11 ms·

Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

111 points by sylvinus 14y ago

j21 14y ago
Made http://www.clipchoose.com http://www.clipchoose.com in May. Never intended it to be profitable, more of a learning experience (first webapp).
daeken 14y ago
A week or two ago I launched http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ to enable WebGL on iOS devices. In theory, it's profitable -- it cost me nothing (outside of a few hours of dev, which I spent on myself anyway) and has made a whopping $26 or so -- but it'll never really go above that, and 'sales' have already stagnated. It was interesting to see the breakdown of downloads versus payment, and how much people paid. I also wonder how much I would've made if I put it up for, say, $1 only. Edit: Also interesting that it got quite a bit of attention on HN and several hundred (maybe 400?) downloads and not a single sale (from what I could tell). That surprised me a bit; every sale has been driven by people coming from tweets that some big names in the jailbreaking scene retweeted.
sushidev 14y ago
I've created http://pazler.com http://pazler.com, and it isn't making any profits :) Built using Clojure, Postgresql, StringTemplate, hosted at Hetzner. Learned quite a lot of things in the process..
- iSloth 14y ago
  Looks a bit like http://pinterest.com/ http://pinterest.com/ ;)
  - sushidev 14y ago
    Any self respecting programmer must create a Pinterest clone these days.. lol
- jcfrei 14y ago
  yeah.... who didn't have that idea, creating a pinterest clone full of amazon affiliate links - would've been too easy if that actually worked ;) on a sidenote: good job on the design, looks solid!
iSloth 14y ago
Only project I have done this year (http://route.im http://route.im), makes $xx/pm however doubt that it would ever cover the server costs, especially when more locations are added. Although it was done more for me, than generating revenue, so that's not too bad.
- zschallz 14y ago
  You could do an Ookla like thing and create a mini version people can host. My server seems to be in the same place as yours, otherwise I wouldn't have minded hosting one.
leothom 14y ago
Although not really a tech company, I started http://www.thoughtthreads.org/ http://www.thoughtthreads.org/ with a few university friends. We don't expect it to be profitable since it's a non-profit. :)
- schrijver 14y ago
  Cool; I’d have put a dash in there thought-threads.org, kind of hard to read like this
sherbondy 14y ago
I created http://www.sherbondy.com http://www.sherbondy.com, a website that gives family members free subdomains @sherbondy.com. Learned Clojure while making it. Wrote the entire thing in Clojure and ClojureScript. Tons of fun. I've even open-sourced it so that others can do the same for their families: https://github.com/sherbondy/sherbondy.com https://github.com/sherbondy/sherbondy.com Still need to fix/optimize a bunch of stuff and better document/test, but it was a nice break from studying for exams. And man am I loving Clojure.
guruz 14y ago
We started to offer hosting for the Quassel IRC client. Not sure if this will make enough money this year to pay for the server we're running it on. But at least it is a small start in transitioning to be some kind of product company instead of just doing consulting/contracting. http://woboq.com/quassel.html http://woboq.com/quassel.html
ngcoders 14y ago
Locux - Low cost linux , we are trying to create open source very low cost linux platform ... it wont be profitable :) . http://www.ngcoders.com/category/projects/locux-projects http://www.ngcoders.com/category/projects/locux-projects
garethsprice 14y ago
I built http://www.giftstrong.com/ http://www.giftstrong.com/ that pulls the 100 top rated products from Amazon. It was built over a weekend to experiment with the Yii PHP framework and because I wanted to see what the list looked like (wasn't disappointed, there's some surprising stuff on there - like how Braveheart on DVD is mankind's greatest accomplishment according to Amazon). I was considering promoting it as a quick way to find gifts for people and use it for this purpose myself, but I have more profitable/enjoyable things to be doing.
- iSloth 14y ago
  Great website, would be even better if it noticed I was from the UK, and then showed UK Amazon results :)
  - garethsprice 14y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion! If it generates profit in the current version I'd love to expand it to other countries.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
iisbum 14y ago
I started tchvlly: http://tchvlly.com http://tchvlly.com is a community site for the tech valley region of new york. I don't expect it will ever make any money!
jontonsoup 14y ago
I built http://stalltalk.info/ http://stalltalk.info/. Its a toilet based social network. The amount of fun I have had with this far outweighs the profitability.
- guiomie 14y ago
  This is brilliant !
- garethsprice 14y ago
  Love it! Fun idea and no more ridiculous than some of the stuff that gets funding these days. Nice work.
- prezjordan 14y ago
  This sounds like an amazing project! I bet you taught/learned quite a bit - I'm looking to start a couple hackathons at my school (barely any webdevs!) and I'd love to churn out projects like these.
- onlyup 14y ago
  I clicked on this thinking it would be really dumb but I was surprised. It seems fun!
benjlang 14y ago
I started http://blisscontrol.com http://blisscontrol.com and http://notificationcontrol.com http://notificationcontrol.com which won't be profitable.
- michaelmartin 14y ago
  Those sites are great! It's a nuisance finding your way around so many social networks and their different settings pages. Bookmarking your sites, thanks for building them!
- praveenrajukusu 14y ago
  how i get it
bearwithclaws 14y ago
Richerd and I built http://sinkorship.com/ http://sinkorship.com/ about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899231 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899231. Got on the HN front page for 10+ hours, tons of attention, tweets, press etc. Except nobody paid.
- lukeinth 14y ago
  I think it made a lot of people smile when they saw the concept. Perhaps its time spin it into http://shipandsink.com/ http://shipandsink.com/ ;-)
- vineet 14y ago
  I liked the idea. But perhaps it needs to be tweaked. Getting gaming right is hard. Maybe: * offer a $100 credit to start off. * offer more services than just a tweet if successful - for example a very simple feedback widget that shows up. * charge only for delaying ship dates, but not for changing what is being shipped, or for minor delays (say within a week). * don't charge if the person accepts public humiliation with a tweet saying "I sucked and did not ship my planned item.".
- phaemon 14y ago
  heh, concept reminded me of: http://bestofcalvinandhobbes.com/2011/10/a-swifty-kick-in-the-butt-is-for-sale/ http://bestofcalvinandhobbes.com/2011/10/a-swifty-kick-in-th...
RBerenguel 14y ago
I wrote whatlanguageis.com (still early beta with just 7 languages and a less than decent identifier) as a test of django abilities. It was fun!
- marquis 14y ago
  This is a great idea but it returned Dutch for "voy al supermercado", though it was correct for "ik ga naar de supermarkt' and 'je vais au supermarché'. Good luck!
  - RBerenguel 14y ago
    For very short phrases the data corpora are too shallow. I have to improve that, and the identifier logic, and... The most important part was discovering that django is amazingly fun & simple. Thanks for the encouragement :)
    - marquis 14y ago
      Right, that makes sense that you need a bigger chunk of data. You could fix that on the user end by just adding a note 'works best with more input'.
      - RBerenguel 14y ago
        Yes, but I also want some kind of enforcement: for short phrases I want to check for being in corpora, if it is clearly in a language I don't want to say "write more," but just identify the language and only in dubious cases put the blame on the user. Ahh, if I had more time and less projects I'd finish this right now :)
daveid 14y ago
I built http://artistsnclients.com http://artistsnclients.com - It was an idea I had back in 2011 but couldn't find time to do. Now I built it, but it doesn't seem to be viable. I had a few people test it and the profit is at about $4 right now. At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.
- genwin 14y ago
  Get rid of the warning "use at your own risk". That's what the Terms of Service is for, on every site.
  - daveid 14y ago
    Yeah.. replaced it with just a Beta message. I feel like it's right to indicate that it's still in development. Thanks! I'm quite surprised I got any upvotes.
- marquis 14y ago
  There are some real gems here, it's a great concept and I think it's worth putting in the time to make it shine. Maybe hit some people up on other artist sites like deviantart and ask them to submit to beef up the portfolio. I commission art for various occasions and it's also a great gift idea, eg. http://artistsnclients.com/slots/13 http://artistsnclients.com/slots/13
n_coats 14y ago
We've silently launched Photofable. It's a social site aimed at promoting global culture exchange through photography and descriptions. Can be used as a travel tool as well. The focus is for each photos description to be informative or educational about the place it was taken. http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  feedback: those oblong shapes and the square images make your site ugly. Strongly suggest using a lot of golden ratio on everything. Really love your idea, I hope you stick to it.
ComNik 14y ago
I started Rankique - http://www.rankique.com/ http://www.rankique.com/ - basically a price tracking app. Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..
- phreeza 14y ago
  Would be neat to see the items in a category which have had the sharpest price drop recently.
  - ComNik 14y ago
    That is coming. But first of all, I need to implement a working category system :/ Thank you (:
- jtolj 14y ago
  Awesome job! I would definitely use this - but I'm getting a 500 error trying to enter my email address with plus character in it.
  - ComNik 14y ago
    Oh so you are the lonely, malformed entry in my db... I'll fix that, sorry!
  - ComNik 14y ago
    Should work now, sorry for the inconvenience.
- dfgonzalez 14y ago
  Made something similar just tracking products in Argentina, where I'm from, pretty much the same concept but I don't understand why don't you put a big nice button with an affiliate link to buy the best price listing you found for today, that would help, believe me :) This is my version: http://numok.com http://numok.com PS, the guys from priceonomics.com seems to be the leaders in this.
  - 14y ago
pre 14y ago
I built an AWS image for launching a bunch of machines and using them as a Blender Render farm. It'd need work to make it secure enough for public use, and I have too many other things on to get around to that. It does what I need though, and I like the feeling of power of clicking a button and knowing so many large computers start calculating for me :)
- mariocesar 14y ago
  You have to know, if you release it. I will buy it!
iuguy 14y ago
I wrote a proposal for Tiger Scheme[1] to radically alter the structure of the scheme and change the general direction, in effect a reboot of the scheme. If it's accepted, it'll be a shedload of work with no financial reward and a massive time sink, but it has the potential to really change information security in the UK and help with the skills shortage in industry so it's worthwhile. [1] - http://www.tigerscheme.org/ http://www.tigerscheme.org/
sparknlaunch 14y ago
Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making any traction, let alone profit from the blog. http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/ http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/
- genwin 14y ago
  I found lots of great stuff there. Added to my favorites and will be back.
- edmarriner 14y ago
  bookmarked!
- sparknlaunch 14y ago
  Thanks for the comments plus all the HN visitors. Had 250 referrals from HN domains in approximately six hours landing on the home page. c. 100 blog posts were viewed Not earth shattering but more visitors than normal. Just need to work out how to make them stay for longer than 10 seconds.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  The template you are using makes your blog seem like it is jus a collection of trackbacks. It looks too busy for my tired old eyes. Maybe you could include less posts in the frontpage, and have more of the post show up. The default font size is rather small. I did like the content. It is a good blog. Just looks to busy. Good luck.
- hmgauna 14y ago
  It's hard to diagnose, but as other says (and your stats point out), there is something giving a little amateur feel. From a blog point of view, you should definitely show your authors, to make a genuine, personal impression to readers. The part of the name of the blog that says 'Biz Startup Tech Blog', it may sound too generic, but also a bit pretentious, and it lacks originality (even if it works from a SEO point of view?). I'll also work on the tagline, to describe better what the blog is about. You could try things like "Personal insights of an entrepreneurial journey", maybe also A/B test it... Tell your visitors you are for real, before they leave. And last, but not the least, I think the images are not helping. Usually images help make everything a little more attractive, but here, it's not the case. They are giving an amateurish, cheap feel. Try something else on that front. You could avoid the images unless they really illustrate your point with some personal sources: a screenshot from your project, stats, etc. And please, tell us the results of the experiment!
vishnumenon 14y ago
I built http://ziposit.com http://ziposit.com, for super-simple website hosting. I was going to add ads when I started getting users, but users never came. Still fun.
m4xt3r 14y ago
We've launched http://heattest.com/ http://heattest.com/ two months ago. It's an app for heatmap analytics, which was a pretty hardcore to develop. We've spent a lot of time to make the algorithm really good and reliable, but so far we have like 3 sign ups in total, all of them for free trials. The market looked really promising at first.
- phaemon 14y ago
  I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful. You spell "conversion" incorrectly in two different ways and your grammar is poor ("Why noone..."). If I were you I'd get the site redesigned, preferably by a professional web designer. Maybe slim the main page down to your banner, a tag-line saying what the product is and a "Try It Now" button. I don't want to sign up for anything; why not let me demo it on your site in real-time? And where's the initial Wow? There's a heatmap picture on the main page but nothing happens when I click it. Why not have the image work as a heatmap too? Sorry to be so negative, but maybe you'll get better results if you fix some or all of those things?
  - white_devil 14y ago
    > I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful. I agree about "noone", but I don't think the website can be called awful. It's certainly quite pretty.
    - phaemon 14y ago
      Fair enough, I was talking about the content more than the look. The top half is certainly nice enough. The lower half is too noisy with an excess of that "writing" stuff. I didn't get where I am today by reading! I want cool stuff I can click on! ;)
    - adrinavarro 14y ago
      Awful or not, it doesn't make me wanna go try it.
  - m4xt3r 14y ago
kamens 14y ago
Launched an app to get your congress reps on the phone w/ a single button - http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- stereo 14y ago
  This looks cool. What's the in-app purchase?
- mmanfrin 14y ago
  What do you use for location/number info for congresspeople? I'm building a somewhat related app, and I'm not sure where to scrape appropriate info.
  - kamens 14y ago
    sunlight labs api -- they're awesome. http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/ http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/
- prezjordan 14y ago
  Is it tacky to place a donate button on your homepage? I'd love to contribute - I think this is a really neat tool.
  - kamens 14y ago
    Thanks -- your compliment is enough. We really wanted the app to be free. Just figured I'd share as it's definitely not profitable :).
- teebs 14y ago
  This is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in--software for civic engagement. A few friends and I are working on an app and website that lists corporations' political contributions. The mobile feature that makes it interesting is that you can scan barcodes to find out the political contributions from those products right away--inspired by Boycott SOPA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsopa.android&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsop... I'd really appreciate it if we could talk some time about publishing an iPhone app. I'm still in college, so I don't have much experience with iPhone App publishing and would really appreciate some advice, especially for a non-profit app dealing with politics.
waxjar 14y ago
I launched a simple app that puts new music releases in your iCal / Google Calendar or on a RSS Feed. It didn't really catch on, I've sort of given up. The UI kinda sucks too, I realised. http://nearupon.herokuapp.com/ http://nearupon.herokuapp.com/
jtolj 14y ago
I quietly launched/brought out of beta http://requeue.com http://requeue.com this year. I built it mainly for myself, since I found myself watching more and more long-format web video and wanted a better way to organize it. The terms of the Youtube API pretty much rule out monetizing the site with advertising, but usage has (sadly?) been low enough that I just eat the cost of the two Linodes it takes to run.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  How about this: let a user enter a tag (#awesome, #sxswi) and your app trolls the tag's search results on twitter for videos. They get sorted by hotness and presented as a playlist. New things get added to the end.
  - jtolj 14y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. When I initially starting brainstorming on the idea, I had some Twitter integration included: auto-adding videos from your timeline (stolen from the Boxee folks) and hashtag "subscriptions"... but it started getting more convoluted to explain to people, so I thought I'd start more simply with just allowing folks to subscribe to "shows". Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (great signup conversion rates, terrible usage rates), so when I have time I may reboot it as something more like what you're describing. I still think there is something to the idea of improving the leanback and placeshifting experience for all this great long format web content that's out there (Rev3, This Week In, etc). I'm apparently just not smart enough to figure it out on my own ;p.
    - cheatercheater 14y ago
      I understand what the leanback format is, but what is the placeshifting experience? Also: if you want to say thanks, just click the tiny triangle pointing up next to my name. That's how we give out happiness around here.
      - jtolj 14y ago
peteretep 14y ago
We launched http://www.placesteal.com/ http://www.placesteal.com/ - an app for pushing postal addresses from the browser to your phone - and no-one really cared :-) Trying to find the time to open-source the JS part for extracting addresses from DOMs...
harrigan 14y ago
We started http://www.fantasy5live.com http://www.fantasy5live.com – a real-time fantasy sports game for GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.
- chussad 14y ago
  One suggestion: Can you add the player details. May be on hover or on click. Also, I think site needs a bit more help in terms of what a user can do once he reaches the play page. May be a small tutorial or a help page might work. Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the events? Do you have a live feed that you parse for certain phrases?
  - harrigan 14y ago
    Yes, we are recording the performances for each player and we want to show those when users are making their selections. We are also adding a small tutorial as you suggest -- a number of users were asking "what do I do next" ;-) The events are recorded manually at the moment and pushed to the users using Pusher.com. There are automated feeds but they are expensive.
- onlyup 14y ago
  How early is early days? Your about, faq and privacy links are blank pages.
  - harrigan 14y ago
    It's very much a weekends-only project.
radagaisus 14y ago
First real attempt at open source https://github.com/Radagaisus/Orpheus https://github.com/Radagaisus/Orpheus
Whitespace 14y ago
I made http://tutorials.github.com http://tutorials.github.com. It's a variant of a larger project I'm working on to make documentation more personalized and more awesome. I hacked it together during the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia, and I posted it to HN, but it never made it to the homepage. I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited. I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even for an MVP for the high-tech crowd. Edit: typo and clickable link
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I launched http://websocket.us/ http://websocket.us/ to tell people about WebSocket. Unlike its competitor, websocket.org, it's not for profit.
- prezjordan 14y ago
  Been looking for something like this for quite some time! May I donate?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    For what reason? To say thanks? And, yeah, email me and I can send you my PayPal address.
adjwilli 14y ago
The iPad needed animated GIF creation, but nobody wants to pay for one. http://gifpl.us http://gifpl.us
- FixThisPOSSite 14y ago
  I like the idea, but from the looks of it you're not using the video camera to capture the frames. Is that right? I think that's a deal-breaker.
tosh 14y ago
https://www.blossom.io https://www.blossom.io because we haven't implemented payment yet :D
- khayati 14y ago
  LOVE your fake screenshot though.
- genwin 14y ago
  Few other Twitter Bootstrap sites (or splash pages in general) need horizontal scrolling on my netbook (1024 pixels wide), but Blossom does. I can see ~95% of it.
samrat 14y ago
Made http://omgyoutube.herokuapp.com http://omgyoutube.herokuapp.com. Had no intentions of making a profit, though.
SethMurphy 14y ago
I started a Brooklyn based website listing (http://brooklyncoded.com http://brooklyncoded.com) and meetup (http://meetup.brooklyncoded.com http://meetup.brooklyncoded.com) for coders. It's more about the meetup now. I am currently accepting applications to be listed on the site. When there are enough I will publish the list.
tsieling 14y ago
We launched an open source web app that creates a social network around every bus stop in our region. It got us lots of press but is offered free to the region, and to any other municipality with transit info in GTFS format. We loved working on it and love seeing people posting comments. Details at http://denimandsteel.com/work/this-is-our-stop http://denimandsteel.com/work/this-is-our-stop and repo at https://github.com/denimandsteel/thisisourstop https://github.com/denimandsteel/thisisourstop
okal 14y ago
I launched http://hackershelf.com http://hackershelf.com on Valentine's Day. It stayed on the frontpage for a little more than a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963. Save for a few Flattrs, haven't made a cent from it, though that was never the plan. I have, however, met a bunch of interesting people because of it, received a job offer, an investment offer and a few advertising inquiries. Learning alot from the experience :)
- clarky07 14y ago
  That looks pretty useful, though I'm confused as to how you could possibly make money on it? I was hoping, and expected, that their would be amazon affiliate links. If I'm going to buy one, it's going to be on Amazon. It makes the site more useful to me, and you could make a little bit of pocket change anyways.
  - okal 14y ago
    I thought about that, but aside from bug fixes, I can't really give it much time at the moment because of my classes (final year). I did play with some affiliate links from http://udemy.com http://udemy.com for a while but it didn't work out so I dropped them and added Flattr instead. Definitely something to explore again when I have more time. Thanks for the pointers.
    - clarky07 14y ago
      Yeah I don't know how much traffic you get, but I have just a small page (read blog post) that does something similar (popular books for a certain niche) that I wrote a couple years ago that makes several hundred dollars a year. Traffic to it isn't huge either. The CPM for me is like $40 on that page.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  Interesting idea, but I'd execute it differently. First off, it's fairly obvious that you could have a "hacker shelf", "new mom shelf", "mathematician's shelf", and so on. Second off, I see little point in making your own database, when Amazon is.. well, pretty much the standard app and user interface for searching for books. My suggestion is to do something which integrates with Amazon and lets people define their own "shelves" by choosing Amazon products. Everyone could define themselves as a mathematician, hacker, new mom, etc. It would be kinda like social networking gone Amazon. P.S. Upvote for letting me know about a few really cool books, like the Haskell School of Music which I intend to read.
nhebb 14y ago
I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?
- mkl 14y ago
  That's pretty interesting. Do you have screenshots we can look at?
- mikedmiked 14y ago
  If you were to include screenshots and write a blog post on this it could generate a discussion which could get you some useful feedback (and promote your site on HN).
  - nhebb 14y ago
    That's a good idea. I'll write a postmortem after the fact, but right now I'm busy reverting the site to its former state. Conversions dropped ~75%, so it's beyond the point where its practical to tweak the design in order to get it back to par. The entire goal was to increase conversions. It didn't. Rewind.
    - genwin 14y ago
      Please do write that postmortem. I'm very interested in the subject of older designs that are more popular than the ones using the latest & supposedly greatest tools.
- mskierkowski 14y ago
  I'd def want to hear more about this.
- dot 14y ago
  A/B test, yadda yadda...
- andyfleming 14y ago
  Dropped ~75%?! Let's see a post with some screenshots!
mzarate06 14y ago
We started TimePanel (http://timepanel.net http://timepanel.net) this year. I love building apps, and always wanted a really fast, simple way to track time and invoice. TimePanel is the result of taking the small, private app I've always used for that and deciding to build it into a product with speed and simplicity being primary goals. Its 3rd beta update was released in May, and we're hoping to launch very soon. While its technically not profitable, it does have a small # of users, and we still have the payment system to hook up. Despite it being very young, building it has been an incredible amount of work, and one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had.
7402 14y ago
I launched http://www.notaplex.com http://www.notaplex.com for the iPad: "Nota plex - write notes, lists, and outlines." None of the note-writing apps that were available were what I wanted, so I learned iOS programming and wrote this one. Also I got to use old-school lex & yacc programming for the in-line calculator part.
- adrinavarro 14y ago
  That reminds me to this app: http://www.thinkbookapp.com/ http://www.thinkbookapp.com/ (I used comic zeal, from the same publisher) I've always wanted to use something like that to take notes quickly, does it combine well with a bluetooth keyboard?
  - 7402 14y ago
    Yes. http://www.notaplex.com/can-app-be-used-external-keyboard http://www.notaplex.com/can-app-be-used-external-keyboard
xpose2000 14y ago
I created a site based off of the idea of Facebook Timeline, except for a professional player's career. It's called Player Career Timeline. It works for just about any NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL player and the data goes back 5 years. For example, LeBron James' career timeline: http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/ http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/ It works by aggregating thousands of stories over the years and assigns them to a specific player/sport. Then I monitor how users interact with the stories to formulate trends in his career. Each story presented in the timeline has a link back to the original source so you can read the full article. I already had all of this data from my main site and thought it would be fun to use it in another way.
- AtTheLast 14y ago
  This is really cool. The timeline helps provide some meaning to a players stats. Also, it's a great way to get a quick overview of a players career or recent history.
- Lorin 14y ago
  Is most of the system automated? How much hand holding is actually required while creating the timeline?
  - xpose2000 14y ago
    It's entirely automated.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  Very cool. Some infinite scrolling (like Facebook) would be nice.
  - xpose2000 14y ago
    Agreed, I had originally planned to use infinite scrolling just like Facebook. Due to time restraints it had to be altered to what it is now.
Jacob4u2 14y ago
Launched an HTML5 offline app analytics library - http://discolytics.com http://discolytics.com. Not profitable, but haven't really tried to market it. Was originally developed for another clients project and figured someone else out there had a similar need. I regret nothing, great learning experience, the whole thing.
fasouto 14y ago
I started http://ninjaprice.com/ http://ninjaprice.com/ a compilation of products from free shipping shops. Made about 23$ so far...
josscrowcroft 14y ago
I launched Open Exchange Rates (http://openexchangerates.org http://openexchangerates.org) - the Robin Hood of exchange rate (FX) data - which collects exchange rates every hour and distributes them for free via a GitHub repository, in a nice, clean, simple JSON API - with values going back to 1999. It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people. Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost. The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!
- omarkj_ 14y ago
  Are you crawling for this data? Also, since currency is a tricky thing to price (almost any bank/broker can trade currencies) how do you select the "most correct" price? Great project btw!
  - josscrowcroft 14y ago
    Yeah, currently collecting from Yahoo! Finance, which has a fairly accurate but hard-to-use API. Advantage that OXR offers is that it's super easy, and responses are about 10x faster and 350x smaller. Pretty soon it'll be collecting from other services too and taking averages, with a few slightly more complex moving parts, as well as calculations and statistics - that's where we need to beef up the server and start making some dough though. Also very soon we're starting to collect other types of 'freely available' trade and economics data, and adding value to it in other ways!
- marquis 14y ago
  This is great, I currently grab a CSV feed from Yahoo so this is hugely easier to implement. Good luck on the monetization.
tomasien 14y ago
This is the coolest fucking thread ever! I'm learning so much! Is there anything more useful than taking all the bragging out of Hacker News and seeing what didn't quite work, or works but isn't blowing up? These are the great lessons
- sylvinus 14y ago
  totally agree ;-)
ww520 14y ago
I launched a webapp last week for encrypting message into url entirely on the browser for maximum privacy - https://boxuptext.com/ https://boxuptext.com/. It's free for all to use. Won't expect it to ever turn a profit, but the fun factor has made up for it.
stephengillie 14y ago
TemplatArr, an internal template generating program, made to streamline a workflow. Pairtris, to impress a woman (didn't work). oh And the scribd fruit bot.
xpressyoo 14y ago
I've released Gmelius (http://gmelius.com http://gmelius.com) a few months ago, a cross-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox. Gmelius made the first page of HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153) and has been featured on TechCrunch, Lifehacker and other tech related news sites since then. The idea was and still is to propose some enhancements to the new Gmail UI. Donations are welcome and are currently just sufficient to pay the coffee/beer intake necessary to adapt the code to constant Gmail changes and provide some new features ;)
- xpose2000 14y ago
  Awesome project. I've been using this since that hacker news post. How often do you find yourself updating the code due to gmail changes?
simplegeek 14y ago
Hi guys, I started selling an ebook and haven't earned a single $ yet. Though I've been making constant improvements. Slightly taking advantage of this thread: is there anyone who has successfully sold ebooks on Internet? I definitely need some help. Thanks in advance.
- patio11 14y ago
  Drop me an email, I know a few things about a few things.
- onlyup 14y ago
  You should link to somewhere we can read about and maybe even buy the book.
davidlains 14y ago
I wrote an iPhone app for rare book collectors called Titlz. http://davidlains.com/titlz http://davidlains.com/titlz The market for this kind of app is tiny but I still had fun building it and learned a lot. It has made about $20 in two months.
ScottBurson 14y ago
I launched https://bountyoss.com/ https://bountyoss.com/ two weeks ago. It's a crowdfunding site designed specifically for Open Source Software projects. It's more like Cofundos than Kickstarter, but it differs from both in emphasizing continued development of existing projects rather than new projects. I'm also trying very hard to attract contributions from businesses, which I think is a huge untapped market.
nrp 14y ago
I'm building open source motion tracking hardware. http://adjacentreality.org http://adjacentreality.org While I do plan on manufacturing and selling the things this year, I'm going to price it as close as possible to break even.
rythie 14y ago
I created http://cleverrun.com http://cleverrun.com as a dashboard addition to RunKeeper, built in about a month as a MVP. 2000 people signed up (promoted by RunKeeper), seems to have good user retention rate of about 8%. Didn't enable paid upgrades till April, currently revenue has been $30 (yearly repeating). Intend to make it profitable or try something else.
tylerneylon 14y ago
I built http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ This is a place for research authors to support open access ~= the idea that research should be free to read when the authors want it to be. Specifically, the site is about boycotting one particular academic publisher, Elsevier, by pledging never again to do free labor for them (submitting, reviewing, editing papers). So far over 12,000 people have signed up. I see this as part of a larger movement of academics away from research-behind-paywalls.
reaktivo 14y ago
I built a site for getting notified when the border wait time on the US/MX border gets to a certain point. http://garitas-tijuana.com http://garitas-tijuana.com
fmstephe 14y ago
I am writing a location service to allow people to add 'local interaction' easily to an application. There is a demo of a multiplayer tankwars clone using it at battlewith.me.uk The initial idea was that when I was young I played games on a single computer with a shared computer, things like Tankwars, Worms and Mortal Kombat. That was a lot more fun for me than fragging strangers over the internet. After the web-demo I would like to look at mobile apps. Actually about to post a Show HN of it very soon. Source @ https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server
kmx411 14y ago
Few friends and I launched www.chooseforchange.com Technically "we" are not profitable since all the income is going to a cause. But it's working pretty well, having some difficulties figuring out how to get people to place the markers that friends buy for them. People are thinking our wall posts are "spam" and ignoring them.
typpo 14y ago
I made a site that computes and ranks the mining value of 580,000 asteroids in our solar system (http://asterank.com http://asterank.com). It has grown in popularity, but obviously does not lend itself well to monetization.
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  Until you start a bond market around it.
hyuuu 14y ago
http://picocrew.com/presents/picocrew http://picocrew.com/presents/picocrew ....:(
ecaradec 14y ago
I launched Qatapult, a quicksilver like inspired launcher for windows http://emmanuelcaradec.com/qatapult http://emmanuelcaradec.com/qatapult . It still needs polish and it still needs more users, but it's already my favorite launcher for windows. (change the default skin if you try, I set the default to the wrong one )
blueprint 14y ago
Blueprint - https://blueprint.io https://blueprint.io - platform for developing native iOS apps without writing any code (order of magnitude less time spent on development, rapid iteration by non-developers possible, able to generate any app at runtime). Actually interviewed at YC but they declined to fund me cause of competition from Apple and Google (see Apple's recent patents and Google's forway into codeless dev - I was actually suspicious if Apple took some of my innovations). I decided to put it on ice and pursue one of my old EE projects which is actually more important to me. Nowadays I'm working with Pair (http://trypair.com http://trypair.com) and do have a few firms interested in acquiring blueprint, so might actually be able to pass the torch and get something out of it to fund my next ventures. For that matter, anyone interested in learning more can email me at paul@blueprint.io.
scottorn 14y ago
I loved this discussion and I learned a lot from reading the responses. I have a side project that is not profitable but has been around for almost 4 years. It's called Ben's Friends (http://bensfriends.org/ http://bensfriends.org/) and we build patient support groups for people with rare diseases (here is our 60 second video: http://youtu.be/YBeRFnJkleU http://youtu.be/YBeRFnJkleU). It's almost impossible to monetize a patient support site, especially for rare diseases, so I've known for a long time we wouldn't make money. However, we've become one of the largest patient support networks on the Internet. I've put a lot of my money into it and we've run out of money many time, but something good always happens and we stay afloat. Here is some unsolicited advice: -Keep your side project alive for as long as you enjoy it. You never know how things will change. When we started there was no such thing as crowdfunding. Last year we managed to pay all the bills through an IndieGoGo campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/Bens-Friends-Builds-Support-Groups-for-Patients-With-Rare-Diseases http://www.indiegogo.com/Bens-Friends-Builds-Support-Groups-... - we never dreamed Crowdfunding would exist, now it's our lifeblood. Reading through many of the responses below, they are public service projects. It's very likely you could do at least a small crowdfunding to pay the bills if you need it. -Who cares if you don't make money? You get to do something you love. That makes you incredibly lucky. Also, almost every person here has tons of opportunities so you can make money on something else. Again, that makes you lucky. -Change the way you measure success. Most people measure success with money. Since we weren't going to make any money on Ben's Friends, we started measuring how many thank you emails we received every day. I get about 25 thank you notes a day - completely unsolicited. Your measurement may be usage, or reach or whether your girlfriend likes your app. Whatever it is, focus on that. It will make you a lot happier than money. -If you are going to do something that doesn't make a lot of money, do it with a partner. It will be more fun, you'll pick each other up when things are down, and with both of you brainstorming and iterating, there is a much better chance it will get traction and eventually become something. Ben's Friends never would have gone anywhere without my partner, Ben Munoz. Good partnerships turn into great friendships and they are one of the best things about starting something. Hope this helps. thanks for posting a great question.
corentino 14y ago
I launched http://www.jaimelesstartups.fr http://www.jaimelesstartups.fr with a friend in mid february. Goal is to make french startup famous ... in France. No ads ! No business model ! (cost us zero since it's hosted on my server I use for my projets) We started with 3 visitors/day now we are at 200. Got a partnership with the French techcrunch Got contacts with famous french entrepreneurs to interview We are happy and we continue to work hard (I work all day long) Actually, I'm working on the design (which is not that easy for an engineer...) Any feedback are more than welcome
softwarerero 14y ago
I launched a Spanish site http://agrupados.biz http://agrupados.biz which is a search engine for clasified ads in Paraguay. I learned Scala und Apache Lucene this way, now I'm hoping to get it at least covering its hosting costs. The site is up aprox. 3 month now and I had almost no visitors before paying Google. 2 days ago I started a Google AdWords campaign so people may find the site, I spend $2.62 so far and got 95 visitors and even won $0.10 with AdSense. Today I added a PayPal donate button.
- hmgauna 14y ago
  Right now I'm trying to use it and I'm getting a lot of errors. As far as I can see, you need to work on the SEO side: there's a lot that needs to be done on that front. Change your title tags structure, create unique descriptions for each page, build friendly urls, make it easy to be crawled, use a sitemap, add to your links the 'title' attribute. For a site like yours, you should not spend on adwords. You will lose money. I hope it helps!
xjki 14y ago
Started and recently published DrinkControl for Android http://drinkcontrolapp.com http://drinkcontrolapp.com Taking into account that iOS version brings just about $50/month, no illusions about becoming profitable ever. Still was worth it for understanding Android as development platform and its ecosystem (biggest surprise so far - beeing in Samsung app store is more important than beeing in Google Play).
mrose 14y ago
I made Image Overflow http://imageoverflow.com http://imageoverflow.com My core focus, which is to keep the UI free of extra text and needless "social" features, has led to a user adoption rate that is less than desirable, to say the least.
mateo999 14y ago
I started www.sunscanner.co.uk last year. Thought it was a novel and useful way to search for vacations. And I think it made all of £7 in commissions since then :-(
penguinsix 14y ago
I built an app that shows the air pollution levels in Hong Kong based on Western standards, primarily because I couldn't understand the local governments rather lax air quality index. I'll probably never recoup the development costs or even the server expense, but I didn't think it would be right to charge for it. In a heavily polluted place, some folks with asthma and respiratory problems or even young children simply shouldn't go out on certain days. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hong-kong-air-pollution/id504536152?ls=1&mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hong-kong-air-pollution/id504...
hmgauna 14y ago
This year I built http://inflooenz.com http://inflooenz.com It's a tool to explore music influences. I have around 100 visitors each day, but I'm a bit stacked with the site as a product. At the beginning I did some PR. I had some ideas for monetizing, but those are yet to be proved (analytics so far are not showing a good scenario). I had some really cool feedback for the music community, and a lot of ideas for features, but I don't want to start adding features without a clear reason and direction. Right now, I'm working on site engagement, because I think I'm not taking full profit from my already existent visitors. I wasn't hoping to be profitable in the short term, but I expected more feedback and real interest in the product (some to-be-developed features right now allow people to leave their email if they wish to hear from me, but that didn't happen often). PS: Anyways, this was very good as a personal challenge!
macca321 14y ago
https://www.squarelater.com/ https://www.squarelater.com/ - a bill splitting application with SMS input.

111 points by sylvinus 14y ago

j21 14y ago

Made http://www.clipchoose.com http://www.clipchoose.com in May. Never intended it to be profitable, more of a learning experience (first webapp).

daeken 14y ago

A week or two ago I launched http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ to enable WebGL on iOS devices. In theory, it's profitable -- it cost me nothing (outside of a few hours of dev, which I spent on myself anyway) and has made a whopping $26 or so -- but it'll never really go above that, and 'sales' have already stagnated. It was interesting to see the breakdown of downloads versus payment, and how much people paid. I also wonder how much I would've made if I put it up for, say, $1 only. Edit: Also interesting that it got quite a bit of attention on HN and several hundred (maybe 400?) downloads and not a single sale (from what I could tell). That surprised me a bit; every sale has been driven by people coming from tweets that some big names in the jailbreaking scene retweeted.

sushidev 14y ago

I've created http://pazler.com http://pazler.com, and it isn't making any profits :) Built using Clojure, Postgresql, StringTemplate, hosted at Hetzner. Learned quite a lot of things in the process..

iSloth 14y ago
Looks a bit like http://pinterest.com/ http://pinterest.com/ ;)
- sushidev 14y ago
  Any self respecting programmer must create a Pinterest clone these days.. lol
jcfrei 14y ago
yeah.... who didn't have that idea, creating a pinterest clone full of amazon affiliate links - would've been too easy if that actually worked ;) on a sidenote: good job on the design, looks solid!

iSloth 14y ago

Only project I have done this year (http://route.im http://route.im), makes $xx/pm however doubt that it would ever cover the server costs, especially when more locations are added. Although it was done more for me, than generating revenue, so that's not too bad.

zschallz 14y ago
You could do an Ookla like thing and create a mini version people can host. My server seems to be in the same place as yours, otherwise I wouldn't have minded hosting one.

leothom 14y ago

Although not really a tech company, I started http://www.thoughtthreads.org/ http://www.thoughtthreads.org/ with a few university friends. We don't expect it to be profitable since it's a non-profit. :)

schrijver 14y ago
Cool; I’d have put a dash in there thought-threads.org, kind of hard to read like this

sherbondy 14y ago

I created http://www.sherbondy.com http://www.sherbondy.com, a website that gives family members free subdomains @sherbondy.com. Learned Clojure while making it. Wrote the entire thing in Clojure and ClojureScript. Tons of fun. I've even open-sourced it so that others can do the same for their families: https://github.com/sherbondy/sherbondy.com https://github.com/sherbondy/sherbondy.com Still need to fix/optimize a bunch of stuff and better document/test, but it was a nice break from studying for exams. And man am I loving Clojure.

guruz 14y ago

We started to offer hosting for the Quassel IRC client. Not sure if this will make enough money this year to pay for the server we're running it on. But at least it is a small start in transitioning to be some kind of product company instead of just doing consulting/contracting. http://woboq.com/quassel.html http://woboq.com/quassel.html

ngcoders 14y ago

Locux - Low cost linux , we are trying to create open source very low cost linux platform ... it wont be profitable :) . http://www.ngcoders.com/category/projects/locux-projects http://www.ngcoders.com/category/projects/locux-projects

garethsprice 14y ago

I built http://www.giftstrong.com/ http://www.giftstrong.com/ that pulls the 100 top rated products from Amazon. It was built over a weekend to experiment with the Yii PHP framework and because I wanted to see what the list looked like (wasn't disappointed, there's some surprising stuff on there - like how Braveheart on DVD is mankind's greatest accomplishment according to Amazon). I was considering promoting it as a quick way to find gifts for people and use it for this purpose myself, but I have more profitable/enjoyable things to be doing.

iSloth 14y ago
Great website, would be even better if it noticed I was from the UK, and then showed UK Amazon results :)
- garethsprice 14y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion! If it generates profit in the current version I'd love to expand it to other countries.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

iisbum 14y ago

I started tchvlly: http://tchvlly.com http://tchvlly.com is a community site for the tech valley region of new york. I don't expect it will ever make any money!

jontonsoup 14y ago

I built http://stalltalk.info/ http://stalltalk.info/. Its a toilet based social network. The amount of fun I have had with this far outweighs the profitability.

guiomie 14y ago
This is brilliant !
garethsprice 14y ago
Love it! Fun idea and no more ridiculous than some of the stuff that gets funding these days. Nice work.
prezjordan 14y ago
This sounds like an amazing project! I bet you taught/learned quite a bit - I'm looking to start a couple hackathons at my school (barely any webdevs!) and I'd love to churn out projects like these.
onlyup 14y ago
I clicked on this thinking it would be really dumb but I was surprised. It seems fun!

benjlang 14y ago

I started http://blisscontrol.com http://blisscontrol.com and http://notificationcontrol.com http://notificationcontrol.com which won't be profitable.

michaelmartin 14y ago
Those sites are great! It's a nuisance finding your way around so many social networks and their different settings pages. Bookmarking your sites, thanks for building them!
praveenrajukusu 14y ago
how i get it

bearwithclaws 14y ago

Richerd and I built http://sinkorship.com/ http://sinkorship.com/ about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899231 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899231. Got on the HN front page for 10+ hours, tons of attention, tweets, press etc. Except nobody paid.

lukeinth 14y ago
I think it made a lot of people smile when they saw the concept. Perhaps its time spin it into http://shipandsink.com/ http://shipandsink.com/ ;-)
vineet 14y ago
I liked the idea. But perhaps it needs to be tweaked. Getting gaming right is hard. Maybe: * offer a $100 credit to start off. * offer more services than just a tweet if successful - for example a very simple feedback widget that shows up. * charge only for delaying ship dates, but not for changing what is being shipped, or for minor delays (say within a week). * don't charge if the person accepts public humiliation with a tweet saying "I sucked and did not ship my planned item.".
phaemon 14y ago
heh, concept reminded me of: http://bestofcalvinandhobbes.com/2011/10/a-swifty-kick-in-the-butt-is-for-sale/ http://bestofcalvinandhobbes.com/2011/10/a-swifty-kick-in-th...

RBerenguel 14y ago

I wrote whatlanguageis.com (still early beta with just 7 languages and a less than decent identifier) as a test of django abilities. It was fun!

marquis 14y ago
This is a great idea but it returned Dutch for "voy al supermercado", though it was correct for "ik ga naar de supermarkt' and 'je vais au supermarché'. Good luck!
- RBerenguel 14y ago
  For very short phrases the data corpora are too shallow. I have to improve that, and the identifier logic, and... The most important part was discovering that django is amazingly fun & simple. Thanks for the encouragement :)
  - marquis 14y ago
    Right, that makes sense that you need a bigger chunk of data. You could fix that on the user end by just adding a note 'works best with more input'.
    - RBerenguel 14y ago
      Yes, but I also want some kind of enforcement: for short phrases I want to check for being in corpora, if it is clearly in a language I don't want to say "write more," but just identify the language and only in dubious cases put the blame on the user. Ahh, if I had more time and less projects I'd finish this right now :)

daveid 14y ago

I built http://artistsnclients.com http://artistsnclients.com - It was an idea I had back in 2011 but couldn't find time to do. Now I built it, but it doesn't seem to be viable. I had a few people test it and the profit is at about $4 right now. At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.

genwin 14y ago
Get rid of the warning "use at your own risk". That's what the Terms of Service is for, on every site.
- daveid 14y ago
  Yeah.. replaced it with just a Beta message. I feel like it's right to indicate that it's still in development. Thanks! I'm quite surprised I got any upvotes.
marquis 14y ago
There are some real gems here, it's a great concept and I think it's worth putting in the time to make it shine. Maybe hit some people up on other artist sites like deviantart and ask them to submit to beef up the portfolio. I commission art for various occasions and it's also a great gift idea, eg. http://artistsnclients.com/slots/13 http://artistsnclients.com/slots/13

n_coats 14y ago

We've silently launched Photofable. It's a social site aimed at promoting global culture exchange through photography and descriptions. Can be used as a travel tool as well. The focus is for each photos description to be informative or educational about the place it was taken. http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php

cheatercheater 14y ago
feedback: those oblong shapes and the square images make your site ugly. Strongly suggest using a lot of golden ratio on everything. Really love your idea, I hope you stick to it.

ComNik 14y ago

I started Rankique - http://www.rankique.com/ http://www.rankique.com/ - basically a price tracking app. Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..

phreeza 14y ago
Would be neat to see the items in a category which have had the sharpest price drop recently.
- ComNik 14y ago
  That is coming. But first of all, I need to implement a working category system :/ Thank you (:
jtolj 14y ago
Awesome job! I would definitely use this - but I'm getting a 500 error trying to enter my email address with plus character in it.
- ComNik 14y ago
  Oh so you are the lonely, malformed entry in my db... I'll fix that, sorry!
- ComNik 14y ago
  Should work now, sorry for the inconvenience.
dfgonzalez 14y ago
Made something similar just tracking products in Argentina, where I'm from, pretty much the same concept but I don't understand why don't you put a big nice button with an affiliate link to buy the best price listing you found for today, that would help, believe me :) This is my version: http://numok.com http://numok.com PS, the guys from priceonomics.com seems to be the leaders in this.
- 14y ago

pre 14y ago

I built an AWS image for launching a bunch of machines and using them as a Blender Render farm. It'd need work to make it secure enough for public use, and I have too many other things on to get around to that. It does what I need though, and I like the feeling of power of clicking a button and knowing so many large computers start calculating for me :)

mariocesar 14y ago
You have to know, if you release it. I will buy it!

iuguy 14y ago

I wrote a proposal for Tiger Scheme[1] to radically alter the structure of the scheme and change the general direction, in effect a reboot of the scheme. If it's accepted, it'll be a shedload of work with no financial reward and a massive time sink, but it has the potential to really change information security in the UK and help with the skills shortage in industry so it's worthwhile. [1] - http://www.tigerscheme.org/ http://www.tigerscheme.org/

sparknlaunch 14y ago

Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making any traction, let alone profit from the blog. http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/ http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/

genwin 14y ago
I found lots of great stuff there. Added to my favorites and will be back.
edmarriner 14y ago
bookmarked!
sparknlaunch 14y ago
Thanks for the comments plus all the HN visitors. Had 250 referrals from HN domains in approximately six hours landing on the home page. c. 100 blog posts were viewed Not earth shattering but more visitors than normal. Just need to work out how to make them stay for longer than 10 seconds.
orangethirty 14y ago
The template you are using makes your blog seem like it is jus a collection of trackbacks. It looks too busy for my tired old eyes. Maybe you could include less posts in the frontpage, and have more of the post show up. The default font size is rather small. I did like the content. It is a good blog. Just looks to busy. Good luck.
hmgauna 14y ago
It's hard to diagnose, but as other says (and your stats point out), there is something giving a little amateur feel. From a blog point of view, you should definitely show your authors, to make a genuine, personal impression to readers. The part of the name of the blog that says 'Biz Startup Tech Blog', it may sound too generic, but also a bit pretentious, and it lacks originality (even if it works from a SEO point of view?). I'll also work on the tagline, to describe better what the blog is about. You could try things like "Personal insights of an entrepreneurial journey", maybe also A/B test it... Tell your visitors you are for real, before they leave. And last, but not the least, I think the images are not helping. Usually images help make everything a little more attractive, but here, it's not the case. They are giving an amateurish, cheap feel. Try something else on that front. You could avoid the images unless they really illustrate your point with some personal sources: a screenshot from your project, stats, etc. And please, tell us the results of the experiment!

vishnumenon 14y ago

I built http://ziposit.com http://ziposit.com, for super-simple website hosting. I was going to add ads when I started getting users, but users never came. Still fun.

m4xt3r 14y ago

We've launched http://heattest.com/ http://heattest.com/ two months ago. It's an app for heatmap analytics, which was a pretty hardcore to develop. We've spent a lot of time to make the algorithm really good and reliable, but so far we have like 3 sign ups in total, all of them for free trials. The market looked really promising at first.

phaemon 14y ago
I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful. You spell "conversion" incorrectly in two different ways and your grammar is poor ("Why noone..."). If I were you I'd get the site redesigned, preferably by a professional web designer. Maybe slim the main page down to your banner, a tag-line saying what the product is and a "Try It Now" button. I don't want to sign up for anything; why not let me demo it on your site in real-time? And where's the initial Wow? There's a heatmap picture on the main page but nothing happens when I click it. Why not have the image work as a heatmap too? Sorry to be so negative, but maybe you'll get better results if you fix some or all of those things?
- white_devil 14y ago
  > I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful. I agree about "noone", but I don't think the website can be called awful. It's certainly quite pretty.
  - phaemon 14y ago
    Fair enough, I was talking about the content more than the look. The top half is certainly nice enough. The lower half is too noisy with an excess of that "writing" stuff. I didn't get where I am today by reading! I want cool stuff I can click on! ;)
  - adrinavarro 14y ago
    Awful or not, it doesn't make me wanna go try it.
- m4xt3r 14y ago

kamens 14y ago

Launched an app to get your congress reps on the phone w/ a single button - http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
stereo 14y ago
This looks cool. What's the in-app purchase?
mmanfrin 14y ago
What do you use for location/number info for congresspeople? I'm building a somewhat related app, and I'm not sure where to scrape appropriate info.
- kamens 14y ago
  sunlight labs api -- they're awesome. http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/ http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Sunlight_Congress_API/
prezjordan 14y ago
Is it tacky to place a donate button on your homepage? I'd love to contribute - I think this is a really neat tool.
- kamens 14y ago
  Thanks -- your compliment is enough. We really wanted the app to be free. Just figured I'd share as it's definitely not profitable :).
teebs 14y ago
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in--software for civic engagement. A few friends and I are working on an app and website that lists corporations' political contributions. The mobile feature that makes it interesting is that you can scan barcodes to find out the political contributions from those products right away--inspired by Boycott SOPA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsopa.android&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsop... I'd really appreciate it if we could talk some time about publishing an iPhone app. I'm still in college, so I don't have much experience with iPhone App publishing and would really appreciate some advice, especially for a non-profit app dealing with politics.

waxjar 14y ago

I launched a simple app that puts new music releases in your iCal / Google Calendar or on a RSS Feed. It didn't really catch on, I've sort of given up. The UI kinda sucks too, I realised. http://nearupon.herokuapp.com/ http://nearupon.herokuapp.com/

jtolj 14y ago

I quietly launched/brought out of beta http://requeue.com http://requeue.com this year. I built it mainly for myself, since I found myself watching more and more long-format web video and wanted a better way to organize it. The terms of the Youtube API pretty much rule out monetizing the site with advertising, but usage has (sadly?) been low enough that I just eat the cost of the two Linodes it takes to run.

cheatercheater 14y ago
How about this: let a user enter a tag (#awesome, #sxswi) and your app trolls the tag's search results on twitter for videos. They get sorted by hotness and presented as a playlist. New things get added to the end.
- jtolj 14y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. When I initially starting brainstorming on the idea, I had some Twitter integration included: auto-adding videos from your timeline (stolen from the Boxee folks) and hashtag "subscriptions"... but it started getting more convoluted to explain to people, so I thought I'd start more simply with just allowing folks to subscribe to "shows". Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (great signup conversion rates, terrible usage rates), so when I have time I may reboot it as something more like what you're describing. I still think there is something to the idea of improving the leanback and placeshifting experience for all this great long format web content that's out there (Rev3, This Week In, etc). I'm apparently just not smart enough to figure it out on my own ;p.
  - cheatercheater 14y ago
    I understand what the leanback format is, but what is the placeshifting experience? Also: if you want to say thanks, just click the tiny triangle pointing up next to my name. That's how we give out happiness around here.
    - jtolj 14y ago

peteretep 14y ago

We launched http://www.placesteal.com/ http://www.placesteal.com/ - an app for pushing postal addresses from the browser to your phone - and no-one really cared :-) Trying to find the time to open-source the JS part for extracting addresses from DOMs...

harrigan 14y ago

We started http://www.fantasy5live.com http://www.fantasy5live.com – a real-time fantasy sports game for GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.

chussad 14y ago
One suggestion: Can you add the player details. May be on hover or on click. Also, I think site needs a bit more help in terms of what a user can do once he reaches the play page. May be a small tutorial or a help page might work. Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the events? Do you have a live feed that you parse for certain phrases?
- harrigan 14y ago
  Yes, we are recording the performances for each player and we want to show those when users are making their selections. We are also adding a small tutorial as you suggest -- a number of users were asking "what do I do next" ;-) The events are recorded manually at the moment and pushed to the users using Pusher.com. There are automated feeds but they are expensive.
onlyup 14y ago
How early is early days? Your about, faq and privacy links are blank pages.
- harrigan 14y ago
  It's very much a weekends-only project.

radagaisus 14y ago

First real attempt at open source https://github.com/Radagaisus/Orpheus https://github.com/Radagaisus/Orpheus

Whitespace 14y ago

I made http://tutorials.github.com http://tutorials.github.com. It's a variant of a larger project I'm working on to make documentation more personalized and more awesome. I hacked it together during the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia, and I posted it to HN, but it never made it to the homepage. I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited. I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even for an MVP for the high-tech crowd. Edit: typo and clickable link

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago

I launched http://websocket.us/ http://websocket.us/ to tell people about WebSocket. Unlike its competitor, websocket.org, it's not for profit.

prezjordan 14y ago
Been looking for something like this for quite some time! May I donate?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  For what reason? To say thanks? And, yeah, email me and I can send you my PayPal address.

adjwilli 14y ago

The iPad needed animated GIF creation, but nobody wants to pay for one. http://gifpl.us http://gifpl.us

FixThisPOSSite 14y ago
I like the idea, but from the looks of it you're not using the video camera to capture the frames. Is that right? I think that's a deal-breaker.

tosh 14y ago

https://www.blossom.io https://www.blossom.io because we haven't implemented payment yet :D

khayati 14y ago
LOVE your fake screenshot though.
genwin 14y ago
Few other Twitter Bootstrap sites (or splash pages in general) need horizontal scrolling on my netbook (1024 pixels wide), but Blossom does. I can see ~95% of it.

samrat 14y ago

Made http://omgyoutube.herokuapp.com http://omgyoutube.herokuapp.com. Had no intentions of making a profit, though.

SethMurphy 14y ago

I started a Brooklyn based website listing (http://brooklyncoded.com http://brooklyncoded.com) and meetup (http://meetup.brooklyncoded.com http://meetup.brooklyncoded.com) for coders. It's more about the meetup now. I am currently accepting applications to be listed on the site. When there are enough I will publish the list.

tsieling 14y ago

We launched an open source web app that creates a social network around every bus stop in our region. It got us lots of press but is offered free to the region, and to any other municipality with transit info in GTFS format. We loved working on it and love seeing people posting comments. Details at http://denimandsteel.com/work/this-is-our-stop http://denimandsteel.com/work/this-is-our-stop and repo at https://github.com/denimandsteel/thisisourstop https://github.com/denimandsteel/thisisourstop

okal 14y ago

I launched http://hackershelf.com http://hackershelf.com on Valentine's Day. It stayed on the frontpage for a little more than a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963. Save for a few Flattrs, haven't made a cent from it, though that was never the plan. I have, however, met a bunch of interesting people because of it, received a job offer, an investment offer and a few advertising inquiries. Learning alot from the experience :)

clarky07 14y ago
That looks pretty useful, though I'm confused as to how you could possibly make money on it? I was hoping, and expected, that their would be amazon affiliate links. If I'm going to buy one, it's going to be on Amazon. It makes the site more useful to me, and you could make a little bit of pocket change anyways.
- okal 14y ago
  I thought about that, but aside from bug fixes, I can't really give it much time at the moment because of my classes (final year). I did play with some affiliate links from http://udemy.com http://udemy.com for a while but it didn't work out so I dropped them and added Flattr instead. Definitely something to explore again when I have more time. Thanks for the pointers.
  - clarky07 14y ago
    Yeah I don't know how much traffic you get, but I have just a small page (read blog post) that does something similar (popular books for a certain niche) that I wrote a couple years ago that makes several hundred dollars a year. Traffic to it isn't huge either. The CPM for me is like $40 on that page.
cheatercheater 14y ago
Interesting idea, but I'd execute it differently. First off, it's fairly obvious that you could have a "hacker shelf", "new mom shelf", "mathematician's shelf", and so on. Second off, I see little point in making your own database, when Amazon is.. well, pretty much the standard app and user interface for searching for books. My suggestion is to do something which integrates with Amazon and lets people define their own "shelves" by choosing Amazon products. Everyone could define themselves as a mathematician, hacker, new mom, etc. It would be kinda like social networking gone Amazon. P.S. Upvote for letting me know about a few really cool books, like the Haskell School of Music which I intend to read.

nhebb 14y ago

I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?

mkl 14y ago
That's pretty interesting. Do you have screenshots we can look at?
mikedmiked 14y ago
If you were to include screenshots and write a blog post on this it could generate a discussion which could get you some useful feedback (and promote your site on HN).
- nhebb 14y ago
  That's a good idea. I'll write a postmortem after the fact, but right now I'm busy reverting the site to its former state. Conversions dropped ~75%, so it's beyond the point where its practical to tweak the design in order to get it back to par. The entire goal was to increase conversions. It didn't. Rewind.
  - genwin 14y ago
    Please do write that postmortem. I'm very interested in the subject of older designs that are more popular than the ones using the latest & supposedly greatest tools.
mskierkowski 14y ago
I'd def want to hear more about this.
dot 14y ago
A/B test, yadda yadda...
andyfleming 14y ago
Dropped ~75%?! Let's see a post with some screenshots!

mzarate06 14y ago

We started TimePanel (http://timepanel.net http://timepanel.net) this year. I love building apps, and always wanted a really fast, simple way to track time and invoice. TimePanel is the result of taking the small, private app I've always used for that and deciding to build it into a product with speed and simplicity being primary goals. Its 3rd beta update was released in May, and we're hoping to launch very soon. While its technically not profitable, it does have a small # of users, and we still have the payment system to hook up. Despite it being very young, building it has been an incredible amount of work, and one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had.

7402 14y ago

I launched http://www.notaplex.com http://www.notaplex.com for the iPad: "Nota plex - write notes, lists, and outlines." None of the note-writing apps that were available were what I wanted, so I learned iOS programming and wrote this one. Also I got to use old-school lex & yacc programming for the in-line calculator part.

adrinavarro 14y ago
That reminds me to this app: http://www.thinkbookapp.com/ http://www.thinkbookapp.com/ (I used comic zeal, from the same publisher) I've always wanted to use something like that to take notes quickly, does it combine well with a bluetooth keyboard?
- 7402 14y ago
  Yes. http://www.notaplex.com/can-app-be-used-external-keyboard http://www.notaplex.com/can-app-be-used-external-keyboard

xpose2000 14y ago

I created a site based off of the idea of Facebook Timeline, except for a professional player's career. It's called Player Career Timeline. It works for just about any NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL player and the data goes back 5 years. For example, LeBron James' career timeline: http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/ http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/ It works by aggregating thousands of stories over the years and assigns them to a specific player/sport. Then I monitor how users interact with the stories to formulate trends in his career. Each story presented in the timeline has a link back to the original source so you can read the full article. I already had all of this data from my main site and thought it would be fun to use it in another way.

AtTheLast 14y ago
This is really cool. The timeline helps provide some meaning to a players stats. Also, it's a great way to get a quick overview of a players career or recent history.
Lorin 14y ago
Is most of the system automated? How much hand holding is actually required while creating the timeline?
- xpose2000 14y ago
  It's entirely automated.
streptomycin 14y ago
Very cool. Some infinite scrolling (like Facebook) would be nice.
- xpose2000 14y ago
  Agreed, I had originally planned to use infinite scrolling just like Facebook. Due to time restraints it had to be altered to what it is now.

Jacob4u2 14y ago

Launched an HTML5 offline app analytics library - http://discolytics.com http://discolytics.com. Not profitable, but haven't really tried to market it. Was originally developed for another clients project and figured someone else out there had a similar need. I regret nothing, great learning experience, the whole thing.

fasouto 14y ago

I started http://ninjaprice.com/ http://ninjaprice.com/ a compilation of products from free shipping shops. Made about 23$ so far...

josscrowcroft 14y ago

I launched Open Exchange Rates (http://openexchangerates.org http://openexchangerates.org) - the Robin Hood of exchange rate (FX) data - which collects exchange rates every hour and distributes them for free via a GitHub repository, in a nice, clean, simple JSON API - with values going back to 1999. It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people. Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost. The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!

omarkj_ 14y ago
Are you crawling for this data? Also, since currency is a tricky thing to price (almost any bank/broker can trade currencies) how do you select the "most correct" price? Great project btw!
- josscrowcroft 14y ago
  Yeah, currently collecting from Yahoo! Finance, which has a fairly accurate but hard-to-use API. Advantage that OXR offers is that it's super easy, and responses are about 10x faster and 350x smaller. Pretty soon it'll be collecting from other services too and taking averages, with a few slightly more complex moving parts, as well as calculations and statistics - that's where we need to beef up the server and start making some dough though. Also very soon we're starting to collect other types of 'freely available' trade and economics data, and adding value to it in other ways!
marquis 14y ago
This is great, I currently grab a CSV feed from Yahoo so this is hugely easier to implement. Good luck on the monetization.

tomasien 14y ago

This is the coolest fucking thread ever! I'm learning so much! Is there anything more useful than taking all the bragging out of Hacker News and seeing what didn't quite work, or works but isn't blowing up? These are the great lessons

sylvinus 14y ago
totally agree ;-)

ww520 14y ago

I launched a webapp last week for encrypting message into url entirely on the browser for maximum privacy - https://boxuptext.com/ https://boxuptext.com/. It's free for all to use. Won't expect it to ever turn a profit, but the fun factor has made up for it.

stephengillie 14y ago

TemplatArr, an internal template generating program, made to streamline a workflow. Pairtris, to impress a woman (didn't work). oh And the scribd fruit bot.

xpressyoo 14y ago

I've released Gmelius (http://gmelius.com http://gmelius.com) a few months ago, a cross-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox. Gmelius made the first page of HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153) and has been featured on TechCrunch, Lifehacker and other tech related news sites since then. The idea was and still is to propose some enhancements to the new Gmail UI. Donations are welcome and are currently just sufficient to pay the coffee/beer intake necessary to adapt the code to constant Gmail changes and provide some new features ;)

xpose2000 14y ago
Awesome project. I've been using this since that hacker news post. How often do you find yourself updating the code due to gmail changes?

simplegeek 14y ago

Hi guys, I started selling an ebook and haven't earned a single $ yet. Though I've been making constant improvements. Slightly taking advantage of this thread: is there anyone who has successfully sold ebooks on Internet? I definitely need some help. Thanks in advance.

patio11 14y ago
Drop me an email, I know a few things about a few things.
onlyup 14y ago
You should link to somewhere we can read about and maybe even buy the book.

davidlains 14y ago

I wrote an iPhone app for rare book collectors called Titlz. http://davidlains.com/titlz http://davidlains.com/titlz The market for this kind of app is tiny but I still had fun building it and learned a lot. It has made about $20 in two months.

ScottBurson 14y ago

I launched https://bountyoss.com/ https://bountyoss.com/ two weeks ago. It's a crowdfunding site designed specifically for Open Source Software projects. It's more like Cofundos than Kickstarter, but it differs from both in emphasizing continued development of existing projects rather than new projects. I'm also trying very hard to attract contributions from businesses, which I think is a huge untapped market.

nrp 14y ago

I'm building open source motion tracking hardware. http://adjacentreality.org http://adjacentreality.org While I do plan on manufacturing and selling the things this year, I'm going to price it as close as possible to break even.

rythie 14y ago

I created http://cleverrun.com http://cleverrun.com as a dashboard addition to RunKeeper, built in about a month as a MVP. 2000 people signed up (promoted by RunKeeper), seems to have good user retention rate of about 8%. Didn't enable paid upgrades till April, currently revenue has been $30 (yearly repeating). Intend to make it profitable or try something else.

tylerneylon 14y ago

I built http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ This is a place for research authors to support open access ~= the idea that research should be free to read when the authors want it to be. Specifically, the site is about boycotting one particular academic publisher, Elsevier, by pledging never again to do free labor for them (submitting, reviewing, editing papers). So far over 12,000 people have signed up. I see this as part of a larger movement of academics away from research-behind-paywalls.

reaktivo 14y ago

I built a site for getting notified when the border wait time on the US/MX border gets to a certain point. http://garitas-tijuana.com http://garitas-tijuana.com

fmstephe 14y ago

I am writing a location service to allow people to add 'local interaction' easily to an application. There is a demo of a multiplayer tankwars clone using it at battlewith.me.uk The initial idea was that when I was young I played games on a single computer with a shared computer, things like Tankwars, Worms and Mortal Kombat. That was a lot more fun for me than fragging strangers over the internet. After the web-demo I would like to look at mobile apps. Actually about to post a Show HN of it very soon. Source @ https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server

kmx411 14y ago

Few friends and I launched www.chooseforchange.com Technically "we" are not profitable since all the income is going to a cause. But it's working pretty well, having some difficulties figuring out how to get people to place the markers that friends buy for them. People are thinking our wall posts are "spam" and ignoring them.

typpo 14y ago

I made a site that computes and ranks the mining value of 580,000 asteroids in our solar system (http://asterank.com http://asterank.com). It has grown in popularity, but obviously does not lend itself well to monetization.

cheatercheater 14y ago
Until you start a bond market around it.

hyuuu 14y ago

http://picocrew.com/presents/picocrew http://picocrew.com/presents/picocrew ....:(

ecaradec 14y ago

I launched Qatapult, a quicksilver like inspired launcher for windows http://emmanuelcaradec.com/qatapult http://emmanuelcaradec.com/qatapult . It still needs polish and it still needs more users, but it's already my favorite launcher for windows. (change the default skin if you try, I set the default to the wrong one )

blueprint 14y ago

Blueprint - https://blueprint.io https://blueprint.io - platform for developing native iOS apps without writing any code (order of magnitude less time spent on development, rapid iteration by non-developers possible, able to generate any app at runtime). Actually interviewed at YC but they declined to fund me cause of competition from Apple and Google (see Apple's recent patents and Google's forway into codeless dev - I was actually suspicious if Apple took some of my innovations). I decided to put it on ice and pursue one of my old EE projects which is actually more important to me. Nowadays I'm working with Pair (http://trypair.com http://trypair.com) and do have a few firms interested in acquiring blueprint, so might actually be able to pass the torch and get something out of it to fund my next ventures. For that matter, anyone interested in learning more can email me at paul@blueprint.io.

scottorn 14y ago

I loved this discussion and I learned a lot from reading the responses. I have a side project that is not profitable but has been around for almost 4 years. It's called Ben's Friends (http://bensfriends.org/ http://bensfriends.org/) and we build patient support groups for people with rare diseases (here is our 60 second video: http://youtu.be/YBeRFnJkleU http://youtu.be/YBeRFnJkleU). It's almost impossible to monetize a patient support site, especially for rare diseases, so I've known for a long time we wouldn't make money. However, we've become one of the largest patient support networks on the Internet. I've put a lot of my money into it and we've run out of money many time, but something good always happens and we stay afloat. Here is some unsolicited advice: -Keep your side project alive for as long as you enjoy it. You never know how things will change. When we started there was no such thing as crowdfunding. Last year we managed to pay all the bills through an IndieGoGo campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/Bens-Friends-Builds-Support-Groups-for-Patients-With-Rare-Diseases http://www.indiegogo.com/Bens-Friends-Builds-Support-Groups-... - we never dreamed Crowdfunding would exist, now it's our lifeblood. Reading through many of the responses below, they are public service projects. It's very likely you could do at least a small crowdfunding to pay the bills if you need it. -Who cares if you don't make money? You get to do something you love. That makes you incredibly lucky. Also, almost every person here has tons of opportunities so you can make money on something else. Again, that makes you lucky. -Change the way you measure success. Most people measure success with money. Since we weren't going to make any money on Ben's Friends, we started measuring how many thank you emails we received every day. I get about 25 thank you notes a day - completely unsolicited. Your measurement may be usage, or reach or whether your girlfriend likes your app. Whatever it is, focus on that. It will make you a lot happier than money. -If you are going to do something that doesn't make a lot of money, do it with a partner. It will be more fun, you'll pick each other up when things are down, and with both of you brainstorming and iterating, there is a much better chance it will get traction and eventually become something. Ben's Friends never would have gone anywhere without my partner, Ben Munoz. Good partnerships turn into great friendships and they are one of the best things about starting something. Hope this helps. thanks for posting a great question.

corentino 14y ago

I launched http://www.jaimelesstartups.fr http://www.jaimelesstartups.fr with a friend in mid february. Goal is to make french startup famous ... in France. No ads ! No business model ! (cost us zero since it's hosted on my server I use for my projets) We started with 3 visitors/day now we are at 200. Got a partnership with the French techcrunch Got contacts with famous french entrepreneurs to interview We are happy and we continue to work hard (I work all day long) Actually, I'm working on the design (which is not that easy for an engineer...) Any feedback are more than welcome

softwarerero 14y ago

I launched a Spanish site http://agrupados.biz http://agrupados.biz which is a search engine for clasified ads in Paraguay. I learned Scala und Apache Lucene this way, now I'm hoping to get it at least covering its hosting costs. The site is up aprox. 3 month now and I had almost no visitors before paying Google. 2 days ago I started a Google AdWords campaign so people may find the site, I spend $2.62 so far and got 95 visitors and even won $0.10 with AdSense. Today I added a PayPal donate button.

hmgauna 14y ago
Right now I'm trying to use it and I'm getting a lot of errors. As far as I can see, you need to work on the SEO side: there's a lot that needs to be done on that front. Change your title tags structure, create unique descriptions for each page, build friendly urls, make it easy to be crawled, use a sitemap, add to your links the 'title' attribute. For a site like yours, you should not spend on adwords. You will lose money. I hope it helps!

xjki 14y ago

Started and recently published DrinkControl for Android http://drinkcontrolapp.com http://drinkcontrolapp.com Taking into account that iOS version brings just about $50/month, no illusions about becoming profitable ever. Still was worth it for understanding Android as development platform and its ecosystem (biggest surprise so far - beeing in Samsung app store is more important than beeing in Google Play).

mrose 14y ago

I made Image Overflow http://imageoverflow.com http://imageoverflow.com My core focus, which is to keep the UI free of extra text and needless "social" features, has led to a user adoption rate that is less than desirable, to say the least.

mateo999 14y ago

I started www.sunscanner.co.uk last year. Thought it was a novel and useful way to search for vacations. And I think it made all of £7 in commissions since then :-(

penguinsix 14y ago

I built an app that shows the air pollution levels in Hong Kong based on Western standards, primarily because I couldn't understand the local governments rather lax air quality index. I'll probably never recoup the development costs or even the server expense, but I didn't think it would be right to charge for it. In a heavily polluted place, some folks with asthma and respiratory problems or even young children simply shouldn't go out on certain days. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hong-kong-air-pollution/id504536152?ls=1&mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hong-kong-air-pollution/id504...

hmgauna 14y ago

This year I built http://inflooenz.com http://inflooenz.com It's a tool to explore music influences. I have around 100 visitors each day, but I'm a bit stacked with the site as a product. At the beginning I did some PR. I had some ideas for monetizing, but those are yet to be proved (analytics so far are not showing a good scenario). I had some really cool feedback for the music community, and a lot of ideas for features, but I don't want to start adding features without a clear reason and direction. Right now, I'm working on site engagement, because I think I'm not taking full profit from my already existent visitors. I wasn't hoping to be profitable in the short term, but I expected more feedback and real interest in the product (some to-be-developed features right now allow people to leave their email if they wish to hear from me, but that didn't happen often). PS: Anyways, this was very good as a personal challenge!

macca321 14y ago

https://www.squarelater.com/ https://www.squarelater.com/ - a bill splitting application with SMS input.