with a problem I've encountered at a few jobs in the past. Mostly, I built it initially to scratch my own itch, and to go back to doing more django dev.
Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date".
It's made a little money, but not much.
Github recently rolled out a feature at Github Universe that has overlap, so I'm guessing it won't get much more traction.
A few lessons I learned: - Especially when building on a platform, make sure you have the right niche. In this case, it probably has a wide enough audience that Github decided it was worth it to build as part of the platform. - Like any engineer, I spent too long building and let scope creep delay me from launching.
All in all, it's pretty cheap (read: basically free) to run, but I probably committed somewhere over 120 hours on it.
Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date".
It's made a little money, but not much.
Github recently rolled out a feature at Github Universe that has overlap, so I'm guessing it won't get much more traction.
A few lessons I learned: - Especially when building on a platform, make sure you have the right niche. In this case, it probably has a wide enough audience that Github decided it was worth it to build as part of the platform. - Like any engineer, I spent too long building and let scope creep delay me from launching.
All in all, it's pretty cheap (read: basically free) to run, but I probably committed somewhere over 120 hours on it.
That sounds almost exactly like bors-ng: https://github.com/bors-ng/bors-ng#a-merge-bot-for-github-pu...
There was also homu, which predated bors and also did more or less the exact same thing.
Does your thing have any features that differentiate it from what bors does?
There was also homu, which predated bors and also did more or less the exact same thing.
Does your thing have any features that differentiate it from what bors does?
You don't have to host it yourself ;)
Beyond that, there are a couple of things that I don't believe bors has.
A big one that I built for myself was the idea of supporting "working hours", i.e. only merge code during this timeframe.
For example, one company I worked for had some pretty flaky tests. Unfortunately, what would happen is we would have several PRs get reviewed and then use a tool like bors to enqueue them. Inevitably, some queued PR would have a failed check for this flaky test.
Fast forward to the weekend and a completely different developer would merge a hotfix into master. Unfortunately, a side effect would be that a tool like bors would try to merge the head commit into the PR with the flaky test, and now it passes! So it gets deployed at a random unexpected time, which isn't what we wanted.
Beyond that, there are a couple of things that I don't believe bors has.
A big one that I built for myself was the idea of supporting "working hours", i.e. only merge code during this timeframe.
For example, one company I worked for had some pretty flaky tests. Unfortunately, what would happen is we would have several PRs get reviewed and then use a tool like bors to enqueue them. Inevitably, some queued PR would have a failed check for this flaky test.
Fast forward to the weekend and a completely different developer would merge a hotfix into master. Unfortunately, a side effect would be that a tool like bors would try to merge the head commit into the PR with the flaky test, and now it passes! So it gets deployed at a random unexpected time, which isn't what we wanted.
Gitlab also has merge trains. Atlassian open sourced Landkid which does the same thing, initially just for Bitbucket Cloud, but it’s pluggable.
Months of covid confinement and getting stuck in a work visa limbo in Malaysia meant I got the chance to work on my side projects undisturbed the past few months. Not really sure if glitterly.app will work out at all. But had a ton of fun building it. Probably learnt more about UI/UX, marketing, sales, product from doing this than anyplace else.
It all started because I wanted to build a changelog, but one that came with videos of what changed. So I made a simple tool that allows you to zoom in on a video. Friends and family had fun making cute videos of their dogs and whatnot.
Then I grew obsessed, and 3 months of midnight coding later built a second/current iteration - a video editing app for making short animated videos for social media. Hasn’t made any money yet, but I’m trying my best.
App here: https://www.glitterly.app/
It all started because I wanted to build a changelog, but one that came with videos of what changed. So I made a simple tool that allows you to zoom in on a video. Friends and family had fun making cute videos of their dogs and whatnot.
Then I grew obsessed, and 3 months of midnight coding later built a second/current iteration - a video editing app for making short animated videos for social media. Hasn’t made any money yet, but I’m trying my best.
App here: https://www.glitterly.app/
A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made about $1,500 in total for the event.
- I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;)
- I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not.
- It was a very strange, happy feeling when the first customer paid us. They decided to give actual money to us, some complete strangers??? To a website that looked totally amateurish, with no design whatsoever? Felt weird.
- I would have made way more money by working at McDonalds for the same amount of time. But that was not the point.
- It did not make sense to continue after the event, not enough $$ to be made.
Overall a very, very positive experience. I helped with my programming skills, and gave me confidence that people would buy something that works, even if ugly and unknown people.
- I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;)
- I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not.
- It was a very strange, happy feeling when the first customer paid us. They decided to give actual money to us, some complete strangers??? To a website that looked totally amateurish, with no design whatsoever? Felt weird.
- I would have made way more money by working at McDonalds for the same amount of time. But that was not the point.
- It did not make sense to continue after the event, not enough $$ to be made.
Overall a very, very positive experience. I helped with my programming skills, and gave me confidence that people would buy something that works, even if ugly and unknown people.
What did you use as a payment processor? Really hard to process cards for gambling.
Paypal. We were not doing gambling. Just charging $1 per person per pool for the service: registering the bets in time, give them points when they win, rankings, etc. We did not see any of the money of their possible side-bets.
Why didn't it make sense to continue after the event ended? Most sports events happen on a recurring basis.
I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..
I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..
Some countries would allow it. The idea sounds a bit like BetFair (they set up an exchange, you name your odds and see if someone takes the other side) but for smaller pools.
I think we were on the right side of the law since we sere not taking any side of the bets. Just charging for the service. The pool participants probably were having their own bets between each other, but we would not take any cut of those.
We stopped because there was a lot of competition, we saw a short term gap in soccer in the US market. But fairly quickly we would have been crushed. Spending a lot of time on something that would not have brought in much money was not that interesting, since it was not fun enough beyond the novelty of the experience.
We stopped because there was a lot of competition, we saw a short term gap in soccer in the US market. But fairly quickly we would have been crushed. Spending a lot of time on something that would not have brought in much money was not that interesting, since it was not fun enough beyond the novelty of the experience.
A timer that's like a pomodoro timer but different. Wrote it for the iPad because I was interested in multi-touch gestures. Wrote a prototype in Java that works on the desktop which I use every day. I've just never gotten around to completing and publishing the iPad app. We're talking iOS 4 when I started...
I have built a couple of WordPress plugin directory websites:
* https://gravityextend.com/ - Gravity Forms add-ons
* https://woo-plugin.com/ - WooCommerce add-ons
I started with Gravity Extend, which was a personal need. Since this sort of worked, I added Woo Plugin. Results on these sites provide (in part) affiliated links. They generate some money, but not that much.
Things I hadn't anticipated:
- Sellers not allowing you access to their affiliate program because a) you haven't bought the product yourself or b) the sites only 'list' products, but don't actively sell/review the product.
- Most sellers are okay, but some need a continued reminder that they actually have to pay the generated affiliate fees, increasing required labor input.
* https://gravityextend.com/ - Gravity Forms add-ons
* https://woo-plugin.com/ - WooCommerce add-ons
I started with Gravity Extend, which was a personal need. Since this sort of worked, I added Woo Plugin. Results on these sites provide (in part) affiliated links. They generate some money, but not that much.
Things I hadn't anticipated:
- Sellers not allowing you access to their affiliate program because a) you haven't bought the product yourself or b) the sites only 'list' products, but don't actively sell/review the product.
- Most sellers are okay, but some need a continued reminder that they actually have to pay the generated affiliate fees, increasing required labor input.
I created this site bestfoodnearme.com a few years back. I could not figure out how to make any money with it, but I did teach myself Go in the process. It was a great learning experience.
I am working on nextlesson.com as a way to help kids learn programming. I have not made any money from this, but it is a lot of fun.
I am working on nextlesson.com as a way to help kids learn programming. I have not made any money from this, but it is a lot of fun.
By far most of my side projects died before seeing the light of day. Either because I lost interest or I found another project that did what I aimed to do better than I imagined.
Only a couple went live but didn't get traction: - A site for ip geolocation lookup - A curated index of conference talks and meetups
Last year I decided that I'd do much more market research before writing any code, and that I'd see it through all the way. So I'm working on https://www.nslookup.io for about half a year now, which isn't profitable yet (€50 monthly cost). I'm still confident I can get it profitable. There's enough search traffic, other tools have horrible UX, and I've committed to spending time on it at least weekly next year.
Only a couple went live but didn't get traction: - A site for ip geolocation lookup - A curated index of conference talks and meetups
Last year I decided that I'd do much more market research before writing any code, and that I'd see it through all the way. So I'm working on https://www.nslookup.io for about half a year now, which isn't profitable yet (€50 monthly cost). I'm still confident I can get it profitable. There's enough search traffic, other tools have horrible UX, and I've committed to spending time on it at least weekly next year.
https://www.nslookup.io/
Why not a droplet? I created something to lookup dns records within a project and it took me a couple of hours
An I missing something about the complexity of it?
Why not a droplet? I created something to lookup dns records within a project and it took me a couple of hours
An I missing something about the complexity of it?
I'm using a droplet, but also pay for analytics (Plausible), Cloudflare Argo, ads (100 daily visitors for a euro daily).
The complexity so far has mainly been polishing usability (autocomplete, responsive design, parsing DNS records, adding ip info, etc).
The complexity so far has mainly been polishing usability (autocomplete, responsive design, parsing DNS records, adding ip info, etc).
I'm intrigued where you've been advertising a tool like this in such an effective way(?) I don't have a DNS lookup tool so am not competing :-D
That's why ;) No one is advertising a DSN lookup tool, so CPC on Google search is 1 cent. I've set the limit on 1 euro per day, but I could probably buy more traffic if I wanted.
I built a web app that would setup secret Santa groups. You could add friends from Facebook or just manually and it had a neat feature where you could group individuals that you didn't want to "get" eachother, eg you could group couples in larger friend groups so they didn't get eachother.
It used a genetic algorithm to generate the pairings and handled all the messaging so the organiser was also kept in the dark about who got who.
I slapped an Amazon ad on there and it worked great, but I never bothered marketing it so it got very little usage and eventually I took it down when shutting down an old server.
I learnt a lot about mysql and genetic algorithms, both of which I've gone on to use extensively in my job so it was well worth it overall, just sad it didn't generate a bit of passive income :/
It used a genetic algorithm to generate the pairings and handled all the messaging so the organiser was also kept in the dark about who got who.
I slapped an Amazon ad on there and it worked great, but I never bothered marketing it so it got very little usage and eventually I took it down when shutting down an old server.
I learnt a lot about mysql and genetic algorithms, both of which I've gone on to use extensively in my job so it was well worth it overall, just sad it didn't generate a bit of passive income :/
I recently launched a website that allows users to book a locksmith for emergency door openings (https://slozzer.net/). The main goal is to ensure a safe and reliable process, because the locksmith industry has a terrible reputation for ripping off and exploiting customers (at least in Germany, for whose market the product is designed for).
Unfortunately, only after several weeks of development I found out that it is not possible to run Google Ads for locksmith keywords, because in the past they were exclusively occupied by scammers. Now I'm torn between abandoning the project or getting involved in the tedious SEO battle with little chance of success.
Unfortunately, only after several weeks of development I found out that it is not possible to run Google Ads for locksmith keywords, because in the past they were exclusively occupied by scammers. Now I'm torn between abandoning the project or getting involved in the tedious SEO battle with little chance of success.
interesting service! Some unsolicited ideas: this sounds like the kind of thing you could take to blogs or newschannels to tell the kind of interesting story: "imagine getting locked out and then getting conned! locksmiths can be shady sometimes, but people really need them, so we make it safe."
I imagine you could find places that would do an interview of you or let you write a short guest blog post to get links back to your domain and drive up your domain's authority for the keywords, and also to directly drive traffic there. Locksmiths and landlords might also be good sources of traffic over time. Or a homeowner's association!
It also might be interesting to experiment with a kind of 'locksmith insurance' model, where you pay a small monthly fee for the peace of mind that a locksmith will be dispatched if you need it -- up to a limit of say 2/year or something. I can pretty honestly imagine paying for a service like that, at least during a normal year where I leave my house every day. Landlords or property management could also then 'sign up' with you on tenants' behalf, as a service available to their apartment, making their own lives easier too.
I imagine you could find places that would do an interview of you or let you write a short guest blog post to get links back to your domain and drive up your domain's authority for the keywords, and also to directly drive traffic there. Locksmiths and landlords might also be good sources of traffic over time. Or a homeowner's association!
It also might be interesting to experiment with a kind of 'locksmith insurance' model, where you pay a small monthly fee for the peace of mind that a locksmith will be dispatched if you need it -- up to a limit of say 2/year or something. I can pretty honestly imagine paying for a service like that, at least during a normal year where I leave my house every day. Landlords or property management could also then 'sign up' with you on tenants' behalf, as a service available to their apartment, making their own lives easier too.
Thank you so much for your genuine interest and feedback, I really appreciate it. Getting external news/blog coverage is definitely something that is on my SEO to-do list, but I have other priorities at the moment as the competition is not getting traction despite numerous press releases and storybook SEO methods.
However, I have not yet thought about landlords, homeowners' associations and insurance models. But these are great ideas that I will start to explore now.
However, I have not yet thought about landlords, homeowners' associations and insurance models. But these are great ideas that I will start to explore now.
It's pretty bad in the US also, going by investigative news reports where they install locks so easy to pick the news reporter learns to do it, and then a locksmith shows up and tries to scam them by saying it's a super complicated lock they wouldn't understand that is going to cost a lot more.
I made an Android app to keep track of my domain name collections -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=id.every
From the name (Every.ID), you can say that it aims to be the one app to keep track of everything you collect: domain names, postage stamps, games, etc.
My end goal is to make it pluggable with API e.g. connect with your Steam account to auto-sync your game collection.
Unfortunately, since I'm doing it as a playground for learning new techs (I learned Flutter and Dgraph), the progress for the app itself is slow.
Fortunately, since I'm also a user (I use it often), it keeps being enhanced.
From the name (Every.ID), you can say that it aims to be the one app to keep track of everything you collect: domain names, postage stamps, games, etc.
My end goal is to make it pluggable with API e.g. connect with your Steam account to auto-sync your game collection.
Unfortunately, since I'm doing it as a playground for learning new techs (I learned Flutter and Dgraph), the progress for the app itself is slow.
Fortunately, since I'm also a user (I use it often), it keeps being enhanced.
How does domain collecting even work? Don't you have to continuously pay in order to renew your domain ownership? Even if it's $5/year per domain, surely at some point you have to stop collecting.
You're right that the cost will accumulate.
I'm not a professional domainer, but "a guy with lots of ideas and no time". Every once in a while I thought of some cool idea, struck a name and bought the .com "just in case I have time to develop it".
I initially used Google Sheet to keep track, but it doesn't remind me of renewals, and some info I want to be dynamically updated.
Oh, another thing I use Every.ID for: keeping track of software purchases, esp. LTDs (Life Time Deals --- SaaS but you only pay once). It's literally a category in the app.
I'm not a professional domainer, but "a guy with lots of ideas and no time". Every once in a while I thought of some cool idea, struck a name and bought the .com "just in case I have time to develop it".
I initially used Google Sheet to keep track, but it doesn't remind me of renewals, and some info I want to be dynamically updated.
Oh, another thing I use Every.ID for: keeping track of software purchases, esp. LTDs (Life Time Deals --- SaaS but you only pay once). It's literally a category in the app.
In 2011, inspired by Colm McMullan's Stats Zone (a football analytics app), I started working at a mobile app for rugby fans. It was my first time on mobile since the J2ME era, and I learned Android and iOS coding from scratch.
The idea was simple: I signed a contract with OptaSports, providers of real-time data from Rugby World Cup and Six Nations matches, and I created real-time visualization of that data directly in an app. Some of the features were a direct translation of Colm's app from football to rugby (for example, showing the location of kicks became the location of passes, etc), but I also added a way to draw a full animation of a game in real-time.
The app was picked up by The Guardian, the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, it was used on the ITV Wales blog, and got coverage on Italian TV. Success, eh? But I sold a grand total of 140 apps. Luckily, Opta had been very generous because they want to invest in rugby, so I didn't lose a lot of money. A year later, I decided to try the free app route with ads and without using Opta data, and generated all the updates myself, without the visualization stuff but by simply sending text updates during the games. The app got 15,000 downloads, and thousands of concurrent users. I got slightly more excited, but after 6 weeks of usage I netted £100 in ad revenue.
I stopped and accepted that time required vs benefit achieved wasn't good. All in all, it might have been that PR wasn't really my thing, compounded by the fact that rugby has a smaller fanbase than football. With Opta, we even tried approaching several potential media partners, but we never got anywhere.
However, it was fun.
It got me a few contracts as developer and as trainer on mobile development, and it solidified my credentials as an all-round data expert (I used it in my most recent successful job application), so although it didn't directly made me any money I'm happy about it.
If you're curious of what it looked like, I still maintain its webpage at http://liverugbyapp.puntofisso.net/
The idea was simple: I signed a contract with OptaSports, providers of real-time data from Rugby World Cup and Six Nations matches, and I created real-time visualization of that data directly in an app. Some of the features were a direct translation of Colm's app from football to rugby (for example, showing the location of kicks became the location of passes, etc), but I also added a way to draw a full animation of a game in real-time.
The app was picked up by The Guardian, the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, it was used on the ITV Wales blog, and got coverage on Italian TV. Success, eh? But I sold a grand total of 140 apps. Luckily, Opta had been very generous because they want to invest in rugby, so I didn't lose a lot of money. A year later, I decided to try the free app route with ads and without using Opta data, and generated all the updates myself, without the visualization stuff but by simply sending text updates during the games. The app got 15,000 downloads, and thousands of concurrent users. I got slightly more excited, but after 6 weeks of usage I netted £100 in ad revenue.
I stopped and accepted that time required vs benefit achieved wasn't good. All in all, it might have been that PR wasn't really my thing, compounded by the fact that rugby has a smaller fanbase than football. With Opta, we even tried approaching several potential media partners, but we never got anywhere.
However, it was fun.
It got me a few contracts as developer and as trainer on mobile development, and it solidified my credentials as an all-round data expert (I used it in my most recent successful job application), so although it didn't directly made me any money I'm happy about it.
If you're curious of what it looked like, I still maintain its webpage at http://liverugbyapp.puntofisso.net/
StartOpz (https://www.startopz.com) is expense reporting, time-off tracking, and what not for small businesses. I had hoped to make it basically a Workday-light. The launch kind of ran into having a second kid and it wasn't really something I was passionate about.
If I were to do things differently I would maybe refocus it on a niche to start with (e.g. target office managers of a professional firm (law offices, accounting firms)) or really try to focus on remote teams. I had also tossed around the idea of just turning off most of the modules and making it just an expense reporting or just a time-off app. Never did that though.
If I were to do things differently I would maybe refocus it on a niche to start with (e.g. target office managers of a professional firm (law offices, accounting firms)) or really try to focus on remote teams. I had also tossed around the idea of just turning off most of the modules and making it just an expense reporting or just a time-off app. Never did that though.
https://categorybooks.com/
I thought about aggregating books by prizes their authors had won, so you could browse books written by chemistry Nobel Prize winners or Fields Medal winners. I quickly gave up on the project, but I'm sure I poured hundreds of hours into it before that. I'm not too despondent about it anymore, and learned a lot (it's my first ever website, and only one so far!) - it was quite gruelling to manually go through all of the authors and choose pictures and attach affiliate links.. I'm sure the affiliate links have already expired as there wasn't a single buy through them.
I thought about aggregating books by prizes their authors had won, so you could browse books written by chemistry Nobel Prize winners or Fields Medal winners. I quickly gave up on the project, but I'm sure I poured hundreds of hours into it before that. I'm not too despondent about it anymore, and learned a lot (it's my first ever website, and only one so far!) - it was quite gruelling to manually go through all of the authors and choose pictures and attach affiliate links.. I'm sure the affiliate links have already expired as there wasn't a single buy through them.
I like the idea, and your website looks great.
What would you do differently if you had to redo it?
What would you do differently if you had to redo it?
Thanks a ton!
I would get going with a more popular technology (I chose Svelte and Sapper). Like I mentioned, it's the first website I've ever built, so I ran into some problems that I'm sure would have been easier to deal with had there been a bigger community and more tutorials available. I was fixated on it being as fast as possible, which is perhaps quite ironic with the amount of images it's downloading - not lazily.
I have to admit now that I'm thinking about building a second project, that my technology stack will also be governed by what employers are looking for. I'm currently working in a non-tech industry, but I'm starting to think about trying to transition.
Another thing that came to mind was that I'd try to remove some of the monotonous tasks that made it such a grind, like manually compressing all of the images and trying to find the right size. That was a huge ordeal, and I would've been better off with implementing lazy loading and just running the images through some compression automatically or not compressing them at all. I really should have done that.
I'd also probably try to advertise it a bit more. This is the only time I've mentioned the project, and it's almost a year old. I was just hoping people would magically stumble into it.. I'm sure even a dollar or two from it would have given me the motivation to at least complete the parts I'd planned out for and actually found interesting myself.
Thanks again for the compliment and happy New Year's!
I would get going with a more popular technology (I chose Svelte and Sapper). Like I mentioned, it's the first website I've ever built, so I ran into some problems that I'm sure would have been easier to deal with had there been a bigger community and more tutorials available. I was fixated on it being as fast as possible, which is perhaps quite ironic with the amount of images it's downloading - not lazily.
I have to admit now that I'm thinking about building a second project, that my technology stack will also be governed by what employers are looking for. I'm currently working in a non-tech industry, but I'm starting to think about trying to transition.
Another thing that came to mind was that I'd try to remove some of the monotonous tasks that made it such a grind, like manually compressing all of the images and trying to find the right size. That was a huge ordeal, and I would've been better off with implementing lazy loading and just running the images through some compression automatically or not compressing them at all. I really should have done that.
I'd also probably try to advertise it a bit more. This is the only time I've mentioned the project, and it's almost a year old. I was just hoping people would magically stumble into it.. I'm sure even a dollar or two from it would have given me the motivation to at least complete the parts I'd planned out for and actually found interesting myself.
Thanks again for the compliment and happy New Year's!
* I made something similar to https://keywordtool.io/ which focuses on long-tail keyword research. I even signed up for Stripe and had some account management stuff. I was the only user ever and even I didn't really use it more than 5 times. It was a fun little project, but nowadays, I wouldn't hassle with account and payment stuff until I had actual users :)
* I wrote an eBook and sold maybe 3 copies per month for $9.99, for a while, but it wasn't the success I thought it would become. I made it free eventually, because I thought the SEO helped more than having it as a paid product.
* I wrote an eBook and sold maybe 3 copies per month for $9.99, for a while, but it wasn't the success I thought it would become. I made it free eventually, because I thought the SEO helped more than having it as a paid product.
I turned part of my personal site into a membership site for aspiring remote workers.
On the membership landing page is a free signup. You get access to a 12-lesson course with tutorials and tactics I’ve used to land three FT remote jobs in my career.
The upsell was group coaching. Some people got excited about this. Only a few people paid.
I learned that unemployed people are not usually willing to pay for a service (especially if there are no video testimonials).
I’m confident that if I persevered this could have become something but I lost interest. Many people are still registering for the membership. I may return to the project soon and find a way to turn the content into a paid, self-paced course—-without paying for SaaS.
On the membership landing page is a free signup. You get access to a 12-lesson course with tutorials and tactics I’ve used to land three FT remote jobs in my career.
The upsell was group coaching. Some people got excited about this. Only a few people paid.
I learned that unemployed people are not usually willing to pay for a service (especially if there are no video testimonials).
I’m confident that if I persevered this could have become something but I lost interest. Many people are still registering for the membership. I may return to the project soon and find a way to turn the content into a paid, self-paced course—-without paying for SaaS.
This business sounds like it would lend itself well to an ISA model.
I Googled ISA model but it didn't make sense to me in the context of monetizing this site. May you expound on this?
Income Sharing Agreement. I think they are mostly used by coding boot camps. The idea is to pay a percentage of the salary for a fixed time/amount. It probably depends on the price of the sessions if this makes sense
I assume by ISA they mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_share_agreement
I spent around 6 months of my spare time to build BonFive (https://bonfive.com). I built it because my wife and I noticed that content creators, especially streamers were having their content on a plethora of platforms and this was an attempt at having a centralized place for fans to discuss and share news and content of their favorite creators. I based our design around old Reddit as I felt it allowed for the most natural online interactions to take place. But with any online platform that expects to have user generate the content getting users in has been the hard part...
https://Loodio.com
A poop device. Well, Kickstarter coming soon so we will see.
Video demo: https://youtu.be/XSBPfK-ZIsA
A poop device. Well, Kickstarter coming soon so we will see.
Video demo: https://youtu.be/XSBPfK-ZIsA
I built this for a bit more than just "making money" (wanted some experience), and it is still early days. But I made an iOS game:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463...
So far, my main win has been to qualify for the apple small business program, so I will qualify for the reduced apple commission next year.
http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463...
So far, my main win has been to qualify for the apple small business program, so I will qualify for the reduced apple commission next year.
http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).
Clicked, saw “This developer does not collect any data from this app”, bought.
Thank you so much. Really appreciated.
App not available on the Irish App Store.
Sorry about that. I am (probably overly) cautious of tax implications so it is currently US and AU only. Maybe I should reread the legal stuff and try to get some more places open.
App not available in my country (the Netherlands).
Sad. We have money too, you know
Sad. We have money too, you know
Sorry about that. I am hoping to open it up to more places, just being small I need to be a little bit aware of the tax implications. Having my incompetence lead to missing sales is preferred to having it lead to tax evasion.
Built a basic plug and play developer portal and API gateway at the beginning of the lockdown.
You can expose your APIs to third party developers by adding your endpoints, choosing the type of authentication and setting rate limits.
The app takes care of provisionimg API tokens and tracking requests. The documentation is auto generated from the swagger file.
GitHub: https://github.com/karthikvellanki/tunnel
Demo: https://shrouded-eyrie-25569.herokuapp.com/
You can expose your APIs to third party developers by adding your endpoints, choosing the type of authentication and setting rate limits.
The app takes care of provisionimg API tokens and tracking requests. The documentation is auto generated from the swagger file.
GitHub: https://github.com/karthikvellanki/tunnel
Demo: https://shrouded-eyrie-25569.herokuapp.com/
Working on https://jobsindevrel.com, a job board for developer advocates and devrel jobs. So far it’s only cost ~$310: $300 for a nice lifetime deal on the job board software and $10 for the domain.
I haven’t launched it yet, but starting to build up the Twitter (https://twitter.com/@jobsindevrel) and the mailing list so that when there is some actual traffic coming in, it should (ideally) be profitable pretty quickly. Hoping to launch next month!
I haven’t launched it yet, but starting to build up the Twitter (https://twitter.com/@jobsindevrel) and the mailing list so that when there is some actual traffic coming in, it should (ideally) be profitable pretty quickly. Hoping to launch next month!
I created an online typing training site: https://typefast.dev
Granted, it launched at the beginning of this month and I'm only spending minimal amounts advertising it. 200 signups, only a fraction actually bother using the site after signing up.
I created it after using another online typing site, which charged quite a lot, and said to myself: "I can do this, and charge a fraction of what they do". So I did, pretty much my only more-or-less complete project after probably a dozen good-hearted attempts that I gave up on eventually.
Granted, it launched at the beginning of this month and I'm only spending minimal amounts advertising it. 200 signups, only a fraction actually bother using the site after signing up.
I created it after using another online typing site, which charged quite a lot, and said to myself: "I can do this, and charge a fraction of what they do". So I did, pretty much my only more-or-less complete project after probably a dozen good-hearted attempts that I gave up on eventually.
https://doplaces.com
Its a very lightweight community search, designed for mobile first but won't suck on any platform...
I haven't put as much effort in promoting it and also not much in the last year due to personal reasons and general COVID-19 uncertainties. But I think it will come in handy as things wake back up either next year or soon after... Still have ideas to try out for improvement/refinement, which besides something that I can show off what I can do is also a proof of concept for ideas in its niche.
Its a very lightweight community search, designed for mobile first but won't suck on any platform...
I haven't put as much effort in promoting it and also not much in the last year due to personal reasons and general COVID-19 uncertainties. But I think it will come in handy as things wake back up either next year or soon after... Still have ideas to try out for improvement/refinement, which besides something that I can show off what I can do is also a proof of concept for ideas in its niche.
I have built and continue to build extremely sophisticated LED lights. But there's no market for fancy anymore. I maybe made back my expenses, though I have a bunch of lights at home to show for it I guess.
Are you sure? Twinkly is doing fine I guess. Maybe focus on xmas lights.
I'm sure. You need to mass produce low end stuff or else have the scale to insure serious installations. There's not really an in between that I'm finding other than art pieces. I'm not very interested in commodity stuff honestly, call me someone with no business sense if you like.
Got anything to show us?
Alas, I deleted all my YouTube videos when they decided to start commercializing them. The big ones were a really really good audio analysis algorithm, wifi lights from 2010 (subsequently patented by everyone else), lights with eight wavelengths including UV in 2008, and some very refined ganzfeld effect work.
For now all I can offer is this video of a song I wrote with my 8 wavelength fixture shining on a collaborator's art piece.
http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/artwork/ultraluminous-2008-1...
For now all I can offer is this video of a song I wrote with my 8 wavelength fixture shining on a collaborator's art piece.
http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/artwork/ultraluminous-2008-1...
I built a very simple website [0] for playing poker. The idea was that people can play poker in person without chips or a deck of cards. I had also planned for more features like hand history. But it didn't catch on and number of users is not growing.
I've also learned that if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn (probably). I did not know this and had incorrect assumptions about promoting the project.
0: https://playcards.live
I've also learned that if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn (probably). I did not know this and had incorrect assumptions about promoting the project.
0: https://playcards.live
> if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn
Can you clarify this?
Does Google Ads forbid advertising on these products?
Can you clarify this?
Does Google Ads forbid advertising on these products?
WIP.. So its not 'failed' yet nor plan to..
Learnt coding because I had free time (COVID) and wanted to involve son into STEP aspects of coding. Then, I saw machine learning as a motivation for side hustle; learnt some of the better libraries out there and applied in the area of sports predictions. Saw incredible success and planned on pivoting to sports betting and now we have a steady consumption of our algorithim output.
So, we are currently 'sharing' our success with others but plan to monetize it later.
Figuring that part out.
Nice! Do you mind elaborating more on how you went about training your models, where do you generate the outputs (web page? spreadsheet?), and the difficulties you encountered or the tedious/repetitive parts?
I downloaded and have curated historical sports data from various sources and figured out the 'simplest' parameters which work.. which at the moment is just the defaults. Model training is not much to be honest. I have a fairly fast processor so it takes about 10 minutes to run every iteration.
It has evolved from predicting just one dimension/feature but now, it predicts all of the variables it can train on (all training features)
Earlier, I used to manually input every predictor and then run the algorithim but now, I have figured out the copy-paste method which essentially cuts the pre-processing from around 2 hours to 10 minutes now. It gets a bit hectic giver the current nature of sports happening every day and increasing frequency of cycles. That part can be optimised via web scraping but not a priority at the moment but is a priority nevertheless.
Outputs are generated into a spreadsheet at the moment but would publish them onto an online platform later once I figure out the 'monetizing' and user-prompted running of the algorithim part.
>Model training is not much to be honest.
Are you using Jupyter notebooks? Are you saving the model and how?
>That part can be optimised via web scraping but not a priority at the moment but is a priority nevertheless.
Are you doing this manually right now instead of a script?
>Outputs are generated into a spreadsheet at the moment but would publish them onto an online platform later once I figure out the 'monetizing' and user-prompted running of the algorithim part.
What decisions do the results in the spreadsheet inform or what actions do they trigger? How would I, as a consumer, use these results?
Are you using Jupyter notebooks? Are you saving the model and how?
>That part can be optimised via web scraping but not a priority at the moment but is a priority nevertheless.
Are you doing this manually right now instead of a script?
>Outputs are generated into a spreadsheet at the moment but would publish them onto an online platform later once I figure out the 'monetizing' and user-prompted running of the algorithim part.
What decisions do the results in the spreadsheet inform or what actions do they trigger? How would I, as a consumer, use these results?
>Are you using Jupyter notebooks? Are you saving the model and how?
Nope, its a python script. I dont use Jupyter notebook as it eliminates (somewhat) the randomising of the training and test dataset. The most of the resources (time) is needed for splitting and fitting which is dependent on randomising and the 'freshness' of the run hence, I use a python script which runs every iteration cycle. Also, since the events happen daily, I have to update the training dataset almost daily hence having a Juypter notebook is not my choice of path forward. Yes, if (and when) user prompted results would be needed, I would go with Juypter notebooks as the target market is extremely finicky and will not wait for 10 minutes for the output.
>Are you doing this manually right now instead of a script?
I cannot cal it a manual process right now.. its copy-paste.. earlier I had to type the predictors.. which was fun at the start as I understood (somewhat) how the predictors affect the output but now, I just copy-paste from websources
>What decisions do the results in the spreadsheet inform or what actions do they trigger? How would I, as a consumer, use these results?
Guidance on how the event result can look like.. and the user is on their own on what bets they would like to place. e.g. If its a hockey match, what can the scoreline look like, how many fouls, etc. In NFL, what would each quarter look like, etc. I stay away from advising what bets to put. Its safer for me that way. e.g. if 1st quarer of a NFL event would be 6-1, I would present the output as is.. the user can place bets on what they would seem appropriate.
Oh I have so many that failed, but I don't think I'd be where I am today without them.
- BillDivider: a SaaS to help housemates divide bills and other expenses
It was my first side-project, I wrote it in Django with Bootstrap. It barely worked, and I gave up due to the cost of running it.
- Jobs? Ok!: a job board
This was probably the dumbest idea I had business-wise - I would scrape jobs from other sites, and ask people to pay to post their own jobs amongst the scraped jobs.
On the tech side of things, it was my first time using React and GraphQL, and I really enjoyed it. Oh and I used DynamoDB for highly relational data, which I wouldn't recommend.
- Appointment Scheduler: a SaaS kinda like Calendly
By this point I sort of had an idea of how to build, I started using infrastructure-as-code (terraform), and building new ideas was just a matter of having one, and copy pasting assets. Tried selling the idea to consultant friends of mine, but they were happy using Outlook.
- Room Booking Co: Same idea as Appointment Scheduler, but for meeting rooms
This one I basically built to test the Google Calendar API. Turns out it's extremely limiting for interfacing with public calendars.
- Online Or Not: a SaaS that performed contract testing on GraphQL endpoints, pivoted to an uptime monitor
I feel like this idea had legs, just launched too early: basically it would snapshot a "good" version of your GraphQL response, ping it every X hours, and alert when the response changed.
I actually took sales meetings on this one, built features that potential customers said were must haves before they could use it. Punchline: those "potential customers" ended up ghosting me.
All of those projects led me to where I am today: running https://PerfBeacon.com - (PerfBeacon helps you keep your app/site fast by automating Google Lighthouse checks), and https://MaxRozen.com - where I write weekly about React, and have started selling a book on useEffect.
- BillDivider: a SaaS to help housemates divide bills and other expenses
It was my first side-project, I wrote it in Django with Bootstrap. It barely worked, and I gave up due to the cost of running it.
- Jobs? Ok!: a job board
This was probably the dumbest idea I had business-wise - I would scrape jobs from other sites, and ask people to pay to post their own jobs amongst the scraped jobs.
On the tech side of things, it was my first time using React and GraphQL, and I really enjoyed it. Oh and I used DynamoDB for highly relational data, which I wouldn't recommend.
- Appointment Scheduler: a SaaS kinda like Calendly
By this point I sort of had an idea of how to build, I started using infrastructure-as-code (terraform), and building new ideas was just a matter of having one, and copy pasting assets. Tried selling the idea to consultant friends of mine, but they were happy using Outlook.
- Room Booking Co: Same idea as Appointment Scheduler, but for meeting rooms
This one I basically built to test the Google Calendar API. Turns out it's extremely limiting for interfacing with public calendars.
- Online Or Not: a SaaS that performed contract testing on GraphQL endpoints, pivoted to an uptime monitor
I feel like this idea had legs, just launched too early: basically it would snapshot a "good" version of your GraphQL response, ping it every X hours, and alert when the response changed.
I actually took sales meetings on this one, built features that potential customers said were must haves before they could use it. Punchline: those "potential customers" ended up ghosting me.
All of those projects led me to where I am today: running https://PerfBeacon.com - (PerfBeacon helps you keep your app/site fast by automating Google Lighthouse checks), and https://MaxRozen.com - where I write weekly about React, and have started selling a book on useEffect.
Currently building a privacy-first cryptocurrency portfolio management and trading app that allows you to easily create complex trades across exchanges. It will likely fail like my other projects :)
Not the founder, 15 years ago, I helped build a browser-based VoIP app. It ran as a Java applet in the browser with Asterisk on the backend and a special device from the mobile phone company that bridged VoIP to their network.
It was a time when mobile plans were still costly, so free calls over the internet sounded good. We got a hotel to implement our service, but it didn't get much use, we killed it a few months later.
Overall it was a few months of work, and I don't regret doing it, but looking back, it probably wasn't a great business model.
It was a time when mobile plans were still costly, so free calls over the internet sounded good. We got a hotel to implement our service, but it didn't get much use, we killed it a few months later.
Overall it was a few months of work, and I don't regret doing it, but looking back, it probably wasn't a great business model.
Me and my brother made meeba-app.com an application for backpackers. But as soon as we launched it, this Corona thing started and people are not traveling and backpacking as they used too. We don't have many users now. I still think it could have been a great application for backpacking finding others the same state of mind but we couldn't get enough revenue and me and my brother each works on other things now. (https://meeba-app.com)
Okay I made halfchess.com . I recently made an update to improve monetisation and next day day I saw I had purchases of $16 on google analytics. I was quite thrilled and thought its only going to go up from here. Until I checked google play console to realise that there had been no purchases. It was me who was testing some new payment buttons and generating fake purchase analytics events. My learning from the experience is, it feels great to see your app making a few dollars the first day it does so.
Tested recruits.com - skill test based recruiting many years before indeed launch their version of this.
Romylms.com - A learning management system/training website for companies to train their employees with courses and modules and quizzes and such.
I currently used both for my own company coalitiontechnologies.com. Neither has made money commercially on its own though although a few dedicated users love it.
I also launched a website where you could pay someone of any faith to pray for you for a dollar. That never took off either haha.
Romylms.com - A learning management system/training website for companies to train their employees with courses and modules and quizzes and such.
I currently used both for my own company coalitiontechnologies.com. Neither has made money commercially on its own though although a few dedicated users love it.
I also launched a website where you could pay someone of any faith to pray for you for a dollar. That never took off either haha.
Definitely https://focuslite.app
I built it for myself, and really expected to make something on it. But didn't get anywhere.
I built it for myself, and really expected to make something on it. But didn't get anywhere.
Seems interesting, similar to the app ColdTurkey. Been looking for something like this since reading Deep Work, will check it out.
I built http://hopscotch.global back in like 2014 as a side hustle with high hopes. The idea was to get people to put together lists of activities and then share/review them. I still think it's a decent idea but I was young and expecting a "if you build it they will come" sort of scenario. So once it was "finished" I didn't know what to do next so I moved on to the next thing.
Portabella (https://portabella.io) is privacy friendly project management. Think Trello/Asana but end-to-end encrypted with no third party tracking.
Hasn't made any money yet but I think it's on the brink
I've also worked on Block Hooks (https://block-hooks.com) but that's very early days. I expect as the Celo ecosystem grows I'll get customers.
Hasn't made any money yet but I think it's on the brink
I've also worked on Block Hooks (https://block-hooks.com) but that's very early days. I expect as the Celo ecosystem grows I'll get customers.
If you will ever be able to integrate git into it, portabella might catch good traction with privacy freaks that self-host their gitlab/bitbucket instances.
Late 2019, I launched https://stocks2.com , a financial site that posts a daily updated report for all NASDAQ/NYSE stocks.
It started well, increasingly growing audience and Adsense revenues until Google's May 2020 core update. Since then, the site started sliding in the SERPs and finally it now disappeared from Google.
Honestly, I still don't understand why Google has penalized the site so much. Any feedback will be appreciated.
It started well, increasingly growing audience and Adsense revenues until Google's May 2020 core update. Since then, the site started sliding in the SERPs and finally it now disappeared from Google.
Honestly, I still don't understand why Google has penalized the site so much. Any feedback will be appreciated.
Searching for a symbol is not pulling any data. There is no audit info on the page like contact, address, team etc
How many page views do you have?
Currently, 3.5k pageviews/month. Used to be 60k. Traffic comes from Bing and social media.
Spent a huge amount of time (more than a year) working alone in a face detection API. The hardest parts were 1) marketing, how to make business know it existed and 2) keep up with the state of the art research implementations. The 2) was not difficult if I had had at least one client to pay/motivate me to keep up with the development. It is still on at www.rosto.io but I am not actively developing anymore. At least I have learnt some stuff tech-wise.
Ever since covid19 started in March 2020, I developed an app aimed at helping people in NYC find small groups of like-minded friends that they can eventually call their inner circles. If you are in NYC, you know how hard it is to find your circle despite how easy it is to meet people.
It's feature complete, but I need more people to beta test it to see if the flow works or not. Check out www.threefiveapp.com and fill in your email if you are interested.
It's feature complete, but I need more people to beta test it to see if the flow works or not. Check out www.threefiveapp.com and fill in your email if you are interested.
I have written a chat app for selling and buying cars. It has been more than two years work now, mostly on weekends but it is not finished yet. Cloud costs to keep it online are very low, only 5EUR/month since I do not use any paid service. I am still very motivated and have the expectation of launching it in the city where I live soon. Link: https://www.occase.de
I built a bitbucket cloud add-on that would compare your PR’s against others in the same repository, repositories or globally to see if they were smaller or larger than average. Would also display the number of files, lines changed and what languages.
Annoyingly there is no pay via atlassian for bitbucket cloud yet, and I was not prepared to do my own pay,ent which sort of negates the marketplace value.
It’s something I plan to launch when that is released eventually though.
Annoyingly there is no pay via atlassian for bitbucket cloud yet, and I was not prepared to do my own pay,ent which sort of negates the marketplace value.
It’s something I plan to launch when that is released eventually though.
I created a vinyl auction aggregator from eBay called collectorsfrenzy.com in 2008 which I ran till 2018.
At the time, there was another website Popsike (still running today) that accomplished the same task, but they only updated the listings pulled from eBay every few months whereas my service pulled the listings as soon as they completed.
My failure was that I ran everything from my cable modem and off of my own hardware. By the time cloud services were affordable, my database was around 60gigs, and I wasn't sure how I would be able to transfer the data easily. Eventually, my hardware bit the dust and I just didn't have the motivation to get everything back up and running. I had always considered to transition to a vinyl marketplace but work/family ended up delaying that indefinitely.
At the time, there was another website Popsike (still running today) that accomplished the same task, but they only updated the listings pulled from eBay every few months whereas my service pulled the listings as soon as they completed.
My failure was that I ran everything from my cable modem and off of my own hardware. By the time cloud services were affordable, my database was around 60gigs, and I wasn't sure how I would be able to transfer the data easily. Eventually, my hardware bit the dust and I just didn't have the motivation to get everything back up and running. I had always considered to transition to a vinyl marketplace but work/family ended up delaying that indefinitely.
Will you sell me your database?
Are you interested in just the data? I no longer have the images, I had them hosted in S3 but I stopped paying for it so they are probably long gone.
https://engineerdeck.com
I tried to make a job board in the UK for Civil, Mechanical and Electrical engineers (and other "real life" engineering) because I'm in the field.
Really, I did it to have a list of jobs to apply to. I'm not even sure I can make money from it though. Learning a lot about the internet and websites, so not all a failure.
Maybe next year, I'll start charging.
I tried to make a job board in the UK for Civil, Mechanical and Electrical engineers (and other "real life" engineering) because I'm in the field.
Really, I did it to have a list of jobs to apply to. I'm not even sure I can make money from it though. Learning a lot about the internet and websites, so not all a failure.
Maybe next year, I'll start charging.
Are the listings added by users? If so it seems like it’s quite active!
Some yes, some I add.
I get spammed every so often. I don't understand why someone would spam me with random Russian stuff.
I get spammed every so often. I don't understand why someone would spam me with random Russian stuff.
Created SAAS to automatically generate trading strategies from price/volume data. The strategies are optimized to achieve high Sharpe ratios. However, it turned out that Sharpe ratio had little value in predicting out-of-sample performance. Abandoned the project before trying to monetize it. The app is still up at http://turboquant.com
I recently built https://app.savvyli.com to help find linkedin connection that I have never messaged.
Here is the chrome extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/savvy-li/ncddkklmi...
Here is the chrome extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/savvy-li/ncddkklmi...
[deleted]
https://PlaceFlare.com I learnt a lot, I was building it for ~3 years, I spent on it about 500 usd :) now I’m working on https://SimpleLocalize.io and it’s way better. Currently MMR is not impressive but it’s getting better
I built Hatchedwith.com mostly because I wanted to mess around with language models. I can’t seem to find any customers even though I got two from a fake landing page but realistically it’s not the product I advertised in the beginning I’m going to lower the pricing to extremely cheap and call it done unless google starts picking up on the tens of thousands of pages.
Personal skincare routine assistant https://bomiapp.com/
Spend most of the second part of the year developing a solution for people that are struggling with skin care consistency. Launched one month ago, still trying to build a community and see if people will be willing to pay for a service like this.
Spend most of the second part of the year developing a solution for people that are struggling with skin care consistency. Launched one month ago, still trying to build a community and see if people will be willing to pay for a service like this.
A few years ago, I made a website aimed at cataloging all the toilets in the world. The idea was to show that a big portion of the world population still has no access to proper toilets. It was a website with a map of toilets, where you could click on the location and see the toilets there. It worked for a year but did not generate much attention sadly.
I tried to build the Eventbrite but for Zoom: if you hold online classes, meetings, etc. on zoom and you want people to sign up and receive zoom links periodically, create a page and we help you find audience.
Then I realized there are launched products with the same idea and the bigger problem: what if Zoom tries to do it? So I never completed the app.
Anyway, zoom.page is for sale ;)
Then I realized there are launched products with the same idea and the bigger problem: what if Zoom tries to do it? So I never completed the app.
Anyway, zoom.page is for sale ;)
I don’t think zoom would do that. It’s not really their core competency. They might buy the company if it becomes big though :P
I created nextmobi.net (domain has not been renewed for a long time). It was gsmarena competitor. It mostly helped with my programming skills in teen years but did not generate much money but I earned quite a bit in early mobile days (before apps took over) with mostly warez sites. I also had my own torrent tracker. Those were much simpler times...
Build this video-sauce.com so normal people could use make use of youtube-dl to archive videos.
Sites like this were nuked off search for 'reverse cypher violation' Very small traffic mainly used by youtubers to download their own videos or to make clips. No revenue.
I added subtitle generation (unreleased), which adds the punctuation. All for fun, which was indeed fun.
Sites like this were nuked off search for 'reverse cypher violation' Very small traffic mainly used by youtubers to download their own videos or to make clips. No revenue.
I added subtitle generation (unreleased), which adds the punctuation. All for fun, which was indeed fun.
Hi,
I wrote (and am still writing) Gig'o'Books (http://www.gigobooks.com) -- Accounting for gigs and side income.
I'm the first user (ie. dogfooding).
Thing is ... I'm sure there's a lot of people with gigs who would find it useful but for some reason, I'm having trouble finding them.
I wrote (and am still writing) Gig'o'Books (http://www.gigobooks.com) -- Accounting for gigs and side income.
I'm the first user (ie. dogfooding).
Thing is ... I'm sure there's a lot of people with gigs who would find it useful but for some reason, I'm having trouble finding them.
If you have this for US, I would have tried. My business is currently passive but I still pay a lot to accountant to run a payroll once per year.
Hi,
Do you mind if we talk? Please email me at ${username} + '1@' + 'gmail' + ${dotcom}
Thanks.
Do you mind if we talk? Please email me at ${username} + '1@' + 'gmail' + ${dotcom}
Thanks.
Weather-marketing.now.sh - A tool to sync FB & Google Ads with the current & future weather forecast
loooong list culminating in ratelimits.dev
some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
Poking around your site it seems like an excellent service. I'm curious if you could expand on why you think this is a failure and what challenges you experienced that make you think the major cloud providers deliberately leave this open.
thank you!
'failure' in that I don't know how to market it. In general I think businesses my size need a focused go-to-market strategy -- what is the profile of your first N customers, how do you get in front of them, what's the immediate 1-line value prop that makes your product worth $ + risk + integration effort.
I don't know the GTM for this one.
not saying aws is 'deliberately' leaving this open, more like most backends roll their own in this area because stack compatibility and low-latency are key.
'failure' in that I don't know how to market it. In general I think businesses my size need a focused go-to-market strategy -- what is the profile of your first N customers, how do you get in front of them, what's the immediate 1-line value prop that makes your product worth $ + risk + integration effort.
I don't know the GTM for this one.
not saying aws is 'deliberately' leaving this open, more like most backends roll their own in this area because stack compatibility and low-latency are key.
When I searched for something like that, all I found was to hide my serverless behind RapidAPI, which also include costumer facing payment processing.
hadn't heard of rapidapi, thanks for the tip
what made you specifically search for rate limiting?
what made you specifically search for rate limiting?
fear of serverless cost getting out of hand, mainly at the start. In AWS, you charges for each call even if blocked by WAF or whatever, so all logic may only protect your app but not your wallet from abuse
A service that swipes on dating profiles for you by leveraging AIs and your specific granular preferences.
I’ve made some but not sure how to go about marketing it, especially in foreign markets.
I’d post a link here but idk if it could lead to a c&d although it’s not much different than those dumb autoswipers.
I’ve made some but not sure how to go about marketing it, especially in foreign markets.
I’d post a link here but idk if it could lead to a c&d although it’s not much different than those dumb autoswipers.
Built a quick MVP (https://xboxprofile.com/) for an idea I had, realised the unofficial API isn't being mantained as my logged issues aren't being looked at, so dead in the water.
https://yakdocs.com, I built it, then realized I needed to learn more about marketing, so I've been working on that. Hoping to get better at the business side and find my niche audience and target.
The scrolling does not work on iOS. I need to completely stop the scrolling to keep moving downwards, making it really tedious to try to read the site.
Thank you, that is very helpful. I will be pulling my mac out of storage and fix that :P
[deleted]
Long story short: I pioneered Deep Fakes 16+ years ago, but no body believed what I was demonstrating was possible, or they wanted to pursue porn, which I refused for multiple reasons.
More of the story: Back in 2001 I was a very burned out video game developer. Back in '93 I was a OS developer on the 3D0 and then the original PSX. By '01 I'd lived through the EA Spouse era, wanting out of games, I transitioned to VFX. While being a hybrid developer / digital artist, I did some actor replacement work that was generalizable - meaning with some preparation, anyone could be inserted into a prepared video clip, with feature film quality.
At this time, about 2002, I realized that short form video, such as conventional TV commercials and pop music videos, treated with consumer faces and actor replacement, become a type of Personalized Advertising. Around 2002, digital cable and streaming video services were just starting to take hold, which meant individual consumers receiving digital video streams receive unique-to-them delivered streams - streams that could have Personalized Advertising in place of ordinary ads. In some cases, this would be very desirable, such as film trailers, or really any desirable wish fulfilling product or service.
So I got serious. I started an EMBA program while continuing at the VFX studio, making the actor replacement project my masters thesis. During this I recruited a team of other VFX people, 2 of which have Academy Awards for their work. By '06 I graduated my MBA program, 2nd in my class, and left working at the VFX studio to work on "the company" full time.
By '08 we had awarded global patents for Personalized Media: a combination actor replacement and product placement process, designed for global scale. We also had an operating VFX pipeline. But, this was 2008: we were in the midst of the global financial meltdown. From '08 through '11 I met with everybody and anybody, presenting and pitching to film studios, recording labels and major advertising firms. I was often met with disbelief the technology was possible or scalable or economically viable. If given the attention, I could explain and demonstrate, but that rarely happened. It was not uncommon for the pitch to receive a rude response, like the idea was crackpot.
Three times I managed to put together an investment pool, but each time one of the investors would realize what the tech could do with porn, and they'd fixate on that. They'd sway the other investors, and no matter how I explained the difficulty of controlling a system that let's anyone put anyone into porn, they insisted that become the direction of the company. I refused, and three times the investment pool disbanded.
After '11 I pivoted to a 3D geometry generator for digital artists and games. The twitter site for that is still at https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media?lang=en. That managed to squeak out an meager existence until '15. Never really generating traction, as people simply expected everything free, and these were professional products.
Simply to eat I'd been doing MBA and developer consulting. Over time, that became the majority of what I was doing, and the freaking global patents were $40K a year to maintain. In '15 I sold the patents, and took a job with one of the company's technology partners I'd licensed the 3D Reconstruction tech. The entire effort covered 13 years, I learned a lot, and destroyed my life savings. Can't say I would not do it all over again.
More of the story: Back in 2001 I was a very burned out video game developer. Back in '93 I was a OS developer on the 3D0 and then the original PSX. By '01 I'd lived through the EA Spouse era, wanting out of games, I transitioned to VFX. While being a hybrid developer / digital artist, I did some actor replacement work that was generalizable - meaning with some preparation, anyone could be inserted into a prepared video clip, with feature film quality.
At this time, about 2002, I realized that short form video, such as conventional TV commercials and pop music videos, treated with consumer faces and actor replacement, become a type of Personalized Advertising. Around 2002, digital cable and streaming video services were just starting to take hold, which meant individual consumers receiving digital video streams receive unique-to-them delivered streams - streams that could have Personalized Advertising in place of ordinary ads. In some cases, this would be very desirable, such as film trailers, or really any desirable wish fulfilling product or service.
So I got serious. I started an EMBA program while continuing at the VFX studio, making the actor replacement project my masters thesis. During this I recruited a team of other VFX people, 2 of which have Academy Awards for their work. By '06 I graduated my MBA program, 2nd in my class, and left working at the VFX studio to work on "the company" full time.
By '08 we had awarded global patents for Personalized Media: a combination actor replacement and product placement process, designed for global scale. We also had an operating VFX pipeline. But, this was 2008: we were in the midst of the global financial meltdown. From '08 through '11 I met with everybody and anybody, presenting and pitching to film studios, recording labels and major advertising firms. I was often met with disbelief the technology was possible or scalable or economically viable. If given the attention, I could explain and demonstrate, but that rarely happened. It was not uncommon for the pitch to receive a rude response, like the idea was crackpot.
Three times I managed to put together an investment pool, but each time one of the investors would realize what the tech could do with porn, and they'd fixate on that. They'd sway the other investors, and no matter how I explained the difficulty of controlling a system that let's anyone put anyone into porn, they insisted that become the direction of the company. I refused, and three times the investment pool disbanded.
After '11 I pivoted to a 3D geometry generator for digital artists and games. The twitter site for that is still at https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media?lang=en. That managed to squeak out an meager existence until '15. Never really generating traction, as people simply expected everything free, and these were professional products.
Simply to eat I'd been doing MBA and developer consulting. Over time, that became the majority of what I was doing, and the freaking global patents were $40K a year to maintain. In '15 I sold the patents, and took a job with one of the company's technology partners I'd licensed the 3D Reconstruction tech. The entire effort covered 13 years, I learned a lot, and destroyed my life savings. Can't say I would not do it all over again.
My friend and I built a marketing company for fitness.
We haven't yet made any income from it, and covid hit us pretty hard because of our customer base. However we're using the end of 2020 to build momentum on a few social media platforms in order to start gaining traction.
We haven't yet made any income from it, and covid hit us pretty hard because of our customer base. However we're using the end of 2020 to build momentum on a few social media platforms in order to start gaining traction.
https://letsfork.app
An app to simplify choosing a restaurant with friends/partner. I mostly created it to have something to do during lockdown, but it would have been fun if it took off.
An app to simplify choosing a restaurant with friends/partner. I mostly created it to have something to do during lockdown, but it would have been fun if it took off.
The landing page would benefit from a bit more information on what the app does without having to watch the video. My lizard brain lost interest at about 14s in, when the video was still going through logistics.
[deleted](2)
I tried scavenging expensive brands of clothes from Goodwill to sell to a consignment shop. I wasted bus fare, only sold one pair of jeans, and ended up with a bag full of clothes that didn’t fit. 2/10 don’t recommend.
I made a recursive version of Google Alerts. It was cool and it worked as intended, but it was difficult to explain to non-technical users and the payoff for using it is very slow, so it didn’t get any user traction.
Quotations search site: https://quotations.ch/quotations/
I don't think we have any subscribers for the non-free variant.
I don't think we have any subscribers for the non-free variant.
I’m still trying to be a small market gardener/farmer.
I’ve accepted that I’ll never reach my goal of financial independence.
But I do believe I can supplement my diet enough to make it a zero-cost hobby. And that’s alright with me.
I’ve accepted that I’ll never reach my goal of financial independence.
But I do believe I can supplement my diet enough to make it a zero-cost hobby. And that’s alright with me.
You can also have lots of fun with growth experiment, finding good light, nutrients mixes for better yield/flavor. Blog it and tell us!
All of my side projects failed, I developed 3 apps, out of those one was not meant to earn anything, but it's success was to get users. My best app got around 100 users for couple of days, none of them used it more than 5 days straight.
First App was a birthday calendar (Back in 2012-13), where I pulled Contact book, Google Plus and Facebook and at one time also had a section of born today. But it had bugs, it took too much time to solve. When I fixed things, Google Plus was shutting down, and FB APIs also got more restricted. I dropped working on that project.
Second App was a utility around a service called PushBullet: Still active and one of the must have utility back in the day, I developed an open-source utility around that app. I couldn't market it properly, (Didn't know real possibility of Product hunt or Hacker news back then). Then PushBullet went behind paywall and I stopped using it entirely. Also lost interest working on that project.
Third App was another utility managing (and intelligently deleting) files in Android Phones: Current Files App (Started as Files GO) didn't exist then. I worked on this longer than any other project. Even tried to do marketting, at it's peak (when I posted about the app on reddit) it had ~100 users a day, then daily job got on the way and I couldn't work on the app. Then Google Happened, their restrictive play store policy meant I have to chose between other aspect of life and this project. I dropped working on this....
Not counting many ideas that didn't go beyond failed or unconvincing POCs. I have stopped developing apps entirely since couple of years. Got some backend certificates, and now in a free time I indulge in Chess, Reading and writing blog post (80% in native language on non tech stuff and 20% on tech stuff).
Edit: Started working on a POC of a service I had in my mind since long. Let's see what happens.
First App was a birthday calendar (Back in 2012-13), where I pulled Contact book, Google Plus and Facebook and at one time also had a section of born today. But it had bugs, it took too much time to solve. When I fixed things, Google Plus was shutting down, and FB APIs also got more restricted. I dropped working on that project.
Second App was a utility around a service called PushBullet: Still active and one of the must have utility back in the day, I developed an open-source utility around that app. I couldn't market it properly, (Didn't know real possibility of Product hunt or Hacker news back then). Then PushBullet went behind paywall and I stopped using it entirely. Also lost interest working on that project.
Third App was another utility managing (and intelligently deleting) files in Android Phones: Current Files App (Started as Files GO) didn't exist then. I worked on this longer than any other project. Even tried to do marketting, at it's peak (when I posted about the app on reddit) it had ~100 users a day, then daily job got on the way and I couldn't work on the app. Then Google Happened, their restrictive play store policy meant I have to chose between other aspect of life and this project. I dropped working on this....
Not counting many ideas that didn't go beyond failed or unconvincing POCs. I have stopped developing apps entirely since couple of years. Got some backend certificates, and now in a free time I indulge in Chess, Reading and writing blog post (80% in native language on non tech stuff and 20% on tech stuff).
Edit: Started working on a POC of a service I had in my mind since long. Let's see what happens.
https://www.webwall.io - a privacy focused chrome extension I built over a weekend. Hit 1k users in a week or two but $0
I created a good lockdown friendly game (whilst stuck in lockdown myself..) that can be played together in person or over video call. Its called ‘Imposter the party game’.
Open to any and all feedback! :)
Open to any and all feedback! :)
I created a Shopify Image Optimizer (Image Compression) app. I made $ 900 in one year and closed it a few days ago.
The competition is hard, the market is saturated.
I made a bot that bet on horse races. The strategies were succesful but ultimately I spent more than it earned on AWS fees. I might turn it on again next year.
Sounds like you just need to move it out of AWS?
I spent about $5k on some refurb Dell servers and pay $200/mo for colocation to replace what was $1,000+ mo in AWS bills. The best part is I can put all my small projects there as well and they are instantly profitable.
I spent about $5k on some refurb Dell servers and pay $200/mo for colocation to replace what was $1,000+ mo in AWS bills. The best part is I can put all my small projects there as well and they are instantly profitable.
I build in person services. I think online only will become counterculture. I’ve made a few thousand from everything I’ve tried.
All construction.
>in person services
>All construction.
Slightly confused by that wording. Do you mean actual contruction as in build things with a hammer?
>All construction.
Slightly confused by that wording. Do you mean actual contruction as in build things with a hammer?
"I think online only will become counterculture."
Interesting opinion, would be interested in knowing the rationale. Is it related to either a progression of the technology or a regression (like nuclear war taking out the infrastructure)? I couldn't help but think about the Homer Simpson quote ("The internet? Is that thing still around?")
Interesting opinion, would be interested in knowing the rationale. Is it related to either a progression of the technology or a regression (like nuclear war taking out the infrastructure)? I couldn't help but think about the Homer Simpson quote ("The internet? Is that thing still around?")
www.gaffologist.com
Maybe it'll make money yet. I dunno. Search for homes for sale in Ireland by proximity to fibre broadband, schools, cycle routes, train stations, and proposed infra (new metro route, cycleways, etc.) and by site area. Ended up buying myself a dirt cheap thatched cottage an hour from Dublin by train on a few acres with it and figured I'd see if others would benefit from it.
Maybe it'll make money yet. I dunno. Search for homes for sale in Ireland by proximity to fibre broadband, schools, cycle routes, train stations, and proposed infra (new metro route, cycleways, etc.) and by site area. Ended up buying myself a dirt cheap thatched cottage an hour from Dublin by train on a few acres with it and figured I'd see if others would benefit from it.
For a couple of years I wrote a blog called Drug Law Blog, back in the days when medical marijuana was getting going in California. It became pretty popular, but I felt uncomfortable about monetizing it bc my interest in drug regulation really is mostly intellectual/libertarian and as a parent I didn't really want to take money from the marijuana industry. I eventually shut the blog down prior to legalization of marijuana. (I had thought the blog would help me build my practice as an appellate attorney, but that part did not pan out.) I think if I had had different values I could have made a tremendous amount of money, but it just wasn't for me.
Pulselyre: A touch-screen synthesizer app for live music production - https://www.pulselyre.com
Spent a few years experimenting with touchscreen UI and audio synthesis in my free time on and off, and eventually settled on an engine and interface design. The idea is to create 'instruments' in the editor (2nd screenshot) by connecting basic modules to create and transform audio based on user X/Y touch coordinates. Then, stack a bunch of instruments on screen and use your fingers to create and loop sequences of notes live on stage. The demo video ( https://youtu.be/Qk85IrgXRj0 ) shows how that part works.
Once COVID hit, I was sent home to do nothing with full pay, so I had free time and decided to power through and create a functional MVP and website. My plan was to get some beta users, polish it up, add missing features, and then start charging. I showed it around on some music production forums and to friends who dabble in it, and got terrible feedback: 1. Too hard to use; 2. not compatible with existing plugin systems; 3. terrible demo video (I'm not a musician nor an expert on creating cool synth sounds); 4. "touch screens are *"; 5. nobody wants to do live production; 6. it sounds terrible
Of those responses, #2 was the killer. Without compatibility with existing synth plugin frameworks, like VST, it was pretty much dead in the water. No producer was going to use a synth app that didn't support their favorite plugins, and no plugin developers were going to switch to an application with no users (I built my own custom plugin framework for it). I looked into adding support, but VST uses such a completely different architecture from the synth engine that I created that they couldn't really work together in any sensible way. One suggestion I got was to remove my synth engine entirely and just make the app a MIDI front-end for other synths, which is something I might do in the future, though the limitations of the MIDI protocol would mean removing a lot of functionality. (I have a new WFH job now, so no more unlimited time.) I'm also thinking of open-sourcing the project entirely, but I need to clean up some things in the codebase first.
I did decide to split out the UI manager that I created for the app into a separate open-source Windows UI framework, which I still work on and use for other small utility apps that I create: https://tinyurl.com/upbeatui
If I were to do it again, I'd have started with support for existing VST plugins or MIDI and worked from there. I also wouldn't have wasted so much time figuring out auth stuff. The only costs were the domain and VPS hosting.
Spent a few years experimenting with touchscreen UI and audio synthesis in my free time on and off, and eventually settled on an engine and interface design. The idea is to create 'instruments' in the editor (2nd screenshot) by connecting basic modules to create and transform audio based on user X/Y touch coordinates. Then, stack a bunch of instruments on screen and use your fingers to create and loop sequences of notes live on stage. The demo video ( https://youtu.be/Qk85IrgXRj0 ) shows how that part works.
Once COVID hit, I was sent home to do nothing with full pay, so I had free time and decided to power through and create a functional MVP and website. My plan was to get some beta users, polish it up, add missing features, and then start charging. I showed it around on some music production forums and to friends who dabble in it, and got terrible feedback: 1. Too hard to use; 2. not compatible with existing plugin systems; 3. terrible demo video (I'm not a musician nor an expert on creating cool synth sounds); 4. "touch screens are *"; 5. nobody wants to do live production; 6. it sounds terrible
Of those responses, #2 was the killer. Without compatibility with existing synth plugin frameworks, like VST, it was pretty much dead in the water. No producer was going to use a synth app that didn't support their favorite plugins, and no plugin developers were going to switch to an application with no users (I built my own custom plugin framework for it). I looked into adding support, but VST uses such a completely different architecture from the synth engine that I created that they couldn't really work together in any sensible way. One suggestion I got was to remove my synth engine entirely and just make the app a MIDI front-end for other synths, which is something I might do in the future, though the limitations of the MIDI protocol would mean removing a lot of functionality. (I have a new WFH job now, so no more unlimited time.) I'm also thinking of open-sourcing the project entirely, but I need to clean up some things in the codebase first.
I did decide to split out the UI manager that I created for the app into a separate open-source Windows UI framework, which I still work on and use for other small utility apps that I create: https://tinyurl.com/upbeatui
If I were to do it again, I'd have started with support for existing VST plugins or MIDI and worked from there. I also wouldn't have wasted so much time figuring out auth stuff. The only costs were the domain and VPS hosting.
Thank you for the detailed comment. During quarantine I started working on a rudimentary sound engine, and this gives me a lot to think about. I really appreciate your analysis of the feedback you received.
Your demo video looks really great to me. Maybe it's not something serious music production people would use, but stick this on an iPad and I could see someone having a lot of fun with it, kind of like https://loopyapp.com/ or https://audiokitpro.com/synth/
Your demo video looks really great to me. Maybe it's not something serious music production people would use, but stick this on an iPad and I could see someone having a lot of fun with it, kind of like https://loopyapp.com/ or https://audiokitpro.com/synth/
I created a great lockdown friendly game (whilst stuck in lockdown myself ...). It’s called ‘Imposter the party game’
Open to all feedback! :)
Open to all feedback! :)
I worked with a few folks to build Whatscookin.us
It's a community building through food sharing attempt.
It's a community building through food sharing attempt.
Scarves - anyone want to buy one? I have a full suitcase
www.opendoctor.io blocked by google :(
Ack, still a bit too recent and bit too raw but here goes.
Last side project which ended up becoming a bit of a rollercoaster was Brring Conference, a conference calling app where you could schedule conference calls ahead of time and it'd send out calendar invites and then automatically dial everyone in when the call time arrived.
https://www.brring.com
At the time of inception I noticed that the UK had terrible conference calling providers. They'd bill ~£50 for a one hour international conference call with 10 people. I did my numbers and realized I could provide the same call for 1/10th the price using outbound dialing and least cost routing via Twilio/Plivo etc.
I thought I was off to the races but I made the cardinal mistake of making every startup mistake in the book.
It took a few months to build a basic prototype and then using lots of my own money (and some begged, borrowed and raised) it slowly grew to become quite the monster in my life.
I wasn't a complete idiot though, I ran the idea by whom I figured my target market would be, wrote up a business plan, projected costing/break even and looked up how much my competitors were making via their company filings - the market (at least in my eyes) was there.
By the time I launched it was too little too late - our big competitors in the UK (and US for that matter) had completely revamped their products in response to Microsoft Teams. As an example of how competitive things became Google Ad spend for the term 'conference calling' literally went up 10x when I launched in response to competition between Slack, Microsoft and our own local competitors.
We obtained 100+ users and two dozen paid within the first month but the pace didn't really pickup much beyond there so after several months of adding features and running ad campaigns instead of parking it I decided to pivot the whole thing and turn it into a lead generation widget - like Intercom or Drift but supporting phone and WebRTC calling via the browser to a sales agent.
Things did better this time, I signed up paid customers ahead of time to figure out what features to launch with and ensure there was a market there once our product arrived - I was pinging maybe 30+ business owners a day asking if they'd be interested and I managed to get hoteliers, estate agents, cruise ship companies and travel agents interested in using my product.
We built Brring Live Dialer in a few months and things were growing better. Then COVID hit and our customers just evaporated. I decided I'd had enough of this side project which had become my life and slowly wound things down and started interviewing.
I have to say the experience of the above was instrumental in leveling up my resume. I came from a background of XMPP and telephony - where our software was deployed on-prem. I'd allowed myself to become deskilled so building an app from scratch using the latest web technologies of the time meant I had zero issues interviewing and landing a job.
Still smarts though, making so many ruddy mistakes!
Last side project which ended up becoming a bit of a rollercoaster was Brring Conference, a conference calling app where you could schedule conference calls ahead of time and it'd send out calendar invites and then automatically dial everyone in when the call time arrived.
https://www.brring.com
At the time of inception I noticed that the UK had terrible conference calling providers. They'd bill ~£50 for a one hour international conference call with 10 people. I did my numbers and realized I could provide the same call for 1/10th the price using outbound dialing and least cost routing via Twilio/Plivo etc.
I thought I was off to the races but I made the cardinal mistake of making every startup mistake in the book.
It took a few months to build a basic prototype and then using lots of my own money (and some begged, borrowed and raised) it slowly grew to become quite the monster in my life.
I wasn't a complete idiot though, I ran the idea by whom I figured my target market would be, wrote up a business plan, projected costing/break even and looked up how much my competitors were making via their company filings - the market (at least in my eyes) was there.
By the time I launched it was too little too late - our big competitors in the UK (and US for that matter) had completely revamped their products in response to Microsoft Teams. As an example of how competitive things became Google Ad spend for the term 'conference calling' literally went up 10x when I launched in response to competition between Slack, Microsoft and our own local competitors.
We obtained 100+ users and two dozen paid within the first month but the pace didn't really pickup much beyond there so after several months of adding features and running ad campaigns instead of parking it I decided to pivot the whole thing and turn it into a lead generation widget - like Intercom or Drift but supporting phone and WebRTC calling via the browser to a sales agent.
Things did better this time, I signed up paid customers ahead of time to figure out what features to launch with and ensure there was a market there once our product arrived - I was pinging maybe 30+ business owners a day asking if they'd be interested and I managed to get hoteliers, estate agents, cruise ship companies and travel agents interested in using my product.
We built Brring Live Dialer in a few months and things were growing better. Then COVID hit and our customers just evaporated. I decided I'd had enough of this side project which had become my life and slowly wound things down and started interviewing.
I have to say the experience of the above was instrumental in leveling up my resume. I came from a background of XMPP and telephony - where our software was deployed on-prem. I'd allowed myself to become deskilled so building an app from scratch using the latest web technologies of the time meant I had zero issues interviewing and landing a job.
Still smarts though, making so many ruddy mistakes!
Edit
Honestly, as a 3D modeler, what is your value proposition for me to have my assets on your platform? Why should I choose your platform over a platform where i get tens or hundreds of dollars for a single sale, compared to a Spotify model, where i might or might not get few dollars a month.
3D modeling is a labour intensive job and the market is way smaller than music or movies, meaning its way harder to get an audience large enough for this kind of service. Even with a audience large enough, could you guarantee I would receive as much as from other services?
Also, at $5 a month pricepoint you’re primarily going to attract below average modelers. Such a low pricepoint means the creator is not going to get much, considering the processing fees & comission and sharing the revenue with other creators.
However, as a consumer I like the idea. But as a creator I really don’t like it. If the subscription would be $50+, i would consider it.
3D modeling is a labour intensive job and the market is way smaller than music or movies, meaning its way harder to get an audience large enough for this kind of service. Even with a audience large enough, could you guarantee I would receive as much as from other services?
Also, at $5 a month pricepoint you’re primarily going to attract below average modelers. Such a low pricepoint means the creator is not going to get much, considering the processing fees & comission and sharing the revenue with other creators.
However, as a consumer I like the idea. But as a creator I really don’t like it. If the subscription would be $50+, i would consider it.
Thanks for taking the time to reply - you have a great points.
> Honestly, as a 3D modeler, what is your value proposition for me to have my assets on your platform? Why should I choose your platform over a platform where i get tens or hundreds of dollars for a single sale, compared to a Spotify model, where i might or might not get few dollars a month.
You're right, the value proposition is not great for modelers. Probably one of the reasons why the site currently isn't a good idea.
> 3D modeling is a labour intensive job and the market is way smaller than music or movies, meaning its way harder to get an audience large enough for this kind of service. Even with a audience large enough, could you guarantee I would receive as much as from other services?
You're right, I would not be able to guarantee that. Modelers are still free to post any asset to other services.
> Also, at $5 a month pricepoint you’re primarily going to attract below average modelers. Such a low pricepoint means the creator is not going to get much, considering the processing fees & comission and sharing the revenue with other creators. However, as a consumer I like the idea. But as a creator I really don’t like it. If the subscription would be $50+, i would consider it.
This is really great feedback. You're right - the creators/modelers need to get paid more. This would mean charging more a month, like you mentioned. Thanks again for taking a look and giving some great advice.
> Honestly, as a 3D modeler, what is your value proposition for me to have my assets on your platform? Why should I choose your platform over a platform where i get tens or hundreds of dollars for a single sale, compared to a Spotify model, where i might or might not get few dollars a month.
You're right, the value proposition is not great for modelers. Probably one of the reasons why the site currently isn't a good idea.
> 3D modeling is a labour intensive job and the market is way smaller than music or movies, meaning its way harder to get an audience large enough for this kind of service. Even with a audience large enough, could you guarantee I would receive as much as from other services?
You're right, I would not be able to guarantee that. Modelers are still free to post any asset to other services.
> Also, at $5 a month pricepoint you’re primarily going to attract below average modelers. Such a low pricepoint means the creator is not going to get much, considering the processing fees & comission and sharing the revenue with other creators. However, as a consumer I like the idea. But as a creator I really don’t like it. If the subscription would be $50+, i would consider it.
This is really great feedback. You're right - the creators/modelers need to get paid more. This would mean charging more a month, like you mentioned. Thanks again for taking a look and giving some great advice.
The one I haven't launched.
I built a VPN application for iOS and Android (still working on it) that uses user's DigitalOcean, AWS, or GCP to log in via OAuth2 or API token and create a VPN server so that only the user can connect and use.
However, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I would be glad to listen to.
Btw, the link to side-project: https://www.zudvpn.com GitHub: https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN
However, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I would be glad to listen to.
Btw, the link to side-project: https://www.zudvpn.com GitHub: https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN
This guide https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand was written for OSS maintainers, but it could still give you ideas on how to monetize your project.
Good luck!
Good luck!
Make a free/pro version. Free version only works w/ a lock-screen interstitial ad enabled, and the VPN disconnects every 30 minutes until you re-enable it.
Pro version is like $1.99/month subscription.
Pro version is like $1.99/month subscription.
I use free vpn app with ads on my android.
Why they can
Why they can
I was pretty happy when the discussion popped onto the front page after 45 minutes or so. Traffic started flowing in and I was looking forward to having some substantial discussion in the comments section. Then all of a sudden it was just gone.
Please explain HN moderators?
Please explain HN moderators?
It set off the flamewar detector. That's the "software that demotes overheated discussions" mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. I've turned off the penalty now. We review all the posts that get it, because sometimes legit discussions get hit—but it can take us a while.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They ask you to email [email protected] instead of posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581828 was particularly excessive because it adds noise to the story feed—and doing this doesn't work anyhow. I only knew about your question because another user decided to help you out and emailed us.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They ask you to email [email protected] instead of posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581828 was particularly excessive because it adds noise to the story feed—and doing this doesn't work anyhow. I only knew about your question because another user decided to help you out and emailed us.
I have a side project that didn't make money, then did, and now effectively does not.
I write novels: I've published 10 so far. I didn't make any money for a while, but all in all I've sold about 80,000 copies. I haven't published anything new since 2018 and my sales have since dried up completely.
Fiction is a product market fit game first: if you don't write what people want to read, they won't read it. After that, it is a quantity game. New books come out every day, if you don't keep releasing more stories, people will forget you.
getting back to writing is one of my 2021 goals.
I write novels: I've published 10 so far. I didn't make any money for a while, but all in all I've sold about 80,000 copies. I haven't published anything new since 2018 and my sales have since dried up completely.
Fiction is a product market fit game first: if you don't write what people want to read, they won't read it. After that, it is a quantity game. New books come out every day, if you don't keep releasing more stories, people will forget you.
getting back to writing is one of my 2021 goals.
I build in person services. I think online only will become counterculture. I’ve made a few thousand from everything I’ve tried.
All construction. Zero code.
I have the opposite problem: I built https://imgz.org to not make money and it does. Not a lot, but not zero. I'll have to fix that.
By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/
By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/
I guess it makes money because you shamelessly advertise in response to completely unrelated questions.
Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize my side-project was unrelated to a question about side-projects. But you are correct, advertising things means they make money. That's why nobody has ever heard of Juicero.
I thought that from what we have seen with all the image hosters coming and going every few years is that the financials don’t work out at some point and they are just losing money. Then they have to try to add ads, prevent hotlinking, add their own social network and handle abuse until people move on and the cycle continues.
What do you think you are going to do differently when you reach that point?
What do you think you are going to do differently when you reach that point?
One of the image links on your hiring page is broken.
https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2.png
(or is that a joke I glazed over)
https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2.png
(or is that a joke I glazed over)
Loads fine for me!
"... are ashamed of what Imgur has become?"
I'm no expert but I think one could say you might get into trouble for defamation if you write something like that on your product page.
I'm no expert but I think one could say you might get into trouble for defamation if you write something like that on your product page.
For asking people if they're ashamed? I doubt it, but I'm not an expert either.
Wikipedia:
> Defamation (also known as calumny, vilification, libel, slander or traducement) is the oral or written communication of a false statement about another that unjustly harms their reputation and usually constitutes a tort or crime
> Defamation (also known as calumny, vilification, libel, slander or traducement) is the oral or written communication of a false statement about another that unjustly harms their reputation and usually constitutes a tort or crime
How fragile Americans must be...
Read 25 years computer news, summarized OLED touchscreens since 2018. Amazon "Google Phone News September 2020 micro LED TV, 5 nano meter chips" published after edited (by price, some alphabetical) chapters like cheap, solid state battery.
I paid for a little advertising but those already in industry more interested than business people. LibreOffice needs Android update.
I paid for a little advertising but those already in industry more interested than business people. LibreOffice needs Android update.
This[0] seems to be what `microLED5nano` is referring to.
My interpretation of the comment:
For the past two years (i.e. since 2018), I've read and summarised 25 years of computer news. Finally published this year after editing/adding some chapters, like one about SSDs. You can find it by searching on Amazon "Google Phone News September 2020 micro LED TV, 5 nano meter chips". I paid for a little advertisement [to no success].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-News-2018-19-micro-meter-ebo...
My interpretation of the comment:
For the past two years (i.e. since 2018), I've read and summarised 25 years of computer news. Finally published this year after editing/adding some chapters, like one about SSDs. You can find it by searching on Amazon "Google Phone News September 2020 micro LED TV, 5 nano meter chips". I paid for a little advertisement [to no success].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-News-2018-19-micro-meter-ebo...
Is this some kind of bot? I can't parse the response at all.
I'm a shy autistic human, spent most of life slowly learning alone. Tried to write 2006 with goal 4 billion people get basic machines. LibreOffice because other apps couldn't handle 100+ pages.
Interesting that this comment is the account's first comment. I hope NLP researches don't start using HN as a proving ground for their models.
markov chain?
LOL
Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be / what would you do differently if you did it again? How much time/money did you spend building it, and what kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
Appreciate any and all answers!