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Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?
- jefozabuss 8y agoI remember at least one (Stripe)
- daeken 8y agoI announced the creation of a class here on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5862102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5862102 -- This was a Show HN, but then it was edited for some reason; link is dead now, but it was a blog post describing the class and had a payment link), which went on to sell out in the first day, then eventually I posted on HN that I wanted to sell it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14933206 ), and was acquired because of the post.
- jfaat 8y agoDropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- ssijak 8y agoAlways interesting to read comments about the product after 10 years and it`s success :)
- Moodles 8y agoThe first comment on that thread is a typical funny HN comment: “if you’re a Linux user and do x, y, z and connect the flux capacitor to the warp drive you can emulate Dropbox no problem”
- entropy_ 8y agoTrue, though it's definitely nice to see how that discussion didn't descend into poo-flinging. The poster replied to the criticism and the critic conceded that it would indeed be useful, even for linux users :-)
- Piezoid 8y agoSadly, 10 years later, they didn't respond to criticism about removing support for non-ext4-yet-xattr-enabled filesystems.
- jen729w 8y agoI’m leaving because of this. And I give them the ~$100/year for the pro plan. Screw ‘em. Also it really shits me that every time I log in I get a little banner that says “Almost out of space? Try Dropbox Business!”. One, no, I am not almost out of space. I’m at 15% and if you don’t know that, there’s something terribly wrong. Two, I’m not a business. I’m just me. And I already pay for Pro. Get out of my goddamned face. /rant
- fastbeef 8y agoThis is the most #firstworldproblems thing I’ve read in a long time.
- stareatgoats 8y agoNot one to support rants normally but this irritates me too, especially when encountered in billion-dollar businesses (not only Dropbox). It's like they can't afford investing a part-time developer and a few extra db queries in customer experience and retention, which indicates that they are in it for the fast buck, right or wrong. This type of customer indifference should have a special, and tarnishing, name.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI think it’s more a problem with most companies of any size. It’s not the devs. The owners likely become sufficiently detached from the end product and experience and sales/marketing teams are left to squeeze every bit of fiscal value from the thing. That usually results in battles for new analytics or new features that usually look like background software/network bloat, and judging the client to increase their spend no matter what. Those teams always have to post higher numbers regardless of the market. Not that I disagree.
- blablabla123 8y agoI do exactly that since 3 years (git though without ftp), having almost stopped using Google Drive. Dropbox I don't use since 5 years or so ;)
- mickael-kerjean 8y agoIf you want a fancy web interface on top on Git, FTP, SFTP, S3, whatever backend, I built this: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/nuage https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/nuage
- blablabla123 8y agoI might check it out... Actually I'm test-driving Perkeep at the moment, it also supports various backends, replication.
- atmosphericnose 8y agoSome interesting context for this comment: "Congrats Dropbox" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660140 BrandonM: It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality). Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that! Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward! Zed Shaw's take on the matter. https://zedshaw.com/2018/03/25/the-billionaires-vs-brandonm/ https://zedshaw.com/2018/03/25/the-billionaires-vs-brandonm/
- Moodles 8y agoInteresting. Thanks for sharing. I hope BrandonM isn't haunted by his comment or anything. It's not really a big deal right? Can't we just have a chuckle about it and move on? Besides, his comment was the top voted one (simultaneously my comment has a lot of upvotes too). We all get things wrong from time to time, especially at a young age. Big deal. He's probably been right a million times but nobody remembers those.
- itronitron 8y agoActually, that comment by BrandonM is occasionally referenced as a good example of how YC startups have an unhealthy advantage on the forum, as YC startups can have their posts deleted but regular users such as BrandonM can not, hence their comments live for an eternity (which in this case seems to be a good thing).
- anewone 8y agoReminds me of: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
- mulletbum 8y agoI reference this when I talk about HackerNews in general. I remember reading this post back then. I remember them slowly growing huge. It's kind of funny to look back and think I knew about their project from the very beginning.
- gtbcb 8y agoSegment.com (formerly Segment.io) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- bemmu 8y agoI announced Candy Japan here, and have made a modest living off of it for the past ~7 years.
- jmchu 8y agoWas there another online service that inspired you to create Candy Japan, or was it filling a need that you yourself had?
- bemmu 8y agoI think I saw BirchBox and thought that sending surprises in the mail was an idea that might work for other things besides beauty products as well.
- stef25 8y agoBeen following you since day 1!
- faitswulff 8y ago...that was 7 years ago? Time flies. Congrats!
- cowpewter 8y agoI loved your service! I'd still be subscribed if I hadn't gotten diabetes and had to cut all candy out of my life.
- milanmot 8y agoWinfify, the company which made the successful A/B testing SaaS product Visual Website Optimizer(VWO) is bootstrapped and successful with $18 millions in revenue. Their first submission was in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141
- paraschopra 8y agoThanks for the mention. The name of the company is Wingify. Here's the Ask HN for Visual Website Optimizer that got 0 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991252 This product has gone to help Wingify bootstrap to $20mn in annual recurring revenue. So there's hope even if an 'Ask HN' doesn't fly :)
- eps 8y agoDepends on what "successful" is, but these guys keep crunching out really good software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8027405
- borski 8y agoTinfoil started as a Show HN back in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291944 Successful is a broad term, but we're still kickin' and growing fast. :)
- estsauver 8y agoWe started AirPaper (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10320509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10320509) off a show HN, but ultimately started a company Apollo Agriculture (https://apolloagriculture.com https://apolloagriculture.com) that's three years in now, growing, and helping thousands of families get out of poverty in Subsaharan Africa.
- Liriel 8y agoHashnode - a community for developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11018763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11018763
- benatkin 8y agoSomehow I was unaware of Hashnode. Just checked it out, and it's really neat! It's a lot like dev.to or Coderwall, but seems to be more like a traditional social network than those two, in terms of people hanging out and posting memes and stuff.
- dvdhsu 8y agoWe're Retool (https://tryretool.com https://tryretool.com). We're not successful startup yet. But we're definitely a startup, haha. We did a Show HN a year ago: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494). Then we did YC, raised a bit of money (almost entirely off our HN traction), and launched around a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966). Now we're profitable!
- keerthiko 8y agoProfitable is a very valid definition of successful! More than one can say of, say, Uber ;)
- mewwts 8y agoI'm actually very psyched to use retool in my startup. We're not there yet but soon!
- dvdhsu 8y agoThanks! Feel free to ping me: david@tryretool.com anytime once you start! I'd love to help out :)
- tixocloud 8y agoWe’re hoping to follow your lead with Orchestra (http://orchestrahq.com http://orchestrahq.com) Traffic has been ok but had 1-2 leads so far.
- edoceo 8y agoPlease turn off the intercom intro when I first land on your page. It distracted me from learning about your project and blocks important text that I was reading with a generic Hello! message
- Vanit 8y agoDon't have the link handy, but Gitlab is one.
- radiKal07 8y agoNomadList ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222
- marknadal 8y agoWe (https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587814) raised $2.6M for our "Open Source P2P Firebase" and now have Internet Archive (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685682) and others doing terabyte / daily traffic on us. All started here on HN! :)
- keerthiko 8y agoWe started BitGym nearly 6 years ago(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4519256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4519256) and had pretty low traction on here, By most definitions we've pivoted from tech startup to "profitable small tech business", staying at 4-6 people. We're no dropbox, but at a solid cohort paying customers for our reasonably well-loved consumer product we've turned into a successful (by our personal definitions) company, if not a successful startup.
- davidjohnstone 8y agoThe results aren't as exciting as some, but Cycling Analytics pays my bills https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/ https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453967
- fouc 8y agoProducthunt is a spin off from Show HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815
- karthikvellanki 8y agoCan't find the thread, but Segment started after the ShowHN post got a great response.
- gpmcadam 8y agoMentioned elsewhere in this thread, but here's the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- OkiiEli 8y agoI just launched contentiskey.co and I see traffic coming from HN.Hoping for the best
- nicwest 8y agoI think this was the company that became pebble (correct me if I'm wrong). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290884
- sp332 8y agoYup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Funding
- daniel_iversen 8y agoNot sure what the underlying intent is with this question, but great question and love reading the answers.. Also, I always thought that the main purpose of the “Show HN” posts weren’t about some big user generating promotion, but rather to solicit feedback from friendly fellow entrepreneurs and business people.?
- jwblackwell 8y agoYes! We launched BuzzSumo 5 years ago almost to the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437712 and we were acquired by Brandwatch last year.
- okgabr 8y agoAlmost 4.5 years ago we launched Instabug (www.instabug.com) on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5526949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5526949) Successful is a broad term, but we have tens of thousands of apps on our platform and our SDK is running on over a billion devices. We did YC and raised multiple rounds after.
- dvirsky 8y agoGitLab: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278
- bufferoverflow 8y agoThey just raised $100M at $1.1B valuation.
- MattBearman 8y agoI announced BugMuncher here (since been renamed to Saber Feedback - https://www.saberfeedback.com https://www.saberfeedback.com), not sure if it counts as a successful startup, but it's been profitably paying my wages for a couple of years :)
- pionar 8y agoThat sounds successful to me! Congrats!
- MattBearman 8y agoThanks! I'm not aiming for explosive growth or a huge exit, so it's probably more of a 'life-style business' rather than a startup, but that suits me just fine :)
- rasikjain 8y agoI remember seeing the launch post few years back. I tried your demo and thought it was an excellent product. Good to hear that. Best of luck.
- adam_ellsworth 8y agoI'm curious to see how insomnia is doing as a non-traditional startup in that he didn't "grow" the company (as far as I know). It's one of the best applications we use in our day-to-day workflow.
- vosper 8y agoI've switched to Insomnia from Postman some time ago, out of frustration, and though I don't use it heavily (a few minutes every week) I really like Insomnia. There are a number of design decisions in the app that I really appreciate.
- gbersac 8y agoInsomnia has a better design than postman, but lack the habillity to transfer data from one request to another... So I am still with postman.
- edent 8y ago5 years ago I asked a question here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828102 That lead to https://unicodepowersymbol.com/ https://unicodepowersymbol.com/ Not a start-up, but a successful project :-)
- fbomb 8y agoThe unicode power symbol looks like someone's giving you the finger. Nice.
- anacleto 8y agoDefinitely Webflow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499 Great company, great founders, great product.
- bsstoner 8y agoDuckDuckGo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142
- jaxtellerSoA 8y agoLOL, all the people saying the the name is horrible.
- WorkLifeBalance 8y agoAre they wrong?
- codemusings 8y agoOr the design. But who can blame them: https://web.archive.org/web/20080926132853/http://duckduckgo.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080926132853/http://duckduckgo...
- jaxtellerSoA 8y agoThe design has improved significantly over the years.
- dx034 8y agoI like DDG but still don't like the name. When telling people about it I heard several times that it sounds like a hobby project and not very trustworthy. I don't think changing the name would make sense for them at this stage but I'd say they are successful despite the name, not because of it.
- brink 8y agoThe name is bad. Some of the people in that thread are comparing "Just duck it" to "Just google it" Or even better, how about "Just duck it, mother truckers"
- contravariant 8y agoNo joke, I would be more willing to recommend it to others if I could say the name with a straight face.
- sharmi 8y agoIndiehackers.com started here and was acquired by Stripe
- jslakro 8y agoBest of examples here. You have been done a great work compiling information from others
- raminassemi 8y agoClose.io: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135295
- olegp 8y agoI saw this post more than eight years ago and commented on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261786 I then started helping Anton out and we managed to hit the front page a few more times: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=akshell&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=akshell&sort=byDate&prefix&pag... To get feedback on the platform, we paid developers to use it to make apps for our clients, which brought in some revenue. However, we failed to get people to pay for the service itself, even though we had a couple of thousand developers signed up and a few hundred apps in production. So we put Akshell on hold, but stayed in touch. Three years ago, we reconnected and started Toughbyte: https://toughbyte.com https://toughbyte.com. We initially focused on the thing that worked at Akshell, i.e. writing software for clients. Almost by accident, in the end we ended up doing tech recruitment instead. More on that here: https://blog.toughbyte.com/whats-next-for-toughbyte-aed3cf54c085 https://blog.toughbyte.com/whats-next-for-toughbyte-aed3cf54... Now we're building a tech recruitment platform. We've been profitable since day one and have been growing 50% each year. So, in a somewhat roundabout way, that first Show HN post did result in a startup that's still around.
- yakshaving_jgt 8y agoNot sure if "successful", but https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/ https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/ makes me some pocket money — not nothing; half-way to "Ramen Profitable" — and was also accepted into the Advisory Track of this year's YCombinator Startup School which I'm quite proud of. I did a Show HN in May last year, and I can't believe how ugly and crappy the service was back then in comparison with how it is now. This reminds me that I should document the history of projects I work on.
- Chive 8y agoLike the page, but jesus, the sound of the chat popup opening up made me jump :-)
- j0ncc 8y agoIs there a US version of this? Cool service!
- yakshaving_jgt 8y agoNot as far as I'm aware, but people have started asking for the same thing for US and Australian companies. I might end up expanding NBM to include other countries, provided I can reliably source the data.
- ph0rque 8y agoI did a Show HN on my side project, AutoMicroFarm, two years ago (although I have been working on it and posting to HN about it much longer than that). Thanks to HN, I was able to get into the YC fellowship program. After launching and not getting any traction, I almost quit. However, I realized I did not know how to do marketing, sales, or customer dev (the "people want" part of "Make something people want"). It wouldn't be fair to the idea of AutoMicroFarm, or to myself, to quit without trying to learn marketing/sales/customer dev and applying it to AutoMicroFarm. So this year, I hired a business coach (https://solacelessons.com/ https://solacelessons.com/) and continued working on AutoMicroFarm. I can't claim it's successful in any meaning of the word yet, but I have a solid framework in place for my social media/email/blog outreach, I am talking to people to figure out what they want, and starting to make revenue--all while having a day job, a side gig (both related to web dev), and a family. I've been really happy to make this progress while keeping the hours spent on AutoMicroFarm to 5-10 hours per week.
- gbersac 8y agoThe website of your coach is ugly !!! But your project seems interesting.
- ph0rque 8y agoOne of the most valuable lessons my coach taught me is, "get better at being good enough". She practices what she preaches ;)
- blensor 8y agoAs I am getting older that's exactly my take on how to achieve something useful. As software devs we sometimes try to outhink the problem by solving every non existent problem that might occur down the road and also doing it in an as elegant way as possible. But the fact is that "down the road" will never come if you never leave the garage. One example is a little fun halloween project I did last year. It's nothing more than a simple servo that opens a box after a voice command through amazon Alexa. I a don't do much in the way of motors and electronics. So I tried to find a way to elegantly mount the servo in the box and build something that pushes the lid upwards. In the end I thought what the heck I'll just glue it down with endless amounts of hot glue hoping that it will stick. A year later when I wanted to retire my box to save some space it turns out that the glue stuck so well that I had to cut it out. So even if it is not elegant and could gave been done in a much more elegant way it worked and nobody cared how it was done. No matter how elegant your solution, most of the time you are judged by the result not the how. Here is the link to the box I was talking about https://youtu.be/BdbjoniAP0s https://youtu.be/BdbjoniAP0s
- syrusakbary 8y agoGraphene: https://graphene-python.org https://graphene-python.org - HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976794 I started working on it almost 3 years ago. Now about 5.000 companies all over the globe are using it including Yelp, Reddit & Mozilla. We're profitable and trying to expand our niche (GraphQL in Python) to more markets. Thinking on applying to YC in not a very far future :)
- llililliliil 8y agoI've seen this used at a large US research institution by data scientists doing health care statistics.
- danpalmer 8y agoI'm interested in how Quiver is going? It looks like this is your main revenue stream? I've looked at it before and been unsure what it does, and trying it now it doesn't seem to work for us (no requests ever reach quiver with the GraphQLQuiverCloudBackend). Is it production ready, or is it in preview at the moment? Edit: so the issue was that we had an extraneous trailing comma, which was turning a string (deprecation reason) into a 1-element tuple, which was then failing an assertion in the AST serialisation within graphql-core, however this assertion was being silenced by one of the backends - either the decider or the Quiver backend.
- zweicoder 8y agoHey, I'm curious as to how this works - how do you guys earn money?
- dfee 8y agoCheck your GitHub notifications about getting graphql-ws-next added to the team!
- parsadotsh 8y agoThat website looks really similar to hashicorp product websites. ex. https://www.consul.io/ https://www.consul.io/
- eruci 8y agoYes. I did a Show HN for https://geocode.xyz https://geocode.xyz about a year ago, revenue is up over 1000% YTY - although there could also be other factors at play. HN is where I got the best criticism though. The key to success is being able to know where you suck early on.
- ThomPete 8y agoNot a successful startup but a successful product. I launched https://www.ghostnoteapp.com https://www.ghostnoteapp.com in 2015 and it's going really well. Releasing a new version 2.0 and expanding with chrome extensions to allow you to annotate even more specific items. Thanks to HN it became a pretty good success. The original Show HN is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007
- jaxtellerSoA 8y ago>Not a successful startup but a successful product. What does that mean exactly? Lots of downloads/customers but not enough to be profitable (or not profitable enough to where it was worth the time and energy)? Or is it profitable, but you just don't view your single product as a "start-up", because maybe it is a one-man-show, and not something you do full time?
- ThomPete 8y agoThe latter. It's profitable but I don't consider it a startup as it's "just a product" perhaps at one point when I have expanded the product line enough I would consider it a startup but for now it's just a nice relatively profitable product.
- andygcook 8y agoDepends on how you’d define success. My older brother did a Show HN for his startup, NanaGram, about four months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17016374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17016374 The product’s now delivering family photos in the mail for hundreds of grandparents every month. They might not be making millions of dollars yet, but they are making some money and doing lots of good in the world by helping with elder loneliness. That’s a success to me.
- chris_mc 8y agoThat is a great idea that not only makes you cash--at a very fair price--but also helps people connect in a genuine fashion.
- andygcook 8y agoThanks! I've stepped away from initially working on the project in my spare time, but my brother @aacook is still going strong. Will pass your positive vibes along to him.
- aacook 8y agoThanks. I'm pushing on lowering the price. So many people are out there making minimum wage. Their grandparents deserve photos too.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- biagidp 8y agoI created an account to say that's really cool. I love seeing business that serve under-represented groups in the tech world.
- aacook 8y agoThanks! You created an account on HN or at NanaGram? :)
- patrickg_zill 8y agoDid Balsamiq start as a Show HN?
- realityking 8y agoContentful (https://www.contentful.com https://www.contentful.com) was originally a Show HN called StorageRoom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041 It's now a series C startup with over 200 employees and customers like Spotify, WeWork, Samsung, Nike, Jack in the Box, The British Museum (I work there)
- childintime 8y agoPM: search for "reSpository" snafu on your home page
- realityking 8y agoThank you! Fixed that :)
- tootie 8y agoContentful is the first developer-oriented CMS that actually appeals to businesses and marketers. I've had more than a few nightmares with the Adobe Marketing Cloud but most big businesses just automatically gravitate to those kind of products. Developers always want simple, easy to deploy and configure and something API-driven. Business wants drag and drop, dashboards, analytics and workflows and other nonsense. Contentful is the first CMS I've seen that is extremely developer-friendly, but is pretty enough to give the business folks confidence. You guys just need more of a spiel on your landing page to appeal to the marketers.
- GFischer 8y agoNice! My team was actually looking for a solution like this.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y agoThis is very timely for me — thanks!
- ivm 8y agoMy time tracking app[1] was bootstrapped with over $15k in sales from Show HN[2]. Without a launch like this, it would be much harder to work on it in the first year when organic sales were low. [1]: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778077
- Edmond 8y agoShow HN traffic can definitely have an impact but I'd also urge keeping in mind the causation vs correlation fallacy. Also the Show HN posts are not as organic as they appear, in other words I don't believe you just prepend Show HN to a post and see it go boom...they won't admit it but there is more happening behind the scene.
- revazquez 8y agoCan you clarify what you meant with "happening behind the scene"? Who are "they" that you are referring to? Thanks!
- searine 8y agoMastodon : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303346
- kevinconaway 8y agoCheckr Started 4 years ago[0] and raised $100m 5 months ago[1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7937476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7937476 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16820699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16820699
- RikNieu 8y agoI'm getting a DNS error on https://checkr.io/ https://checkr.io/. Just me?
- stephenhuey 8y agoI am as well. *edit: Looks like it's at https://checkr.com https://checkr.com
- martin-adams 8y agoI've been following Nathan Barry with ConvertKit. Not all Show HN gets traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583911 But that doesn't mean you wont still be successful: https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/ https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/
- RikNieu 8y agoThis one is incredible.
- caseyf 8y agoApr 4, 2011 "Show HN: my weekend project, Gumroad" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 May 7, 2012 "Gumroad raises $7 million from KPCB" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3939871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3939871
- muzani 8y ago"Over $156,000,000 has been made by over 38,011 bloggers, writers, and artists." Damn son! That's a lot more impressive than the money raised.
- theunixbeard 8y agoFunny to see the $0.70 Bitcoin reference and debate as to whether it would gain traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407053 Hacker News referencing Bitcoin in April, 2011
- stevesearer 8y agoFrom what I can tell, the first HN post referencing Bitcoin is this one from February 3, 2009, about a month after its initial release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793
- mrskitch 8y agoI’ve actually had the exact opposite happen: my ShowHN posts got nowhere, but the product itself became successful. I’m sure that the opposite is also true as well, but figured folks needed to hear that, just because your ShowHN post got nowhere, doesn’t mean there’s not a market fit for what you’re building. It just might not be interesting enough for the HN crowd, or you don’t have any name-recognition. For those who are curious the product is browserless.io. Rev chart is here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/browserless/revenue https://www.indiehackers.com/product/browserless/revenue EDIT: here’s my ShowHN post for posterity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15722617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15722617
- pc86 8y agoEven if the type of person who browses HN religiously is your exact target market, just posting at a bad time or being unlucky enough to post right before other relevant big news comes out is enough to get buried.
- mrskitch 8y agoThis is a good point. My lessons from this are to pick a time when traffic isn't as high so you have a chance of gaining some visibility. Getting on the frontpage during non-peak hours is better than getting on page 2 during peak hours.
- muzani 8y agoIt could be the way it's presented too. What does "headless Chrome as a service" even mean? When I look at the Github link, I actually understand what it does: "Severless Chrome on your own infrastructure. Each session gets its own clean Chrome context for total isolation. After the session is complete Chrome is shutdown. You can also think of it like a database connection where your app connects to browserless, runs some work, and gets results back." But it's fair. Titles are hard and HN shuns clickbait.
- piptastic 8y agoAlso you didn't respond to the person who did leave a comment. Tough to have a post take off that way.
- romanhn 8y agoPagerDuty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653. Valued at $1.3B this month.
- sidcool 8y agoDropbox did.
- mmattax 8y agoNov 14, 2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8653575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8653575 Not much traction on our Shown HN post, but we've had a lot of growth through our standup bots in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Still very much a startup, but we've re-branded to https://jell.com https://jell.com, have 4 employees, and a growing customer list!
- knoxa2511 8y agoSysdig - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524144 Raised 68M last week, 100+ total overall - https://sysdig.com/press-releases/sysdig-closes-series-d-funding/ https://sysdig.com/press-releases/sysdig-closes-series-d-fun...
- thecodemonkey 8y agoWe posted our side project as Show HN almost 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095228 As of Monday, both co-founders are working on it full time as a fully bootstrapped business.
- jsamuel 8y agoServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/ https://serverpilot.io/) --- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6733631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6733631 Our Show HN post didn't get much attention, but we also didn't have our marketing hopes set on that. We did turn into a successful startup, not in terms of raising money but instead in terms of growing off of revenue.
- tango12 8y agoHasura - https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540263 We'd been building the tech (realtime GraphQL on Postgres) for a while, but the HN launch gave us the initial visibility and a tremendous number of users, reviews. And within the last few weeks we have several users in production and enterprise clients too. :)
- lquist 8y agoPosted a Show HN about 6 years ago. On the front page for about half a day. We hold our cards close to our chest because ours is a competitive industry, so pardon the anonymity, but we are bootstrapped and did $10m+ in revenue last year with a healthy profit. Much love, HN :)
- megaman8 8y agoI would imagine that every successful/not-successful startup would post on Show HN. There are entire lists of places to post stuff, and I'm sure Show HN must be in the top 10.
- derwiki 8y agoDec 31, 2012 "Show HN: my weekend project, CameraLends" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4987929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4987929 (7 upvotes) Aug 5, 2013 "I launched my weekend project 7 months ago on HN – here's CameraLends today" (124 upvotes) Jan 10, 2017 "KitSplit Acquires CameraLends Becoming Biggest Online Camera Rental Company" https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliesportelli/2017/01/10/kitsplit-acquires-cameralends-to-become-biggest-online-camera-rental-company/#61065b3f4d5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliesportelli/2017/01/10/kit...
- hwoolery 8y agoMy project didn't get much attention on Show HN (or anywhere else), but I sent a cold email to Mark Cuban and offered to invest pretty quickly. So don't get too disheartened if your project gets a tepid response. Orignal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14459876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14459876
- rwieruch 8y agoI did a Show HN for my React book two years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13170837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13170837 Since then I transitioned from being employed at a startup to being self-employed where I split my time doing 50% consulting work (which is passively generated through my blog) and the other 50% for educational platform/books https://roadtoreact.com https://roadtoreact.com Hacker News gave me one of the initial feedbacks which made me follow this passion :)
- kashosoft 8y agoAlways interesting to read comments about the product after 10 years and it`s success :)
- gesman 8y agoOne blog post on my own crappy blog - turned into ~$1M so far.
- kull 8y agoSegment https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-product-market-fit-at-segment/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/peter-reinhardt-on-finding-prod...