5 ms·

Did you ever have any users? Or did the technical challenges stop you short of shipping the product?

by maximp 5y ago

dharmaturtle 5y ago
No users - no launch. I have many conversations with potential users though... I'm 100% positive this is something that people want. E.g. right now the way they solve the problem of collaborating on flashcards is by using _google sheets_ to collect errata on shared decks. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/official_errata_google_doc_links_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/o... This workflow involves manually checking the sheets link, downloading it, converting it to the correct format, importing it into your collection, and hope it doesn't override/corrupt your own customizations to a particular card. It's absolutely fucking nuts. I'm 100% sure it (or something like it) is desperately needed by the world. However, students aren't really well known for paying for software, so this remains a nights/weekends thing.
- quadrature 5y ago
  Can you launch without offline sync ?.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    Great question. I've thought hard about this. I originally built it to be online-first, thinking "you can add offline support later". This is the version that's demoed in the video on the Github - and is over a year old at this point. I abandoned this for multiple reasons: 1. Adding offline support is very nontrivial. It (may) influence your choice of DB and your data schema. This is a type of master-master replication, since the user is the master of their data, and this is quite painful in RDBMS-land. I'm avoiding having to migrate my schema to support offline sync. 2. There already exist solutions that are online-first. E.g. Quizlet, mochi.cards, remnote. I find all their tools for collaboration lacking, despite being online-first... which is surprising. They don't even support something as basic as commenting on a card. This blows my mind. Imagine Github without issues/discussions/pull requests. 3. Users have repeatedly told me that they prefer offline-first. This is probably due to them coming from Anki - a popular open source offline-first program. Anki is my real "competition" - not billion-dollar Quizlet.
    - knubie 5y ago
      Mochi is not online first, it is offline first.
      - dharmaturtle 5y ago
        Ah whoops - you're right. Also - hi, it's you! If you're willing to talk shop, you can reach me at my HN handle at gmail.com. Primarily, I'm curious why no one else is building what I am - Github for flashcards. I've met someone who's trying to build Wikipedia for flashcards... but for me personally I'm more interested in something more decentralized. Not like crypto-decentralized, but like "everyone can have their own card/definition of 'Proteus Syndrome'" - i.e. they don't defer to a central authority. I'd love to pick your brain :) No pressure, just an open invitation! My comment here [1] is still accurate: > If there's only one thing you know about me, it should be that I want Spaced Repetition to become popular. I don't care who makes it popular - it simply needs to be popular. I'll happily talk shop with anyone building a tools-for-thought system and tell you all I've learned. [1] https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow/issues/3 https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow/issues/3
        knubie 5y ago
        Yeah I’d love to chat. I’ll shoot you an email.

Did you ever have any users? Or did the technical challenges stop you short of shipping the product?

by maximp 5y ago

Did you ever have any users? Or did the technical challenges stop you short of shipping the product?

No users - no launch. I have many conversations with potential users though... I'm 100% positive this is something that people want. E.g. right now the way they solve the problem of collaborating on flashcards is by using _google sheets_ to collect errata on shared decks. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/official_errata_google_doc_links_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/o... This workflow involves manually checking the sheets link, downloading it, converting it to the correct format, importing it into your collection, and hope it doesn't override/corrupt your own customizations to a particular card. It's absolutely fucking nuts. I'm 100% sure it (or something like it) is desperately needed by the world. However, students aren't really well known for paying for software, so this remains a nights/weekends thing.

quadrature 5y ago
Can you launch without offline sync ?.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  Great question. I've thought hard about this. I originally built it to be online-first, thinking "you can add offline support later". This is the version that's demoed in the video on the Github - and is over a year old at this point. I abandoned this for multiple reasons: 1. Adding offline support is very nontrivial. It (may) influence your choice of DB and your data schema. This is a type of master-master replication, since the user is the master of their data, and this is quite painful in RDBMS-land. I'm avoiding having to migrate my schema to support offline sync. 2. There already exist solutions that are online-first. E.g. Quizlet, mochi.cards, remnote. I find all their tools for collaboration lacking, despite being online-first... which is surprising. They don't even support something as basic as commenting on a card. This blows my mind. Imagine Github without issues/discussions/pull requests. 3. Users have repeatedly told me that they prefer offline-first. This is probably due to them coming from Anki - a popular open source offline-first program. Anki is my real "competition" - not billion-dollar Quizlet.
  - knubie 5y ago
    Mochi is not online first, it is offline first.
    - dharmaturtle 5y ago
      Ah whoops - you're right. Also - hi, it's you! If you're willing to talk shop, you can reach me at my HN handle at gmail.com. Primarily, I'm curious why no one else is building what I am - Github for flashcards. I've met someone who's trying to build Wikipedia for flashcards... but for me personally I'm more interested in something more decentralized. Not like crypto-decentralized, but like "everyone can have their own card/definition of 'Proteus Syndrome'" - i.e. they don't defer to a central authority. I'd love to pick your brain :) No pressure, just an open invitation! My comment here [1] is still accurate: > If there's only one thing you know about me, it should be that I want Spaced Repetition to become popular. I don't care who makes it popular - it simply needs to be popular. I'll happily talk shop with anyone building a tools-for-thought system and tell you all I've learned. [1] https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow/issues/3 https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow/issues/3
      - knubie 5y ago
        Yeah I’d love to chat. I’ll shoot you an email.