Basically all of the projects went on 'auto-pilot' right away, meaning that I didn't touch them since I posted them. However, my latest 'Show-HN' turned into a real business and three years later we are a three people remote team and we are growing quite fast (the project is called mailparser.io).
I was wondering what your 'Show HN' turned into? Any stories you want to share?
At the time, we had been working on Webflow day and night for 6 months with no other income coming in, we had gotten rejected from YC a few months before, I was over $50K in credit (and medical) debt, and the Show HN was our last-ditch effort to get some traction before going back to our jobs.
The post did really well - we had the #1 position for most of the day, got over 500 upvotes, and in the resulting days over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list. This gave us the confidence to keep going and helped us get into YC for the next batch.
Since then, Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has grown into a profitable business with 400K+ users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and 25 employees (also all over the world). I'm not sure any of this would have happened if the Show HN would not have taken off the way it did.
TLDR: A+, would post again ;)
At first (in late 2012), we tried every single frontend framework available - including Backbone, Angular, Spine, and SproutCore (which ended up becoming Ember) - but they were all too slow for what we were doing. React wasn't yet a thing, and the only library that we found that worked fast enough was Knockout.js, so we went with that in the early days.
Since then, we've refactored 90%+ of the app (which is now approaching a million lines of code) to React/Flux/Immutable.js, with the remaining 10% not far behind.
The rest of the stack is nearly 99.9% JavaScript - including Node/Express/Mongo/Mongoose/Redis/nginx+more on the backend side of things.
We're hoping to post a lot more about our full stack in the future, especially since we're rolling out our dynamic website hosting stack worldwide (there's a lot of interesting S3/Lambda/CloudFront/Fastly goodies in there).
The biggest challenge is probably dealing with the huge array of different sites that people build, which range from small one-page marketing sites to huge 1000+ page dynamic web apps. Since Webflow is not template-based (like Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, etc) but rather allows designers to build up a site from scratch (including defining their own DOM nodes and CSS classes), we have to create JSON-based abstractions that need to work in a backwards-compatible way even as we add new features to Webflow.
Webflow is a much more professional tool targeted at web designers, freelancers, and agencies who create custom responsive websites, usually from scratch (or from a professional template as a starting point). That is, people who create websites for others. To be successful with Webflow, our users need to think somewhat like a developer (e.g. understand the box model, understand how CSS works in principle, etc), so the learning curve is a bit steeper.
For example, everything you see on https://webflow.com/ is built visually in Webflow and deployed to staging and production by non-engineers. There's a full database there with over 20 tables representing different content types, with a complex schema (e.g. blog posts, case studies, testimonials, job posts, templates, tags, etc), all the pages are custom responsive layouts - and all this was created without writing code.
None of this would be possible with Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc - since those are limited to their available templates. Most of the sites created in Webflow (see https://webflow.com/discover/popular for some examples) can only be recreated in Webflow or by writing code by hand, no other visual "WYSIWYG" builder comes even close.
You can think of Webflow as a much more evolved Dreamweaver, or a purely visual next-generation WordPress - minus all the code :)
In 2013 the author of GitLab, Dmitriy, tweeted "I want to work on GitLab full time" and I hired him. A year later we incorporated and applied for YC.
In March of 2015 we graduated from YC with 9 people on our team. Now we are 93 people in 28 countries https://about.gitlab.com/team/ with more than 100,000 organizations running GitLab. Over 1200 people contributed to the project http://contributors.gitlab.com/
I owe the greatest adventure in my life to Hacker News and its users, thanks everyone!
Nice job!
Lately I've been toying with the idea of selling the business, as it seems like half a decade is plenty enough to spend on a single project and I'm curious to see what else I might be able to do. But I periodically get into this mood and might soon come to my senses again :-)
Hah, my thoughts exactly! Time flies...
Glad to hear it's doing well.
Btw, for others interested in good food, and/or Japanese food, the inspiration for this request came from the excellent documentary:
"Shoyu and the Secrets of Japanese Cuisine" / "Shoyu et les secrets de la cuisine Japonaise"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3898014/
http://www.pointdujour-international.com/catalogueFiche.php?...
A few years after that post I left my job to work on PCPartPicker full-time. Then a year later I hired my first employee. Now we're a larger team working toward expansion.
The feedback I got from the original post was extremely helpful.
Looks like you've got a decent market sewn up, well done!
I've always wondered how apps like yours (single isolated feature done well, available many other places for free) get customers. I've only built things which are niche-based so it's easier to find customers, but with your type of project it feels to me like gaining traction would be quite difficult. I always want to learn from people who have taken something so simple (not downplaying your efforts, just the 'concept'), and made it stick.
1) It started out as just an image optimization API (so it was a little bit of a niche product back in 2013).
2) Our API covered all major image formats, and supported both lossy and lossless optimization modes, which again, was pretty rare at the time.
3) Listen to customers, fix things, and add sensible features such as image resizing. Always listen to customers and try to understand what they want even if they don't know how to explain it themselves.
4) With enough people using our platform to essentially replace the development work, R&D and infrastructural requirements needed for a decent imaging workflow, the app will essentially market itself.
5) Develop a stack which can be rapidly scaled up and simultaneously allows for costs to be kept as low as possible. Pass on the value to customers at every available opportunity.
6) I'll edit this post and add more detail once I get to a real computer.
It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces)
It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return whatsoever. I keep it up because it is incredibly powerful software and I hope it is helping at least some people.
If you want it to be more widely used, maybe it could use some SEO or marketing love? You don't seem to be on page 1 for company name generator, business name generator, name generator, etc., and you deserve to be. Get an h1 tag, get a few blogs to list you on their "top 5 web 2.0 name generators" articles.
I used several similar name generators recently and they all sucked each on its own way, but this one rocks.
Crowdsourced asteroid discovery (http://www.asterank.com/discover) - only 5 upvotes on HN, but nearly half a million survey images reviewed, with 17,000 potential asteroids marked. Not really working on it anymore.
Free outgoing SMS API (http://textbelt.com/) - not much interest on HN, but about 3M texts sent over the past few years, almost 1000 stars on Github. Requires an hour or two a month for maintenance, responding to issues, etc.
Call Congress (1-884-USA-0234) - single phone number that dials all your representatives one after another. 8 upvotes on HN, but did very well on Reddit and sent over 300 hours of phone calls to Congress in a few days after the Orlando shooting.
Conspiracy theory generator (http://www.verifiedfacts.org/) - Did well on HN with 181 points. About 1M conspiracies generated. On autopilot but still gets organic traffic for ridiculous queries like "snooki illuminati".
Dream logs (http://keepdream.me) - posted 4 years ago but it's a niche tool. 62 subscribers, 2.5k dreams recorded, on autopilot.
Asterank (http://www.asterank.com/) - I submitted parts of this site to Show HN as I added new features. Sold it to Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company for a small amount.
Meteor showers visualization (http://www.ianww.com/meteor-showers/) - did well on HN, finalist in some Popular Science viz contest.
Dinosaur Pictures database (http://dinosaurpictures.org/) - a few upvotes on HN, about 8k uniques/mo a year later mostly from SEO. This is one of my favorite projects to spend time on.
See here: https://github.com/typpo/textbelt/blob/master/lib/carriers.j...
2.5 years ago I posted it again with some more features [2], got 190 points and 80 comments, and some positive feedback. Was encouraged to keep up development.
Since then:
* > 5 million sessions
* A native Android version written in Java with > 100k installs
* Native iOS version in the works
* I now work full time as a software developer
It's a small, simple application - almost a toy - and there are now lots of similar services, but it has genuinely changed my life.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205451
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975538Originally the idea was just to add better search mechanism for "Who is hiring" thread, but i've decided to go beyond that. I've added every big job board that I could find. Right now it aggregates 15956 jobs for IT from 12 different sources [1]. The website didn't make a dollar yet. Although I received few investment propositions to make something bigger out of it.
The current domain is whoishiring.io (google didn't like .it much)
Nice project by the way, I saw it for the first time on the last "Who's Hiring" thread.
The exception to this rule are "generic" ccTLDs, Google has a number of generic ccTLDs, these are ccTLDs that they will treat as if they're not ccTLDs. This includes .io, .me and .tv[1].
I used to run a site from httpstatus.es, last year I switched the site from .es (Spain) to generic (.com) and have seen a significant increase in search engine traffic. Here is a 3 year traffic chart, red box is the switch from .es to .com: http://i.imgur.com/60RXFjP.png
I am confident from my own experience that there is a big penalty associated with using a non-generic ccTLD and businesses should be very careful when choosing a ccTLD if search engine traffic is meaningful to their business.
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en (scroll down to "More about domain determination")
Thanks.
Open Exchange Rates was initially a portfolio piece (a labour of love that I hoped would land me a job at Stripe!) I launched it as an adjunct to money.js[1], a minimal JavaScript currency conversion library. The latter is still popular, but Open Exchange Rates has since organically grown on its own merits into a community of over 50,000 developers, with hundreds of tutorials and open source integrations. It's my full-time job, and there are seven of us on board.
We've since grown to be the industry-leader in our niche, loved and relied upon by Booking.com, SkyScanner, Etsy, KickStarter, WordPress.com, BrainTree, Coursera, Fab.com, Wego, Lonely Planet, Stripe, SoundHound, Vice.com - and thousands more of the world's most trafficked websites and brands.
This week, over four years later, I've just returned to Hong Kong - the project's birthplace - to work with our team here. We're about to switch on a platform that will open up true real-time data for our clients in high-risk financial environments, and allow us to scale to the next 500,000 clients and beyond.
I never liked where the industry is heading - towards competitive, closed, stingy business - so we've chosen to move further towards transparency, sharing and collaboration. The next steps in our journey are where we open more and more to our community and marketplace, meanwhile tailoring our higher-ticket service to those who need it.
(Thanks for posting this Ask HN!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641
By now, we're the largest streaming search engine in the world, having surpassed both canistream.it and instantwatcher.com - and the hybrid app is nearing one million Android downloads now while still being featured on the Cordova and Ionic showcases. All this with zero marketing dollars invested and no venture capital on board. Fun ride so far :)
Seriously, the main reason we're outgrowing our competitors so fast is that audience marketing is a much more lucrative business than affiliate marketing.
That way the site stays clean, the content relevant and our users only occasionally see trailers on Youtube and Facebook from movies they'd actually want to see in cinema!
Win, win.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11871554
I've created and put up 6 tutorials at
Worked with Amazon on a guest blog post:
https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx14R0IYY...
Flask-Ask and AlexaTutorial have been featured on
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/4qdy73/learn_t...
and
https://www.producthunt.com/tech/alexatutorial-com
280 github stars
https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask
Having a blast!
Since then many of the great suggestions that I received from here have been completed, including AWS inventory import, teams, unlimited canvas etc. I've added paid Pro subscriptions that are working out very well, but also kept and expanded on the free usage tier.
HN got me my first users and was very motivating, but after that initial spike I've kept steadily growing and have added many tens of thousands of new users organically with essentially zero marketing so far. About 50% of my traffic comes from other sites and blogs directly linking, including AWS itself [2] these days, the other 50% is people Googling for AWS diagrams/architectures.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942 [2] https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/
I think the Product Hunt attention helped more than HN, but I've learnt that it's the longer term sources you don't expect that help the most. For example, it got into in an ArchDaily.com article that they re-publish every so often. That's easily been the most valuable source.
It's been growing pretty consistently for quite a while. About 5% every week.
To me the site looks fine, not ugly by any means. It's spartan/simple and utilitarian, as it probably should be. Will definitely be trying this out the next time I need a bulk-resize.
Is there any particular method you plan to use to turn a profit from this? Premium plans/etc.?
I feel that it's a difficult site to monetize. Part of the appeal is that it can be more convenient than having a resizing application on your computer. I think adding sign in (a dependency for premium plans) would undermine that a bit.
At the moment, it's still growing quickly, doesn't take up much of my time and costs barely anything to run. Given those circumstances, I don't feel I need to rush into monetizing. I'd rather wait and see.
Probably the best thing that could happen in the meantime is widespread adoption of a very low friction micropayments platform. I think PayPal or bitcoin are best positioned for that, but I haven't seen any signs of that ideal scenario coming to fruition any time soon.
Two years later I got into Imagine K12. Now we are doing around $100k ARR, ~250+k monthly uniques, and have been used by almost 5 million people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289393 [2] https://www.class-central.com/
Back then, I started as a tool that lets you create your own HackerNews clone. I did this, because every now and then, I was seeing Show HN posts that went like "HackerNews for XYZ". So I thought, I'll create a tool that lets you build your own HN quickly!.
Two years later, I'm still going and it's now grown into a community tool. Still not at the level that I want, but slowly getting there and hopefully monetize it soon.
I gradually started killing more and more accounts. The admin overhead was a pain, so I polled a few users and said "Hey this is crippling, would you pay?" Many said yes. I knocked up stripe integration and received zero paying clients.
Closed registrations to new users, and setup a git-based DNS host instead, https://dns-api.com . Users pay for that from the first week, and it slowly ticks over. I've been using the service myself for all my new domain registrations and I'm constantly impressed at how smooth it is.
(that was nearly 10 years ago!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6025427
We didn't get the biggest reception on HN, but we now have 200,000+ users, 500,000+ scenes, profitable and have strong growth. Still self-funding the project.
I also posted https://unop.uk/tube (I built the original over 5 years ago) and I still use it pretty regularly, as the TfL site is so bloated for mobile use.
$60k RR last month.
I have sold about 6000 licenses of the Game Engine since.
Impact was my bachelor thesis and I wanted to release it as open source initially. However, after I finished university I poured a whole lot of time into polishing and documenting it, so I thought "what the hell, I'm going to try to sell it". Surprisingly it worked. Impact pretty much financed all the other projects I've been working on since.
I believe I was at the right place at the right time. Apple just announced that they won't support Flash on iOS and Impact was one of the very few solutions to make (substantial) games in HTML5.
Impact has only received minor updates since its launch. I tried to start with a fresh new version a number of times, but always stopped short - I felt like I couldn't deliver anything worthy of the high expectations people had. Sales have died down slowly over the last two years, partly because Impact is somewhat outdated now and makes some things more complicated than neccessary and partly because there are now very strong Open and Closed Source alternatives in this space.
At the beginning of this year, I finally found some new perspective on what a "Impact 2.0" should deliver and most importantly, the motivation to implement it. It's currently my favorite project to work on. It's a complete rewrite. Simplifying everything with the insights I gathered over the past few years is humbling, but I love it.
My plan is to have 2.0 ready at the end of the year. I'll probably publish Impact 1.0 under GPL then.
Also, I'm excited for Impact 2.0
[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta
[2] https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg
[3] http://phoboslab.org/#games
[4] http://zty.pe/
Here is something you might want to look into:
I searched for 'money' and got the following by clicking one of the results (small photos):
https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-girl-eyes-young-41526/
Now, this photo is tagged with the keyword money and it is completely relevant too, but if you scroll down on that page to Similar Photos, they are all woman/girl/eyes type, so it looks like your code is showing similar photos based on random/un-ordered matches with the tags of the current photo. Instead, if you show similar photos with tags matching the original search term the user has typed in, that would be a lot more relevant and useful. HTH and best wishes.
That being said, I'm still extremely proud of it, at least from a technical standpoint, and will probably keep it running for a long time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881622
It's still running today, though the user-base has stabilised around a dedicated core of users, and not seeing much/any growth.
EDIT: holy shit, I just checked the stats, 7k unique users over the last two months. It's doing better than I remember.
Quickly after launch, I discovered that many people could not install the app because they were running an older android version. Since then I've improved support for older android devices, added several smaller features and did some smaller UI improvements. I've also built a small website (http://timesheetapp.xyz/), so you can find the app when looking for "timesheet app" at google.
The app is currently downloaded at ~100 devices, but not really growing. However the existing users are all very happy with the app. I'm very happy with it aswell as it's solving the problem I have very well (built it primary to solve my own problem of time tracking).
If you have any idea on how to better promote the app, let me know :)
I've made money only by selling an installation service, which is about £1k. I have further plans, but nothing more to add.
I stop working on the project for 1+ years and now I plan to put more time to improve it (i.e. HTTPS) in the next few months.
Traffic to the side is dropping and I plan to post some contents to generate traffic as well.
We launched after about 6 weekends of work. It took a month or so until we saw our first paying subscriber. The ramp up was slow at first but by January 2015 growth had accelerated and today we draw a healthy and growing income from the business. As we've built out the product we've raised prices slowly and have had he joy of seeing companies we admire use the product.
[0] - https://www.devjuncture.com -
322 days ago, I posted my tiling window manager for wayland: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224608. It's still going very well, I have thousands of users and just today was providing support in the IRC channel and talking with some contributors about features they want to implement.
I'm using sr.ht a lot ; used Knight OS and saw your TrueCraft repo somewhere a while ago.
What a great job man. Thanks for your code. :)
https://www.takeitapart.com TakeItApart is coasting, and not really supporting itself. We had high hopes that our easy guide creation wizard would lead to new content, but sadly it has not.
http://artfulmac.com Artful pays for itself and a little more (an extra meal or two a month), but it is in need of an update to better support El Capitan. Sadly the shift to Swift 2 broke much of the code and with my day job I haven't yet had an opportunity to dig in and fix it.
MadBlocker, my ad blocker for iOS 8 based on a hack of the VPN subsystem, worked well as a proof of concept but was completely superseded by much better as blockers made possible by iOS 9.
It's not making me any money, got no funding or anything like that, but as my first full stack personal side project that I actually finished and shipped, I'm really happy that it's worked out and has real users that find it useful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389
I actually spent today working on a new document viewer for Twiddla. It has been relatively successful, with tons of happy users, but still isn't bringing in the same sort of revenue as my other bill-paying product.
Edit: Here's the "last week" link that somebody mentioned on that thread. That must have actually been the one I found in my logs (since I responded to it):
Go-Micro turned into Micro - a microservice ecosystem https://micro.mu. It's primarily open source software for microservices geared at simplifying the process of building distributed systems. I'm working on it full time, have a sponsor and will be speaking at the Golang UK conference next month. Still a long road ahead but things seem to be going well so far.
It got a modest number of stars now, but few from HN (mostly from Reddit, judging by how upvoted the post is).
A few pivots (and a lot of lessons learned) later and we're still kickin! We've grown to a good sized team of full-time employees now.
http://iactionable.com now focuses on real-time 'employee engagement' by leveraging gamification concepts.
Merely 2-3 people sign up and no activity after sign up. I dont know what to do with it and now I am not motivated to improve it. :(
I think you could make better use of the demo too by scrapping the placeholder text and instead using it as a 'how to' guide for the platform itself - not only would this be useful in itself for your customers, but it'd help show off what it can do. I tend to prefer demos that show the product in a real-life situation as it helps me more in understanding how I might be able to get value from it.
Also I actually find the "No Credit Card Required" a bit scary (although that could just be me) - perhaps something more like "Get Started For Free"?
It gave us a boost of initial interest and feedback, which was awesome – the effects of which I summarized here [1]
Two years after Show HN we went through Techstars. Now we are a 10-person team. Thanks HN!
[1] https://medium.com/routific/what-61-points-on-hn-did-for-my-...
It's a server side solution for highlighting search terms in PDF documents. Can show highlights in a web based PDF viewer (customization of PDF.js) or burn them to PDF. Supports navigation between hits. So far, most customers used it with search solutions based on Solr and dtSearch but it could be easily integrated with any search engine.
Didn't get any comments on HN but it's a profitable project otherwise.
SocketCluster itself gets between 6K and 10K downloads per month - Almost all of these are direct downloads. Some big soccer/football leagues websites use SC to broadcast results of matches in realtime, also, some education startups and some bitcoin/trading startups are using it too.
A lot has changed but I've stuck to the core mission and the project just keeps evolving to adapt to changing technologies. In terms of monetization, finding a market fit has been a slow process; ironically because underlying technologies have been moving so quickly that I didn't want to commit to the wrong tech. Recently, we have been really excited about Docker, Kubernetes and other container/orchestration software and are doing cool stuff with them.
For a while I was worried that technology would evolve in ways which would make SC irrelevant (and it looked like this for a while) but over the past couple of months it seems that the opposite is starting to happen and it looks like all the pieces are actually starting to fit together.
My mode has changed, though. I've learned a lot in that time, and I no longer think of advertising and distribution online as a viable method for most projects. I've had far more success getting real engaged eyes on my projects by engaging people in person.
There is an adage in sales, "go to your customers." It is meant literally. Go physically to where people will not only be interested in your project, but they're also in the mood to "buy" (whatever that might mean for your project. Installing and incorporating into my daily routine a free app on a smartphone is a cost I frequently choose to avoid).
For my wife, that means the vast majority of her sci-fi novel sales have been through three book fairs in the last two years, not the 24/7 Amazon. It's mostly just a hobby for her, and it would take a lot of work to replace her current income, so we haven't done more, but there is definitely s direct correlation between effort in, sales out, which is noticeably absent online. It makes it a lot easier to continue making that effort.
For me, that means presenting at JavaScript and designer meetups.
Some five year laters, it's still very active, with some 100k monthly (free) users, and paying customers, with the (modest) revenue being poured back into development.
I had a few (5 or 6) more Show HNs over time, but those projects failed to gather outside (or keep my) interest.
I'm working on something right now, but was fully expecting it to not get any attention and just be something fun for me to work on. Now I'm thinking it could probably use a bit more polish, because maybe there is a way for it to gain visibility.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9535989
Users + revenue has been growing quite well month over month since we launched. Our biggest hurdle now is optimizing for profit.
I was in college then and found making a well formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post, and went full time on it after passing out of college.
We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. It has helped us learn how to go about building a profitable business. Also, we have come a long way from that first iteration of the product. I was a rookie at that point and didn't have much of a clue about the software development best practices and how to write maintainable code. The learning that I got by sticking to one project has been immense.
More importantly, it is comments like these that make us super happy - https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials
Thank you HN, you helped us build a profitable business!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886337
I originally built Radio Silence as a Cocoa practice project. This spring, I rewrote it from scratch with all the lessons learned along the way. Now it generates enough income that I was able to quit my day job a month ago. Cool beans.
- Turkish Poncho (The first Turkish messenger bot for weather forecasts) story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913204 link: http://havadurumu.herokuapp.com/ comment: I wasn't expecting any new users anyway. This is only for Turkish facebook users.
- Pour – Simple and secure Azure diagnostics for C# and Node.js story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021606 link: http://www.trypour.com/ comment: Similar to previous project, this has a limited audience as well (Azure) I think.
I guess I need to think for bigger audiences.
I'm using it regularly to power lots of A/B tests so it's fulfilling its role, and saves us a few thousands $'s a month, so can't complain.
I would love to find collaborators and improve it, so it's a viable (open) alternative to Optimizely and VWO. But no plans other than as a side project.
Thousands of customers later and I'll going full time on it. Good times ahead!
Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful (https://www.contentful.com) has raised a Series B, got 70+ employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, Nike to Urban Outfitters.
It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime soon :)
I'm working on a detailed 4-year summary post, which I'll post on HN soon. One of the offshoots of my work on the project, Ansible for DevOps, did (and continues to do) much better, revenue-wise!
Umbrella's lessons give you simple, practical advice on what to do and what tools to do it with – covering everything from sending a secure email to dealing with a kidnapping or conducting physical counter-surveillance. Users can mark, customise and share simple checklists for quick reminders. It also has a series of security information feeds from places like the UN and Centers for Disease Control to keep you updated on the move.
You can download Umbrella here -Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u... -or Amazon App Store: https://www.amazon.com/Security-First-Umbrella-made-easy/dp/... -or F-Droid Repo: https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo (Fingerprint: 39EB57052F8D684514176819D1645F6A0A7BD943DBC31AB101949006AC0BC228) -Our code: https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android -Our code audit: https://secfirst.org/blog.html
(I've never had a response like this before! Out of curiosity, I opened it up again after writing the first paragraph, and yep - waves of nausea with some not so subtle vertigo thrown in the mix!)
I still get consistent traffic of a few thousand hits per week, and my work has been forked by my former employer, Branch, to create their own version of the tool for iOS [3] and Android [4]. My goal wasn't really to take it anywhere, it was just something I wanted to build for the community since I spent a lot of time struggling with the set up, and saw a lot of similar struggle in the beta forums. I'm satisfied with how it turned out, and how many people used it (for instance, the several of the Cocoapods team members linked it, it's all over the forums, etc).
So, no story about how much money it made or anything, but personal satisfaction at least :)
[1] https://limitless-sierra-4673.herokuapp.com [2] https://search.developer.apple.com/appsearch-validation-tool [3] https://branch.io/resources/universal-links/ [4] https://branch.io/resources/app-indexing/
I work on it as a side project with a remote friend. We have added a lot of things (automation, architecture redesign to an API-centric mode, introduction of angular, lots of devops...). We use the project as a lab to experiment new trends and it's really rewarding for that (approx 10k users for big events, with surges of 1200+ simultaneous users which is quite challenging).
We managed to charge some companies who use it for internal constests, and it provides the money needed to cover the expenses but not much more. Still we are happy with it, lots of kind feedback from our users, and lots of learning, which is why we made it in the first place.
Didn't receive much feedback, but still use it personally when shopping online and booking travel.
So it's gained traction and I constantly improve it since I wrote it for me a long time ago. I'm working on version 5 as we speak which is another API change but one that's going to make it far more approachable. Once version 5 is out it will become the LTS version and still stick around for a very long time.
I never get much feedback on it except for the folks at Immuta who used it quite a bit. I wish I got really any feedback but since it's written by me and for me it ultimately doesn't matter much (though I would love to improve it for others).
1. Started a company around the medical apps (http://www.medicaljoyworks.com)
2. Managed to create a revenue stream and released more than 12 apps in the medical education field (Some completely new apps and some sub specialty apps of the original app idea)
3. Employed several full time people through out the years - in four different countries.
4. Our apps have been downloaded more than ~4 million times and been in the top ten medical apps around the world continuously.
5. Have been featured in many prominent blogs and medical college study guides (Also few research papers on medical education using gamification and pilot programs from universities)
6. Released more than 600 case studies in English and Spanish. (We are on the process of translating everything into French, Italian and Portuguese).
7. Doing quite good on revenue/profit and about ~200 content creators are working for us on contract basis right now.
Unfortunately, I posted it before I really wanted to because I got Type I diabetes and had increased medical expenses and couldn't afford to get by working at a grocery store anymore. So, the posting served as a pretty effective way of getting a sort of resume out. It ended up on the front page for a good while, and was generally well received, and has landed me a couple of good jobs—but I do regret that I haven't returned to it since (though I do now have another project of a similar nature).
Project page (with video): http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext
HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155
I got my current job through it and from time to time I still get "thank you" emails from random people telling me it helped them get a job too - a really good feeling (:
Originally, I posted Faqt as a personal knowledge base and it spent most of the day on the front page and led us to currently having a couple thousand users and a few well-known startups beta testing our team accounts. In a few weeks, we are re-launching Faqt as a team knowledge base. If anyone wants to get notified when we do our big release, feel free to email me at hello@faqt.co and we’ll make sure to get you guys in. We’re really excited for what’s coming next and a lot of that is due to the Hacker News community and the fantastic feedback we've been getting throughout the last year. Thanks guys - you’ve been awesome!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538970
I just checked the stats: it's sold 2,442 copies, and earned over $60,000 in revenue.
Seriously, thank you. It was really helpful.
(Apart from keeping the free and open html+css web of old alive, I think this part is the most interesting thing about the whole project. A large reason for why I've donated in the past - and I'd be surprised if that doesn't go for some other donors as well).
Keep up the good work!
400+ upvotes, 50k+ traffic and lots of comments. Tool posted: http://gradient.quasi.ink/
Zero freelancing request, few twitter followers and many adrenalin rushes :) At least I can cross out the 'get to front page of HN' from my bucket list.
While people find it interesting, I don't have any users, only bots visit it, until I post something here or there. Guess the webapp is not useful, the UX/UI is not good, the voices are not good, the domain name is terrible... I don't really know. I lost interest/motivation and just left it running.
Finally, I open sourced the Go library used by my project: https://github.com/pqyptixa/tts2media . AFAIK, no one uses it.
Here's a direct link to github: https://github.com/kgabis/parson
Standard Resume now has over 15k users and is still growing with only minor updates and fixes based on feedback. It doesn't make any money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9513076 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846574 [2] https://www.producthunt.com/tech/standard-resume
[0] https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop [1] https://luameter.com/
So far saw only minor interest. I have been slowly improving it since I posted it on HN.
But it is not profitable yet so I am focusing on my full time job and only spending evenings now and then on Pinglist.
A few months ago I have launched http://lumiverse.io (a website where you can publish and discover educational videos). Since the launch I had other priorities, so the traffic slowly trickled down, now it's consistently at around 100 visitors per day. I'm planning to get back to it soon with new ideas and improvements, hopefully it will take off.
I wish I've had more time to spend on it, but work and has been draining. I really want to build a saas around it with docker to see how people respond to it and use it. I should dedicate some time to this.
Sorry about the above text, I'm on my phone and it keeps autocorrecting >_<.
For a while it felt like nobody cared, but the minute I went on vacation we started getting some good contributions, mostly from the sideloading community. Although I'm not very familiar with that world. Lately facing some challenges with iOS 10. We know roughly what the changes are, but I'm at the point where I guess I have to provide things like a roadmap.
It's a set of Automator workflows for text manipulation in OS X apps https://github.com/vmdanilov/TextFlow. It had a warm welcome on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9585115. Since that time it collected 486 stars on Github.
Happy to know that people still find it useful.
BTW, donations don't work for projects this small. But that was rather an experiment to prove what I've heard.
It's an excellent way for me, to experiment with things and learn on something that other people see/use ( to keep you responsible in some way ).
Most weird thing is that, although I now have at least 100 unique visits every day, no one gives any feedback, positive or negative. Don't know how to interpret that...
I'm still able to run a hobby instance on heroku because it's all on Phoenix Elixir. Very happy with it as a fun pet project.
www.peergym.com
Today 120,000+ Microsoft employees and vendors are wearing the employee badges I designed: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/the-new-microsoft-even-the-blue... :)
It didn't get any traction, and I haven't had time to work on it since, but I still run into people from time to time who say they've enjoyed a quick game. It still stands as a high-point in my technical achievement, as a full emulation of the interface between the Commodore 64 and its disk drive, all in JavaScript.
Didn't find a way to monetize, though.
5 years later the projects is still going strong, profitable and I still really enjoy working on it.
We got ~70 upvotes and approx 500 stars on Github.
I've consistently seen traffic on our repos Github page since then, and have reasons to believe (Google Analytics metrics) that people use it on a regular basis. We have added a couple new features since our Show HN. It's free and always will be. :)
No comments at all on my "Show HN" thread! ;-)
But it's not that surprising since it's a new Java web framework (and it's still in beta).
The development goes very well though! WebSockets are now fully supported. Version 1.0.0 will be released in a couple of months.
If you are a Java developer and a Guice fan, please have a look. We are looking for new ideas and contributors.
Can you some up some salient points which makes spincast different from all other existing Java web frameworks? (spark, ninja, jooby etc)
My interest is because I love Java and would love to have a great goto framework in this language.
1News – 1 sentence summarized news – inspired by Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003510
Has had over 160+ visitors so far. iOS / Android apps have had over 300+ downloads. 30+ daily users.
Thank to HN, I got some great feedback from users. This is still in its early stage, will definitely continue to improve the service.
The project is a free repo of handy git commands, and so far it's working really well with teams. Ideas are welcome!
We now power over 300 production applications, raised funding and have gathered a pretty awesome team: https://getstream.io/team/
Since then we have head a steady 8% week over week growth. We closed a small seed round and added 4 developers to the team to work on the mobile app and keep improving the algorithm.
Was a traumatising year of highs and lows, 6/10.
* Edited for readability.
Not much of a response, which is fine.
Since then we raised a seed round from billionaire investors like Tim Draper and Marc Benioff of Salesforce after having gone through the bitcoin/virtual-reality accelerator BoostVC (their applications are open now, message me about your startup and if it is awesome I'll try and refer it in)!
Now we're about to release a performance focused version (30M ops/sec, see https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2... with a podcast by readthesource.io on how) and onboarding enterprise customers.
It has been a real honor and huge blessing. Very thankful to be able to work on Open Source full time, check it out at https://github.com/amark/gun and http://gun.js.org/ .
