9 ms·

I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

280 points by sillysaurusx 2y ago

ipnon 2y ago
I wouldn't be who I am today without wasting years in the bike shed. Kudos!
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
yeah, GitHub Sponsors is non-existent, impossible to get any revenues from it
- david_allison 2y ago
  And yet it still hurts significantly less that Patreon
msephton 2y ago
Previously: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599679
jstxm 2y ago
Cool to read. Thanks.
Uptrenda 2y ago
Light text on light background for max pain. Still I will read it though. Frankly, I commend anyone who is willing to work long-term on massive projects by themselves like this. I find it inspiring since all my projects are like this tbh. Seems like frameworks were a major problem for the project. I get it. Sometimes if you're too early you end up having to build not only your project but a small ecosystem of things to support it. Here's the software they ended up making which looks frigging cool: https://signal.vercel.app/ https://signal.vercel.app/
- makerdiety 2y ago
  Is that Signal Vercel MIDI thing something people can use to make music for free?
  - reactordev 2y ago
    Yes
- dsego 2y ago
  Luckily there is reader mode, the contrast is so low to make it almost illegible.
- joseda-hg 2y ago
  Dark Reader works beautifully on it tho, because it's pretty simple
nrilead9 2y ago
One time I set out to write an accounting ledger application and towards the end realized I built an ORM framework. Neither the application nor the ORM lived on. I now start from an existing ORM framework for any new project. Good learning!
- zaphirplane 2y ago
  If anything HN taught us is ORM is bad. You want to be roasted ;)
Frederation 2y ago
Thats cool.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
I remember the moment when in my last startup, the first invoice was paid - $5. A magic moment. I still remember the name of the customer. The last invoice before exit was $50.000. I remember that customer too.
- cmenge 2y ago
  Interesting, did you pivot / change the target market? $5 sounds more like a consumer product but $50k likely isn't (unless you literally progressed from skateboards to cars like every Agile cartoon wants to make us believe)... Among other things, I'm working on an elephant hunter type product. Took us five months, but the first invoices were $7k, $3k and now $45k but that doesn't prove much yet.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    No we started with too low of a price, and we added enterprise pricing later on. So it was a combination, but we didn't pivot.
android521 2y ago
Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch and take off. But in reality...
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  > mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, Even non-technical founders make this error. Everyone wants to believe that "just one more feature" is the difference between make and break. In my experience reducing features is better to begin with.
  - reactordev 2y ago
    >In my experience reducing features is better to begin with. This is right approach. Lean. If you don’t have PMF, reduce your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again. Eventually you’ll find a market to serve. Just don’t fall into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market exploration.
    - OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
      How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding new features?
      - Phreaker00 2y ago
        As a freelance back-end developer with various co-founding experience this question speaks to me. I think it's all a matter of perspective. Looking at it from a development perspective the two can mean the same thing: we pivot and so we need to add new features. However, in my experience the key is to look at pivoting from a non-development perspective. As mentioned in parent comments you pivot to find a product market fit. That entails finding your audience and the problem you're solving for them. Those questions do not require a product, but a human understanding. Questions like 'is it actually a problem they need solving, or a slight convenience?' and 'how are they solving their problem without my product?'. By pivoting quickly in that space you don't get bogged down by technical issues or challenges that don't even matter, and the real solution might be a week's worth of time.
swoorup 2y ago
Surprisingly the cost to develop is fairly accurate, using scc's COCOMO Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $1,023,233 Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 13.87 months Estimated People Required (organic) 6.55
writtenAnswer 2y ago
I want to be as cool as this guy.
jsemrau 2y ago
I built a deep search for financial research in 2023 and learned that 2025 would have been the year to launch it.
- cmenge 2y ago
  Sounds interesting, what stops you from (re-)launching it?
  - jsemrau 2y ago
    Well, I am pondering this now, tbh.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  are you aware your posts are visible to paid users only? Why if it is intentional?
  - jsemrau 2y ago
    Because the content has high value compared to all the ChatGPT written slop. It is well researched use-cases, based on actual research papers, and includes implementations and solutions. Also highlights problems. For the first 3 months the posts are free.
arionhardison 2y ago
Same here but I learned so much I think it was worth it, im literally 4y+ in. I made a platform for my own personal website: https://arionhardison.com https://arionhardison.com then Ai education: https://pub.education https://pub.education then Ai healthcare: https://codify.healthcare https://codify.healthcare I used to think my goal was to do this and that and change the world etc... I am starting to think that I just like building things and maybe thats OK.
- Narciss 2y ago
  Just visited your personal website, looks like it has a bunch of overflow errors - worth looking into. I appreciate the grind though
  - arionhardison 2y ago
    Yeah, that's just unformatted markdown. Ill fix eventually. TY for the comment, feedback of any kind is awesome IMO.
dsego 2y ago
Ah Riot.js, it was like Vue before Vue, yet it never took off for some reason, and it had component templates with locally scoped JS and CSS. I remember mentioning it to a few fellow devs when they were hyping up Vue and nobody ever even heard about it.
- pinoy420 2y ago
  Did you also tell them about “server side rendering” capabilities of PHP?
  - dsego 2y ago
    I remember this uncanny feeling when I started reading about a new thing in JS frameworks called "file based routing", coming from PHP it was, wait, didn't we just come from this to proper routing, and now this is a feature again.
    - floydnoel 2y ago
      whenever i tell other developers that i think file-based routing is stupid all i get are blank stares. i guess we'll just have to let the young bucks figure it out again on their own
indulona 2y ago
i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off. as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i will ever make, for this reason. it will be 2.5 years of work in march, when i will be releasing it. the only reason i am going for it and i stuck with working on it full-time this whole time is because it is a type of business where customers will come on their own and will want to use it because it provides them with a new sales channel so competition is actually good for them. it flips the usual business model on its head. otherwise i would have quit a long time ago. my hopes up to get it going this year and make 1M in sales next year and hope to be able to focus on growing it for many years to come.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  Interesting. Link?
  - indulona 2y ago
    not yet. it is nothing world-changing, just sales platform for digital content creators. something like patreon, teachable, audible...mashed together.
    - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
      There was a fantastic article giving advice to any would-be patreon disruptors posted on HN a while back. Might be worth your time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808115
kubb 2y ago
How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary. Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.
- input_sh 2y ago
  Nobody starts by dropping quarter of a mil, you start by dropping $1k and being very frugal, releasing something minimal, seeing how it behaves, and once you have some actual data to work with, you pivot again and again and again. It's always a huge money sinkohole until it isn't.
- svantana 2y ago
  It's not really clear from the blog post, but it seems like it was a side project. That's why it took so long. Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of doing freelance work 2-3 days/week and working on my own projects in the remaining time.
  - AutistiCoder 2y ago
    How do you get freelance work?
    - svantana 2y ago
      Networking, in the broadest sense of the word. Gone to tech meetups, gotten to know a lot of people in my particular niche (sound and image processing).
  - psytrancefan 2y ago
    Surely a side project. It is actually really good too. There is quite a problem with creativity being stifled by the infinite possibilities of a modern DAW. Everything feels super fast and responsive on it too. I am going to spend a good amount of time in this. Helio is a desktop app that is down this line but more complicated and not as easy to use. This just all makes sense if you know how a piano roll is going to work.
piskov 2y ago
2.54:1 contrast for text which spectacularly fails any accessibility specs. Please don’t do this
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  I’d noticed it as 2.58 in Firefox’s dev tools, so when you say 2.54, I’m curious. #ab9ea2 on #ffffff. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ says 2.57, https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white says 2.57 and on hover expands that to 2.5785676343306743. I presume Firefox is rounding, while the other two are truncating. Truncating actually feels more useful for how people are too likely to use such things—taking values as low as they can while still complying. The new, superior method is https://www.myndex.com/APCA/ https://www.myndex.com/APCA/. It yields an Lc of 50.4, which is (as you’d expect) wildly unsuitable for body text.
  - piskov 2y ago
    Most likely some typo on my part
- fsckboy 2y ago
  cm/inch:inch ? ok, not what you meant, but it jumped out at me
- kristianp 2y ago
  Agreed, that is the lightest-grey text I have seen on the web in years. Just use the default text colour, dude.
webprofusion 2y ago
Technically they didn't put a price tag on the app, the $1 was github sponsor money, so the project was never really designed to make money. The app itself (Midi editor with piano roll UI) looks great but is instantly made much less relevant if you just install Reaper (and actual DAW, free to try, available at the time all this was developed). Cool thing, but the moral of the story is: release that toy thing you spent a few weeks on, it's as ready as it ever will be and maybe it'll grow with it's user base.
- nchmy 2y ago
  That ain't the moral of the story... It's not even the literal story that they shared
- psytrancefan 2y ago
  No, you aren't understanding the point. The point is to make something stripped down compared to Reaper. The problem with modern DAW software is you end up getting lost in the infinite possibilities. It is counter intuitive but constraints are a known aid to creativity. If you want to write notes, this is the way to do it. Otherwise you get lost picking effect,synths, samples , on and on and on. The idea would be to write the notes then you take the midi into something like Reaper. If the author reads this what it really just needs is a microtuning import for scala scl files. There is absolutely nothing that can do this easily for non 12 tet music and just have the notes in front of you without much else.
albertobarrago 2y ago
Thanks for sharing, great result
p3rls 2y ago
I spent eight years and I'm around -$150,000 for my main webapp so you're ahead of the curve!
- Narciss 2y ago
  What’s the web app, if you don’t mind sharing the link
  - p3rls 2y ago
    It's kpopping.com
KronisLV 2y ago
I feel like many would point at all of the technology migrations and view it as a cautionary tale: that if you don't stick with whatever stack you picked, then shipping will be a lengthy ordeal due to migrating between various sub-optimal choices all the time. For example, what if someone just picked jQuery for the front end and stuck with that and tried and rewrites or changes after the launch of the MVP? On the other hand, this no doubt will let you learn a lot of useful things along the way and possibly make you a better developer, or at least give you an idea of which technologies are nice or easy to use, or suited for certain problems. It's nice to have that sort of separation between the categories of what you aim to do - to study or to try and ship something, because without you see a lot of cases (especially in indie game development, for some reason) where people feel disappointed due to not shipping anything in the end. There's nothing wrong with unfinished projects that let you learn, or shipping sub-optimal code to get it out of the door and start generating value. Good job, though!
jvanderbot 2y ago
TFA talks a bit about shiny object/library syndrome. I think there's another good reason to avoid new things: LLMs are better with old stuff. I can sit down and essentially english-type an app together in javascript or an old version of bevy, but if I ask for new APIs it all falls apart until I have built up sufficient examples in my own code. I've tried giving documentation, etc. It's just easier to version pin something from 2022 and chug along using a less featureful but more productive assisted-coding paradigm.
flippyhead 2y ago
This resonates with me. I've recently come out of retirement, and really gotten back into programming and product building. I've done this a few times before, but even with experience, I STILL find it hard sometimes to not just dive right in and start building. Mostly, it's because I enjoy it so much. Now though, things are different. After a throw away project to get back into things, I realized I could very nearly just build first and find product market fit second if only because building is sooo much quicker now. I decided that over the course of a year I was going to try building 3-6 separate projects, and assume at least one will be successful. My most recent project I realized very late that it's probably going to be very hard to ever make much money; so for now, I'm giving it away for free, just to see how people use it (https://seikai.tv https://seikai.tv). I've not just started a new project and for sure this one is going to be a unicorn!
xyzzy9563 2y ago
I spent 2 years making a web app and it's making about $4k per month now.
vcryan 2y ago
This is a great post about learning JavaScript
beryilma 2y ago
> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote everything in TypeScript, including my own libraries. > Anyway, I'll be replacing my own components like Button and Toolbar with Material-UI ones. > It's time to rewrite everything to styled-components. > It's time to rewrite everything to useXXX. No wonder why these software projects (personal as well as professional ones) are 6 years late. It may be a good learning experience, but a terribly inefficient way of developing software.
- madduci 2y ago
  Exactly. Using a boring stack like jQuery would have been already good enough to let them concentrate on solving business problems rather than stack ones
  - EGreg 2y ago
    It’s interesting 12 years ago I released v1.0 of the full stack open source platform for anyone to use to quickly put together pretty much anything on the Web in a standard way, and focus on actually growing it, but I have faced opposition from day 1, on weird bases First, I was told that the name of my library “conflicts with the excellent Q.js library for promises” and that no one was going to take a look. Well, promises are built into browsers now. But I renamed it to Qbix Platform back then. See for yourself LOL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053211 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053296 (2013) Then people told me that it doesn’t use the latest React / Angular / Web Components / Typescript whatever, and looks old. On the PHP side they told me that it looks like ancient code because it’s compatible with PHP 5.2 and told me I must break compatibility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897369 (2023) Then I was told that PHP is a stupid language to build a platform in and I should use Go or Rust if anyone would take it seriously. Every step of the way, I was citing massively adopted projects like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, the number of servers running PHP and my vision for everyone to “just run it” https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem But the signal to noise ratio was very high. Some people here on HN started telling me that they didnt want to read that page because they found mentioned a token. But the token is optional and there only for settling micropayments and hosting companies to make money from customers globally. It is solving the payments problem on the web and getting rid of the stupid paywalls. It is solving the problem of monetizing digital content like open source software, journalism etc. Which have corrupted journalism. In short, it’s been a lonely experience. Many times people are married to the latest fads or taboos and unwilling to even read what you wrote (unless you remove all mention of a token and add the latest framework du jour). Here it is, if you want it, it’s free and open source btw: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
curiousigor 2y ago
Really good writeup and insights, thanks for this. A friend of mine convinced me to enable kind of "donations" if you will for a free macOS app I've made a some time ago. I was not really trying to sell it or anything as it's a simple tool which you setup once and then that's it. But I figured that some might want to support my work and so I setup a Gumroad page with a suggested price of $2.99 and kinda forgot about it. The first $1 email that came through that felt very validating
MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
Seems like a solid app. I haven't evaluated online music software but this is a good first experience, for me. I appreciate that I can try it without signing in.
fsckboy 2y ago
when I got my first apartment that had its own clothes washer and dryer, the first time I found a $1 bill in the dryer with my clothes, I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall!
ge96 2y ago
now just time travel to when $1 was $100
lxe 2y ago
The app is actually really good too.
gitlinuxgreat 2y ago
I use boring stacks in all my software development including jQuery, also 5 years programming and not a dime of revenue. American software development not easy. Even though I offer free account, how messed up is that.
swoorup 2y ago
I love reading posts and comments like these, as it gives me better insights and questions what I have been doing wrong as I can relate to this shiny new attachment syndrome very much myself.

280 points by sillysaurusx 2y ago

ipnon 2y ago

I wouldn't be who I am today without wasting years in the bike shed. Kudos!

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

yeah, GitHub Sponsors is non-existent, impossible to get any revenues from it

david_allison 2y ago
And yet it still hurts significantly less that Patreon

msephton 2y ago

Previously: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599679

jstxm 2y ago

Cool to read. Thanks.

Uptrenda 2y ago

Light text on light background for max pain. Still I will read it though. Frankly, I commend anyone who is willing to work long-term on massive projects by themselves like this. I find it inspiring since all my projects are like this tbh. Seems like frameworks were a major problem for the project. I get it. Sometimes if you're too early you end up having to build not only your project but a small ecosystem of things to support it. Here's the software they ended up making which looks frigging cool: https://signal.vercel.app/ https://signal.vercel.app/

makerdiety 2y ago
Is that Signal Vercel MIDI thing something people can use to make music for free?
- reactordev 2y ago
  Yes
dsego 2y ago
Luckily there is reader mode, the contrast is so low to make it almost illegible.
joseda-hg 2y ago
Dark Reader works beautifully on it tho, because it's pretty simple

nrilead9 2y ago

One time I set out to write an accounting ledger application and towards the end realized I built an ORM framework. Neither the application nor the ORM lived on. I now start from an existing ORM framework for any new project. Good learning!

zaphirplane 2y ago
If anything HN taught us is ORM is bad. You want to be roasted ;)

Frederation 2y ago

Thats cool.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

I remember the moment when in my last startup, the first invoice was paid - $5. A magic moment. I still remember the name of the customer. The last invoice before exit was $50.000. I remember that customer too.

cmenge 2y ago
Interesting, did you pivot / change the target market? $5 sounds more like a consumer product but $50k likely isn't (unless you literally progressed from skateboards to cars like every Agile cartoon wants to make us believe)... Among other things, I'm working on an elephant hunter type product. Took us five months, but the first invoices were $7k, $3k and now $45k but that doesn't prove much yet.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  No we started with too low of a price, and we added enterprise pricing later on. So it was a combination, but we didn't pivot.

android521 2y ago

Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch and take off. But in reality...

OccamsMirror 2y ago
> mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, Even non-technical founders make this error. Everyone wants to believe that "just one more feature" is the difference between make and break. In my experience reducing features is better to begin with.
- reactordev 2y ago
  >In my experience reducing features is better to begin with. This is right approach. Lean. If you don’t have PMF, reduce your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again. Eventually you’ll find a market to serve. Just don’t fall into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market exploration.
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
    How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding new features?
    - Phreaker00 2y ago
      As a freelance back-end developer with various co-founding experience this question speaks to me. I think it's all a matter of perspective. Looking at it from a development perspective the two can mean the same thing: we pivot and so we need to add new features. However, in my experience the key is to look at pivoting from a non-development perspective. As mentioned in parent comments you pivot to find a product market fit. That entails finding your audience and the problem you're solving for them. Those questions do not require a product, but a human understanding. Questions like 'is it actually a problem they need solving, or a slight convenience?' and 'how are they solving their problem without my product?'. By pivoting quickly in that space you don't get bogged down by technical issues or challenges that don't even matter, and the real solution might be a week's worth of time.

swoorup 2y ago

Surprisingly the cost to develop is fairly accurate, using scc's COCOMO Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $1,023,233 Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 13.87 months Estimated People Required (organic) 6.55

writtenAnswer 2y ago

I want to be as cool as this guy.

jsemrau 2y ago

I built a deep search for financial research in 2023 and learned that 2025 would have been the year to launch it.

cmenge 2y ago
Sounds interesting, what stops you from (re-)launching it?
- jsemrau 2y ago
  Well, I am pondering this now, tbh.
riku_iki 2y ago
are you aware your posts are visible to paid users only? Why if it is intentional?
- jsemrau 2y ago
  Because the content has high value compared to all the ChatGPT written slop. It is well researched use-cases, based on actual research papers, and includes implementations and solutions. Also highlights problems. For the first 3 months the posts are free.

arionhardison 2y ago

Same here but I learned so much I think it was worth it, im literally 4y+ in. I made a platform for my own personal website: https://arionhardison.com https://arionhardison.com then Ai education: https://pub.education https://pub.education then Ai healthcare: https://codify.healthcare https://codify.healthcare I used to think my goal was to do this and that and change the world etc... I am starting to think that I just like building things and maybe thats OK.

Narciss 2y ago
Just visited your personal website, looks like it has a bunch of overflow errors - worth looking into. I appreciate the grind though
- arionhardison 2y ago
  Yeah, that's just unformatted markdown. Ill fix eventually. TY for the comment, feedback of any kind is awesome IMO.

dsego 2y ago

Ah Riot.js, it was like Vue before Vue, yet it never took off for some reason, and it had component templates with locally scoped JS and CSS. I remember mentioning it to a few fellow devs when they were hyping up Vue and nobody ever even heard about it.

pinoy420 2y ago
Did you also tell them about “server side rendering” capabilities of PHP?
- dsego 2y ago
  I remember this uncanny feeling when I started reading about a new thing in JS frameworks called "file based routing", coming from PHP it was, wait, didn't we just come from this to proper routing, and now this is a feature again.
  - floydnoel 2y ago
    whenever i tell other developers that i think file-based routing is stupid all i get are blank stares. i guess we'll just have to let the young bucks figure it out again on their own

indulona 2y ago

i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off. as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i will ever make, for this reason. it will be 2.5 years of work in march, when i will be releasing it. the only reason i am going for it and i stuck with working on it full-time this whole time is because it is a type of business where customers will come on their own and will want to use it because it provides them with a new sales channel so competition is actually good for them. it flips the usual business model on its head. otherwise i would have quit a long time ago. my hopes up to get it going this year and make 1M in sales next year and hope to be able to focus on growing it for many years to come.

cactusplant7374 2y ago
Interesting. Link?
- indulona 2y ago
  not yet. it is nothing world-changing, just sales platform for digital content creators. something like patreon, teachable, audible...mashed together.
  - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
    There was a fantastic article giving advice to any would-be patreon disruptors posted on HN a while back. Might be worth your time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808115

kubb 2y ago

How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary. Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.

input_sh 2y ago
Nobody starts by dropping quarter of a mil, you start by dropping $1k and being very frugal, releasing something minimal, seeing how it behaves, and once you have some actual data to work with, you pivot again and again and again. It's always a huge money sinkohole until it isn't.
svantana 2y ago
It's not really clear from the blog post, but it seems like it was a side project. That's why it took so long. Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of doing freelance work 2-3 days/week and working on my own projects in the remaining time.
- AutistiCoder 2y ago
  How do you get freelance work?
  - svantana 2y ago
    Networking, in the broadest sense of the word. Gone to tech meetups, gotten to know a lot of people in my particular niche (sound and image processing).
- psytrancefan 2y ago
  Surely a side project. It is actually really good too. There is quite a problem with creativity being stifled by the infinite possibilities of a modern DAW. Everything feels super fast and responsive on it too. I am going to spend a good amount of time in this. Helio is a desktop app that is down this line but more complicated and not as easy to use. This just all makes sense if you know how a piano roll is going to work.

piskov 2y ago

2.54:1 contrast for text which spectacularly fails any accessibility specs. Please don’t do this

chrismorgan 2y ago
I’d noticed it as 2.58 in Firefox’s dev tools, so when you say 2.54, I’m curious. #ab9ea2 on #ffffff. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ says 2.57, https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white says 2.57 and on hover expands that to 2.5785676343306743. I presume Firefox is rounding, while the other two are truncating. Truncating actually feels more useful for how people are too likely to use such things—taking values as low as they can while still complying. The new, superior method is https://www.myndex.com/APCA/ https://www.myndex.com/APCA/. It yields an Lc of 50.4, which is (as you’d expect) wildly unsuitable for body text.
- piskov 2y ago
  Most likely some typo on my part
fsckboy 2y ago
cm/inch:inch ? ok, not what you meant, but it jumped out at me
kristianp 2y ago
Agreed, that is the lightest-grey text I have seen on the web in years. Just use the default text colour, dude.

webprofusion 2y ago

Technically they didn't put a price tag on the app, the $1 was github sponsor money, so the project was never really designed to make money. The app itself (Midi editor with piano roll UI) looks great but is instantly made much less relevant if you just install Reaper (and actual DAW, free to try, available at the time all this was developed). Cool thing, but the moral of the story is: release that toy thing you spent a few weeks on, it's as ready as it ever will be and maybe it'll grow with it's user base.

nchmy 2y ago
That ain't the moral of the story... It's not even the literal story that they shared
psytrancefan 2y ago
No, you aren't understanding the point. The point is to make something stripped down compared to Reaper. The problem with modern DAW software is you end up getting lost in the infinite possibilities. It is counter intuitive but constraints are a known aid to creativity. If you want to write notes, this is the way to do it. Otherwise you get lost picking effect,synths, samples , on and on and on. The idea would be to write the notes then you take the midi into something like Reaper. If the author reads this what it really just needs is a microtuning import for scala scl files. There is absolutely nothing that can do this easily for non 12 tet music and just have the notes in front of you without much else.

albertobarrago 2y ago

Thanks for sharing, great result

p3rls 2y ago

I spent eight years and I'm around -$150,000 for my main webapp so you're ahead of the curve!

Narciss 2y ago
What’s the web app, if you don’t mind sharing the link
- p3rls 2y ago
  It's kpopping.com

KronisLV 2y ago

I feel like many would point at all of the technology migrations and view it as a cautionary tale: that if you don't stick with whatever stack you picked, then shipping will be a lengthy ordeal due to migrating between various sub-optimal choices all the time. For example, what if someone just picked jQuery for the front end and stuck with that and tried and rewrites or changes after the launch of the MVP? On the other hand, this no doubt will let you learn a lot of useful things along the way and possibly make you a better developer, or at least give you an idea of which technologies are nice or easy to use, or suited for certain problems. It's nice to have that sort of separation between the categories of what you aim to do - to study or to try and ship something, because without you see a lot of cases (especially in indie game development, for some reason) where people feel disappointed due to not shipping anything in the end. There's nothing wrong with unfinished projects that let you learn, or shipping sub-optimal code to get it out of the door and start generating value. Good job, though!

jvanderbot 2y ago

TFA talks a bit about shiny object/library syndrome. I think there's another good reason to avoid new things: LLMs are better with old stuff. I can sit down and essentially english-type an app together in javascript or an old version of bevy, but if I ask for new APIs it all falls apart until I have built up sufficient examples in my own code. I've tried giving documentation, etc. It's just easier to version pin something from 2022 and chug along using a less featureful but more productive assisted-coding paradigm.

flippyhead 2y ago

This resonates with me. I've recently come out of retirement, and really gotten back into programming and product building. I've done this a few times before, but even with experience, I STILL find it hard sometimes to not just dive right in and start building. Mostly, it's because I enjoy it so much. Now though, things are different. After a throw away project to get back into things, I realized I could very nearly just build first and find product market fit second if only because building is sooo much quicker now. I decided that over the course of a year I was going to try building 3-6 separate projects, and assume at least one will be successful. My most recent project I realized very late that it's probably going to be very hard to ever make much money; so for now, I'm giving it away for free, just to see how people use it (https://seikai.tv https://seikai.tv). I've not just started a new project and for sure this one is going to be a unicorn!

xyzzy9563 2y ago

I spent 2 years making a web app and it's making about $4k per month now.

vcryan 2y ago

This is a great post about learning JavaScript

beryilma 2y ago

> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote everything in TypeScript, including my own libraries. > Anyway, I'll be replacing my own components like Button and Toolbar with Material-UI ones. > It's time to rewrite everything to styled-components. > It's time to rewrite everything to useXXX. No wonder why these software projects (personal as well as professional ones) are 6 years late. It may be a good learning experience, but a terribly inefficient way of developing software.

madduci 2y ago
Exactly. Using a boring stack like jQuery would have been already good enough to let them concentrate on solving business problems rather than stack ones
- EGreg 2y ago
  It’s interesting 12 years ago I released v1.0 of the full stack open source platform for anyone to use to quickly put together pretty much anything on the Web in a standard way, and focus on actually growing it, but I have faced opposition from day 1, on weird bases First, I was told that the name of my library “conflicts with the excellent Q.js library for promises” and that no one was going to take a look. Well, promises are built into browsers now. But I renamed it to Qbix Platform back then. See for yourself LOL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053211 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053296 (2013) Then people told me that it doesn’t use the latest React / Angular / Web Components / Typescript whatever, and looks old. On the PHP side they told me that it looks like ancient code because it’s compatible with PHP 5.2 and told me I must break compatibility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897369 (2023) Then I was told that PHP is a stupid language to build a platform in and I should use Go or Rust if anyone would take it seriously. Every step of the way, I was citing massively adopted projects like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, the number of servers running PHP and my vision for everyone to “just run it” https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem But the signal to noise ratio was very high. Some people here on HN started telling me that they didnt want to read that page because they found mentioned a token. But the token is optional and there only for settling micropayments and hosting companies to make money from customers globally. It is solving the payments problem on the web and getting rid of the stupid paywalls. It is solving the problem of monetizing digital content like open source software, journalism etc. Which have corrupted journalism. In short, it’s been a lonely experience. Many times people are married to the latest fads or taboos and unwilling to even read what you wrote (unless you remove all mention of a token and add the latest framework du jour). Here it is, if you want it, it’s free and open source btw: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

curiousigor 2y ago

Really good writeup and insights, thanks for this. A friend of mine convinced me to enable kind of "donations" if you will for a free macOS app I've made a some time ago. I was not really trying to sell it or anything as it's a simple tool which you setup once and then that's it. But I figured that some might want to support my work and so I setup a Gumroad page with a suggested price of $2.99 and kinda forgot about it. The first $1 email that came through that felt very validating

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago

Seems like a solid app. I haven't evaluated online music software but this is a good first experience, for me. I appreciate that I can try it without signing in.

fsckboy 2y ago

when I got my first apartment that had its own clothes washer and dryer, the first time I found a $1 bill in the dryer with my clothes, I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall!

ge96 2y ago

now just time travel to when $1 was $100

lxe 2y ago

The app is actually really good too.

gitlinuxgreat 2y ago

I use boring stacks in all my software development including jQuery, also 5 years programming and not a dime of revenue. American software development not easy. Even though I offer free account, how messed up is that.

swoorup 2y ago

I love reading posts and comments like these, as it gives me better insights and questions what I have been doing wrong as I can relate to this shiny new attachment syndrome very much myself.