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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

• navalsaini 6y ago
  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.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• notoriousarun 6y ago
  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 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.
  • tomwojcik 6y ago
    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?
    • scanny 6y ago
      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).
  • throwaway3699 6y ago
    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.
  • ttamslam 6y ago
    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!
  • chad_strategic 6y ago
    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!
• koellewe 6y ago
  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/NEC https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.
  • arbol 6y ago
    Wow that really sucks! Sorry to hear that. I suppose you would've needed patents on the idea to stop them from stealing it.
    • vmception 6y ago
      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.
  • killtimeatwork 6y ago
    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.
    • 6y ago
• StavrosK 6y ago
  I have the opposite problem: I built https://imgz.org 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/ https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/
  • tomwojcik 6y ago
    "... 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.
    • StavrosK 6y ago
      For asking people if they're ashamed? I doubt it, but I'm not an expert either.
    • tubularhells 6y ago
      How fragile Americans must be...
    • playpause 6y ago
      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
  • mckirk 6y ago
    I have to admit, I much prefer this approach of "honest abuse" to most sites' business models.
    • muzani 6y ago
      Haha, I'm tempted to throw money at it too.
      • 6y ago
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  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.
  • Havoc 6y ago
    >in person services >All construction. Slightly confused by that wording. Do you mean actual contruction as in build things with a hammer?
  • ldx1024 6y ago
    "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?")
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  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.
• stanislavb 6y ago
  https://99remotejobs.com 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.
  • truetaurus 6y ago
    Something similar: https://launchafrica.io https://launchafrica.io but still have hope! Jobboard for startup and tech jobs in africa
  • that_guy_iain 6y ago
    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.
  • blackrock 6y ago
    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.
    • rozenmd 6y ago
      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.
  • t3rabytes 6y ago
    https://weworkremotely.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/ is a pretty big remote job board that is likely siphoning away most traffic
    • 6y ago
• loraa 6y ago
  Problem is sales. Realistically you need someone who can hustle.
• yalooze 6y ago
  https://www.musictaco.co.uk 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!
  • asutekku 6y ago
    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.
    • polynomial 6y ago
      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.)
      • fapjacks 6y ago
        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.
• iambateman 6y ago
  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.
  • arbol 6y ago
    This sounds like a project that would benefit from some kind of clustering algorithm using machine learning. Is that how you did it?
    • iambateman 6y ago
      I agree but no, it’s manual data entry at the moment.
    • alexchamberlain 6y ago
      It sounds like a project someone would use a clustering algorithm for, where a moderated user submission would be better.
      • arbol 6y ago
        Perhaps, but it's not so easy to generate user submissions. Scraping would quickly get you a lot more data to work with.
  • heliodor 6y ago
    https://saaspages.xyz/ https://saaspages.xyz/ does that as a way of driving traffic to their paid product, a landing page builder.
  • godmode2019 6y ago
    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
• cosbgn 6y ago
  Weather-marketing.now.sh - A tool to sync FB & Google Ads with the current & future weather forecast
• fearlesswizard 6y ago
  https://letsfork.app 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.
  • freewilly1040 6y ago
    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.
• Ologn 6y ago
  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.
  • blackrock 6y ago
    Is there really a large enough market that would want to fiddle with an Access db file on their Android phones?
• miniyarov 6y ago
  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 https://www.zudvpn.com GitHub: https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN
  • ayewo 6y ago
    This guide https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand 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!
  • bobkrusty 6y ago
    I use free vpn app with ads on my android. Why they can
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    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.
• lw5 6y ago
  I have built a couple of WordPress plugin directory websites: * https://gravityextend.com/ https://gravityextend.com/ - Gravity Forms add-ons * https://woo-plugin.com/ 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.
• robric 6y ago
  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.
  • ptd 6y ago
    This business sounds like it would lend itself well to an ISA model.
    • robric 6y ago
      I Googled ISA model but it didn't make sense to me in the context of monetizing this site. May you expound on this?
      • mrud 6y ago
        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
      • daanlo 6y ago
        I assume by ISA they mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_share_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_share_agreement
• nickelcitymario 6y ago
  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 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.
• tomcam 6y ago
  I spent $1.4 million of my own money attempting to dethrone Craigslist in 2007. Didn't work.
  • BenoitP 6y ago
    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?
    • tomcam 6y ago
      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.
      • randomsearch 6y ago
        Hard agree on the Mom test. Sorry you spent all that cash, hope that you got something out of it.
  • bobkrusty 6y ago
    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
    • tomcam 6y ago
      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.
• asicsp 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/learnbyexample/squaretictactoe I wanted to re-implement in Python later, started it but never finished. May be next year ;)
  • fapjacks 6y ago
    Congrats on trying something new after your burnout.
• prash2488 6y ago
  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.
• notoriousarun 6y ago
  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?
  • dang 6y ago
    It set off the flamewar detector. That's the "software that demotes overheated discussions" mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581828 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.
• throwAway9234LL 6y ago
  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.
  • freewilly1040 6y ago
    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..
    • jbjbjbjb 6y ago
      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.
    • throwAway9234LL 6y ago
      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.
• shakow 6y ago
  Hyades (https://hyades.info/ 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.
  • p2detar 6y ago
    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.
  • milani 6y ago
    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.
• microLED5nano 6y ago
  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.
  • phreeza 6y ago
    Is this some kind of bot? I can't parse the response at all.
    • microLED5nano 6y ago
      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.
  • sontek 6y ago
    markov chain?
  • ttamslam 6y ago
    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.
  • vasergen 6y ago
    LOL
  • ecedeno 6y ago
    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-ebook/dp/B083F1Q95Z https://www.amazon.com/Computer-News-2018-19-micro-meter-ebo...
• j3th9n 6y ago
  https://wifimask.com 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.
  • rrrrrraul 6y ago
    Good on you for sticking with it. I too tried launching a similar service in this market, you’re right, the “big boys” marketing is everywhere and drowns out smaller service providers. Keep going, good luck.
    • j3th9n 6y ago
      Thank you!
  • tHap1 6y ago
    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
    • j3th9n 6y ago
      Interesting, this was probably due to "DNS tunnel mode": https://www.your-freedom.net/index.php?id=dns-tunneling https://www.your-freedom.net/index.php?id=dns-tunneling I will look into this more, thanks! :-)
• benibela 6y ago
  My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ 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
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    > 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?
    • 1f60c 6y ago
      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".
  • poulsbohemian 6y ago
    > 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.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• rsync 6y ago
  "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 https://0x.co
  • bamboleo 6y ago
    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”
  • ufmace 6y ago
    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 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.
    • rsync 6y ago
      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 ...
  • kyleShropshire 6y ago
    https://0x.co/TRKFVR https://0x.co/TRKFVR
• awinter-py 6y ago
  loooong list culminating in ratelimits.dev some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
  • ttamslam 6y ago
    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.
    • awinter-py 6y ago
      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.
  • yonixw 6y ago
    When I searched for something like that, all I found was to hide my serverless behind RapidAPI, which also include costumer facing payment processing.
    • awinter-py 6y ago
      hadn't heard of rapidapi, thanks for the tip what made you specifically search for rate limiting?
      • yonixw 6y ago
        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
• ganashaw 6y ago
  I spent about 6 months building Itinee (https://itinee.com 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
  • freewilly1040 6y ago
    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?
    • ssss11 6y ago
      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.
      • ganashaw 6y ago
        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!
    • ganashaw 6y ago
      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!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jpulec 6y ago
  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.
  • TheDong 6y ago
    That sounds almost exactly like bors-ng: https://github.com/bors-ng/bors-ng#a-merge-bot-for-github-pull-requests 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?
    • jpulec 6y ago
      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.
  • steve_taylor 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  • akritrime 6y ago
    looks super sleek, but I think a landing page that explains what's tiblar and why I should use it would help.
  • sontek 6y ago
    What is it? Looks like a social network? Is it competing with generic ones like FB or does it have a niche?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• rikroots 6y ago
  > 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 https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas [2] Scrawl-canvas home page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/ https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/ [3] My creative coding collection on Codepen - https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv
• Taig 6y ago
  I recently launched a website that allows users to book a locksmith for emergency door openings (https://slozzer.net/ 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.
  • wcarss 6y ago
    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.
    • Taig 6y ago
      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.
• jtwaleson 6y ago
  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 https://utrechtaandemuur.nl
  • weaksauce 6y ago
    have you considered localizing and selling it to english speaking countries too? cool looking maps but not all that accessible.
  • yosefjaved1 6y ago
    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.
    • unixhero 6y ago
      Nuce business. I didn't see an English version of the site.
  • blackrock 6y ago
    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?
    • briandear 6y ago
      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.
• kmf 6y ago
  Working on https://jobsindevrel.com 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 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!
• keeble 6y ago
  Personal skincare routine assistant https://bomiapp.com/ 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.
• arkadiyt 6y ago
  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 https://logsnitch.com.
  • pc86 6y ago
    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?
• freeplay 6y ago
  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.
• mariushn 6y ago
  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/ https://hoteliera.com/
  • pc86 6y ago
    Great design!
    • mariushn 6y ago
      Thanks :)
  • dlkinney 6y ago
    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...
    • mariushn 6y ago
      Thank you, I'll look into it!
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    It probably doesn’t pay to make it free, and especially to advertise it as such. Price it as if the value is $200+/month and maybe people will feel it’s worth it.
    • mariushn 6y ago
      Thanks!
• chaostheory 6y ago
  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 https://theymadethat.com Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a371fc76a4c 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_by 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_versions 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
  • chris_f 6y ago
    This is cool. Are all of the entries manually added, or are you also pulling in information from outside structured sources like Wikipedia?
    • chaostheory 6y ago
      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.
• lpellis 6y ago
  I built https://pagewatch.dev 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.
• fierarul 6y ago
  I've spent a whole bunch of time on CoolBeans (now OpenBeans http://www.openbeans.org 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.
  • ldx1024 6y ago
    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
    • fierarul 6y ago
      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 :)
• scyclow 6y ago
  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 https://ronamerch.co
  • manuelisimo 6y ago
    Maybe try fewer animations
    • kawera 6y ago
      Or zero animations, even better.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • hitpointdrew 6y ago
    Having a site that is less busy might be helpful....all the motion on your site makes me want to click away immediately.
  • mrhackernews 6y ago
    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.
    • rusticpenn 6y ago
      You weren't kidding. I underestimated the effect the site would have on me.
      • s279 6y ago
        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?
• jedgardyson 6y ago
  Been working on https://tryquilt.com 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.
• rangelreale 6y ago
  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 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!
  • rangelreale 6y ago
    Also take a look at the marvelous table-based design of the app website: http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html
  • dave84 6y ago
    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.
  • joshcain 6y ago
    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.)?
    • rangelreale 6y ago
      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 http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html
• mgreenleaf 6y ago
  https://yakdocs.com 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.
  • asutekku 6y ago
    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.
    • mgreenleaf 6y ago
      Thank you, that is very helpful. I will be pulling my mac out of storage and fix that :P
• dejv 6y ago
  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.
  • blackrock 6y ago
    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?
    • dejv 6y ago
      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)
  • tobyhinloopen 6y ago
    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
• seanwilson 6y ago
  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 https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid
  • japhyr 6y ago
    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!
    • seanwilson 6y ago
      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.
  • robbiejs 6y ago
• CrackpotGonzo 6y ago
  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 https://www.thisorthat.ai
  • rattray 6y ago
    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.
    • jstummbillig 6y ago
      Did your YC feedback yield hints as to why you were rejected (I am presuming)?
      • rattray 6y ago
        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.
    • 6y ago
• apankrat 6y ago
  Digital time-stamping service called CertTime. Here's the post-mortem - https://swapped.ch/certtime https://swapped.ch/certtime
  • yonixw 6y ago
    Great read, thanks.
• wj 6y ago
  StartOpz (https://www.startopz.com 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.
• les_diabolique 6y ago
  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.
  • guidovranken 6y ago
    Will you sell me your database?
    • les_diabolique 6y ago
      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.
• tekdude 6y ago
  Pulselyre: A touch-screen synthesizer app for live music production - https://www.pulselyre.com 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 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 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.
  • michae2 6y ago
• Void_ 6y ago
  Definitely https://focuslite.app https://focuslite.app I built it for myself, and really expected to make something on it. But didn't get anywhere.
  • smk_ 6y ago
    Seems interesting, similar to the app ColdTurkey. Been looking for something like this since reading Deep Work, will check it out.
• semireg 6y ago
  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/ https://semireg.com/mass/ and https://semireg.com/labelscope/ 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 https://label.live
  • troymc 6y ago
    Could you say more about why you think the original mac apps "failed?" Small market? Lack of promotion? Cost too high? What?
    • semireg 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • statictype 6y ago
    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?
• malinens 6y ago
  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...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mbostleman 6y ago
  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.
  • matt_the_bass 6y ago
    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.
• albertgoeswoof 6y ago
  https://tab.bz 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.
• meepery 6y ago
  I spent around 6 months of my spare time to build BonFive (https://bonfive.com 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...
• steviedotboston 6y ago
  http://eruvstat.us 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...
  • CallMeMarc 6y ago
    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
    • steviedotboston 6y ago
      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
      • CallMeMarc 6y ago
        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=PLEyPgwIPkHo77DOhpb1OBl18uLcB-IrUX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YTmrCLeidc&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...)
        • steviedotboston 6y ago
          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.
• tobyhede 6y ago
  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.
  • type0 6y ago
    StoryWall name sounds like an outliner app, maybe you should have pivoted into that.
• neltnerb 6y ago
  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.
  • tobyhinloopen 6y ago
    Are you sure? Twinkly is doing fine I guess. Maybe focus on xmas lights.
    • neltnerb 6y ago
      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.
  • jve 6y ago
    Got anything to show us?
    • neltnerb 6y ago
      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-2008-11-03-backlight-off.avi http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/artwork/ultraluminous-2008-1...
• boyter 6y ago
  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.
• karthikvellanki 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/karthikvellanki/tunnel Demo: https://shrouded-eyrie-25569.herokuapp.com/ https://shrouded-eyrie-25569.herokuapp.com/
• 0xdba 6y ago
  I created an online typing training site: https://typefast.dev 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.
• abj 6y ago
  Edit
  • asutekku 6y ago
    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.
    • abj 6y ago
      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.
• ZguideZ 6y ago
  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.
  • ZguideZ 6y ago
    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.
    • type0 6y ago
      > The other alternative to the pointy nose theory you'd think it would have been much more successful with Obama
      • scottmf 6y ago
        ?
        • oarsinsync 6y ago
          Obama’s nose is a bit flatter than GWB’s, so would poke out a bit less.
  • dmje 6y ago
    Almost uncontrollable LOL here
  • viraj_shah 6y ago
    This is hilarious. Thank you for the laughs.
• Scizor 6y ago
  Built a quick MVP (https://xboxprofile.com/ 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.
• ZguideZ 6y ago
  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.
  • shakezula 6y ago
    Reminds me of Cha Cha. And wow it’s been a long time since I thought about Cha Cha.
• engineerdeck 6y ago
  https://engineerdeck.com 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.
  • vvll 6y ago
    Are the listings added by users? If so it seems like it’s quite active!
    • engineerdeck 6y ago
      Some yes, some I add. I get spammed every so often. I don't understand why someone would spam me with random Russian stuff.
• ZguideZ 6y ago
  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
  • mattmanser 6y ago
    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.
    • ZguideZ 6y ago
      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.
• Mc_Big_G 6y ago
  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 :)
• TheNewAndy 6y ago
  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/id1539646329 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/ http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).
  • dave84 6y ago
    App not available on the Irish App Store.
    • TheNewAndy 6y ago
      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.
  • ytdytvhxgydvhh 6y ago
    Clicked, saw “This developer does not collect any data from this app”, bought.
    • TheNewAndy 6y ago
      Thank you so much. Really appreciated.
  • tobyhinloopen 6y ago
    App not available in my country (the Netherlands). Sad. We have money too, you know
    • TheNewAndy 6y ago
      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.
• alexh1 6y ago
  Portabella (https://portabella.io 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 https://block-hooks.com) but that's very early days. I expect as the Celo ecosystem grows I'll get customers.
  • high_priest 6y ago
    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.
• rozenmd 6y ago
  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 https://PerfBeacon.com - (PerfBeacon helps you keep your app/site fast by automating Google Lighthouse checks), and https://MaxRozen.com https://MaxRozen.com - where I write weekly about React, and have started selling a book on useEffect.
• Jsharm 6y ago
  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/B081GV8Y7V https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharman-What-Animal-Am-I/dp/B081GV8...
• 37ef_ced3 6y ago
  NN-512 (https://NN-512.com 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
  • staunch 6y ago
    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)
    • 37ef_ced3 6y ago
      Thank you for this thoughtful reply!
    • 6y ago
• pul 6y ago
  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 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.
  • NicoJuicy 6y ago
    https://www.nslookup.io/ 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?
    • pul 6y ago
      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).
      • petercooper 6y ago
        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
        • pul 6y ago
          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.
• godmode2019 6y ago
  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.
• jason_zig 6y ago
  I built http://hopscotch.global 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.
• newguy1234 6y ago
  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.
• lostmsu 6y ago
  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=610036494 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61003...
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    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.
    • lostmsu 6y ago
      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.
  • Can_Not 6y ago
    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.
• Rinum 6y ago
  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.
  • mguerville 6y ago
    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
  • superice 6y ago
    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:)
    • fapjacks 6y ago
      Interesting, so which technologies do 16 and 17 year olds learn in HS CS courses?
      • superice 6y ago
        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)
• LarryMade2 6y ago
  https://doplaces.com 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.
• dukoid 6y ago
  Quotations search site: https://quotations.ch/quotations/ https://quotations.ch/quotations/ I don't think we have any subscribers for the non-free variant.
• braydo25 6y ago
  https://www.webwall.io https://www.webwall.io - a privacy focused chrome extension I built over a weekend. Hit 1k users in a week or two but $0
• testmasterflex 6y ago
  https://Loodio.com https://Loodio.com A poop device. Well, Kickstarter coming soon so we will see. Video demo: https://youtu.be/XSBPfK-ZIsA https://youtu.be/XSBPfK-ZIsA
• geocrasher 6y ago
  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.
  • TwoBit 6y ago
    This would have made bank on iPhone back in 2008 when novelty apps (eg BeerMe) were big.
• onlyreply 6y ago
  https://www.hangurself.com https://www.hangurself.com spent a total of about $50
• borepop 6y ago
  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.
• CalRobert 6y ago
  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.
  • joe_91 6y ago
    Great idea! I'd thought of doing something similar for years. I can't believe the likes of Daft haven't added something like this in yet. It's so useful and you've a load of filters! How much time did you spend on it and how/where did you get the data from do you mind me asking?
• cg94301 6y ago
  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
  • maest 6y ago
    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.
    • cg94301 6y ago
      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.
• cg94301 6y ago
  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 http://turboquant.com
• asfarley 6y ago
  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.
• Grimm1 6y ago
  https://app.scrollkeeper.com 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.
• mpermar 6y ago
  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.
  • giovannibonetti 6y ago
    You can share it here! You have our attention :)
  • sugarkjube 6y ago
    Rumour is due to covid a babyboom is coming, so soon there will be a lot of potential for your app.
    • Flimm 6y ago
      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.
  • mobilio 6y ago
    This pandemia really crush all tourism industry...
    • eb0la 6y ago
      For at least two years
  • mindhash 6y ago
    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
• purplecats 6y ago
  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.
• kbelder 6y ago
  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.
  • kumarm 6y ago
    Why not call your app "Hexadoku - Hexdecimal Sudoku"?. There is no reason not do do the app just because someone grabbed the name.
  • austinjp 6y ago
    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 :)
• arnaudsm 6y ago
  Built a modern comparison engine for tech products (https://picked.arnaud.at 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!
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    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.
    • arnaudsm 6y ago
      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.
• ipodopt 6y ago
  The one I haven't launched.
• iandanforth 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • probably_wrong 6y ago
    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.
• mguerville 6y ago
  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
  • seppin 6y ago
    curious, have you had any successes ? (respectfully)
    • mguerville 6y ago
      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
      • sib301 6y ago
        What did you sell it for if you don’t mind my asking?
• konst75 6y ago
  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.
• wcchandler 6y ago
  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.
  • edoceo 6y ago
    You can also have lots of fun with growth experiment, finding good light, nutrients mixes for better yield/flavor. Blog it and tell us!
• nevster 6y ago
  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...
• balls187 6y ago
  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.
• nevster 6y ago
  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.
  • plumeria 6y ago
    So, something like GeoGuessr?
  • issa 6y ago
    I think this is a great idea. Did you ever do anything with it?
    • nevster 6y ago
      Absolutely nothing! Other than a bit of paper brainstorming. Too many other things to work on.
  • pontifier 6y ago
    Oh man... I have no idea how many domains I've bought over the years. Hundreds... none have gone anywhere.
• leonroy 6y ago
  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 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!
• AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  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/ https://questinglog.com/2020-year-in-review/
• malloreon 6y ago
  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.
• jpomykala 6y ago
  https://PlaceFlare.com 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 https://SimpleLocalize.io and it’s way better. Currently MMR is not impressive but it’s getting better
• pravenj 6y ago
  Starting 1998, every couple of years I have taken up one or other side projects, which have all ended up not making a penny or even had much visits. My misadventures have been documented really well by the Waybackmachine in archive.org Here is an example -- https://web.archive.org/web/20001017145942/http://www.nepalnet.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20001017145942/http://www.nepaln... This was a travel and hotel booking website we made using Perl starting 1998. Then there was a Indic text editor tool, based on character map image exchange, that didn't go anywhere. As I was building the editor, so was Unicode becoming more common. After that was rating system for anything using Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient. I specifically used it for hotels and universities. Again Wayback machine reminds me that they existed -- https://web.archive.org/web/20130513055430/http://www.prjoshi.com.np/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130513055430/http://www.prjosh... In between there were tools for early learners, used goods exchange and even a product demo system where people could give incremental feedback on specific aspects of the product. After 22 years, I have realized that most projects failed because I was more into the programming aspect of them. Once the products were done programmatically upto a level in which I was satisfied I failed to follow through with marketing or even creating basic awareness. With that discovered self-realization I started doing things low tech, meaning requiring very less programming work from the start of 2020. This included making videos on youtube and making what I call a Visual encyclopedia website, http://www.viewpedia.org http://www.viewpedia.org Now I realize that marketing or awareness creation part is equally hard. I have been trying to get my site ranked on Google and Bing for last few months and haven't gotten anywhere. Youtube videos, the highest count is 500 views. I hope to document my projects in last 22 years and my current learnings for marketing in articles that I hope to post to HN later.
• ehnto 6y ago
  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.
  • mapster 6y ago
    What did store locator do? We’re hosting costs too much?
• gravyboat 6y ago
  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 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 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.
• steve_taylor 6y ago
  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.
• bsenftner 6y ago
  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 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.
• nerf0 6y ago
  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 https://playcards.live
  • blackrock 6y ago
    > 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?
• codingdave 6y ago
  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.
• the_cat_kittles 6y ago
  ls ~/projects
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    this would crash my 64GB of ram and 16 core cpu.
• ublaze 6y ago
  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.
  • mike_d 6y ago
    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.
• milani 6y ago
  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 ;)
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    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
• roshan4074 6y ago
  I worked with a few folks to build Whatscookin.us It's a community building through food sharing attempt.
• thom 6y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/lemonwatcher/status/1286082683412582403
• ank-26 6y ago
  Two years ago we built this tool https://imagetranslate.com 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.
  • tomikk 6y ago
    Oh, this is really cool idea. And executed well. Bookmarking it!
  • Jetroid 6y ago
    I like this a lot. I assume you are using machine translation on the backend?
• px43 6y ago
  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.
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    I hope you kept a few of those coins for yourself and are rich now!
    • px43 6y ago
      I'm lucky to be doing financially better than most in this world, but I just love spending bitcoins too much, so not retired on a tropical island quite yet.
• oskarahl 6y ago
  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/ https://www.glitterly.app/
• aik 6y ago
  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.
  • codingrightnow 6y ago
    I would like to use this. Any way to get access?
    • aik 6y ago
      There isn’t at the moment. Curious what part interests you?
  • bluebit 6y ago
    You do realize that the bull run is back again? Might be a good idea to look into this again.
    • aik 6y ago
      Yeah thinking about it! It was time consuming. Also I’m thinking the market this time around will be more mature than last time but don’t know, watching it.
  • 6y ago
• failedsides 6y ago
  https://categorybooks.com/ 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.
  • basicneo 6y ago
    I like the idea, and your website looks great. What would you do differently if you had to redo it?
    • failedsides 6y ago
      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!
• ransom1538 6y ago
  www.opendoctor.io blocked by google :(
• eloisius 6y ago
  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.
• lone-cloud 6y ago
  I built https://www.tomati.io/ 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.
• ununoctium87 6y ago
  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
  • a13n 6y ago
    > 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.
  • hanniabu 6y ago
    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.
• artworx 6y ago
  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.
• paulsmal 6y ago
  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/sqldeveloper-landing.html https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldevel... 1: https://github.com/letitcrash/nora https://github.com/letitcrash/nora
• WA 6y ago
  * I made something similar to https://keywordtool.io/ 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.
• occase 6y ago
  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 https://www.occase.de
• scyzoryk_xyz 6y ago
  Scarves - anyone want to buy one? I have a full suitcase
• wiradikusuma 6y ago
  I made an Android app to keep track of my domain name collections -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=id.every 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.
  • besulzbach 6y ago
    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.
    • wiradikusuma 6y ago
      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.
• p5v 6y ago
  Here are three of mine: - https://linqable.pro/ https://linqable.pro/ - https://podradio.live https://podradio.live - https://arounda.world/ https://arounda.world/ All three built in 2020 with the awesome Elixir Phoenix. Hopefully, at least one of them will take off in 2021.
• tonixx 6y ago
  I've built https://MillionDollarTablet.com https://MillionDollarTablet.com as a spin to the famous Million Dollar Homepage from 2010, but it only made $100 so far :)
• dannyhodge 6y ago
  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.
• edumucelli 6y ago
  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.
• memset 6y ago
  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!
  • snarkypixel 6y ago
    > 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)
• andreygrehov 6y ago
  https://www.bithub.com 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)_/¯
  • bambataa 6y ago
    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.
• hemantv 6y ago
  I recently built https://app.savvyli.com 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/ncddkklmijpmmddaaginfnnmaphngdko https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/savvy-li/ncddkklmi...
• neok 6y ago
  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.
• james862 6y ago
  I created a great lockdown friendly game (whilst stuck in lockdown myself ...). It’s called ‘Imposter the party game’ Open to all feedback! :)
• james862 6y ago
  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! :)
• Volrath89 6y ago
  https://developerjobs.world 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
• elliottkember 6y ago
  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 https://shop.soulmatelights.com/products/square and the IDE I’m building is at https://editor.soulmatelights.com/tutorial https://editor.soulmatelights.com/tutorial
  • Guest19023892 6y ago
    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.
• atylerrice 6y ago
  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.
• silexia 6y ago
  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.
• puntofisso 6y ago
  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/ http://liverugbyapp.puntofisso.net/
• tmaly 6y ago
  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.
• bengtan 6y ago
  Hi, I wrote (and am still writing) Gig'o'Books (http://www.gigobooks.com 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.
  • templarchamp 6y ago
    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.
    • bengtan 6y ago
      Hi, Do you mind if we talk? Please email me at ${username} + '1@' + 'gmail' + ${dotcom} Thanks.
• patbwill 6y ago
  Late 2019, I launched https://stocks2.com 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.
  • templarchamp 6y ago
    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?
    • patbwill 6y ago
      Currently, 3.5k pageviews/month. Used to be 60k. Traffic comes from Bing and social media.
• harshadbarge 6y ago
  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.
  • Jugurtha 6y ago
    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?
    • harshadbarge 6y ago
      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.
      • Jugurtha 6y ago
        >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?
• bbeckford 6y ago
  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 :/
• threefiveapp 6y ago
  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.
• caviv 6y ago
  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 https://meeba-app.com)