Well, it's December 2, so I figure it's time for some show and tell.
How did everyone do?
http://www.quickbrownfrog.com
http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com
Still, I plan to keep plugging at it. I have no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, so next on my list is to get some badly-needed design help.
Many thanks to everyone who provided invaluable feedback during the past month. I really learned a lot and had great fun developing it.
I think your biggest difference from Patrick is that you are in a B2C situation where he's definitely in a B2B situation.
A teacher or event planner needs to make bingo cards to save time - which is money.
If I just want to type better, I have to justify this expense as a consumer. Is this something I will spend $9.95 on? No. I'll probably spend 20 minutes looking for a free typing tutor that will ultimately have me repeat type what I see on the screen until I get better at typing.
I think my app outshines the top Google result for "learn to type online". But as you mentioned, not everyone will be willing to pay for that difference.
Why tutor? At a glance I thought it was a very cheap way for employers to test via the browser an possible hire's typing speed. A certificate is printed by the person at home who brings that to the employer. It should have a URL that could be used to prove they didn't just make up the result.
The number of clicks you mentioned isn't a lot to judge a PPC campaign on. In such a small sample you never know where the clicks may fall--sometimes you'll get a bunch later and be surprised. I don't mean to suggest you should continue your campaign (especially if you're paying a lot for clicks while lowering your price), just that I wouldn't measure its success based on such a small sample size.
Price drops like that just seem like a race to the bottom, and it doesn't appear you've generated enough traffic to know for sure whether it's necessary. If/when you do find someone who'll pay $9, maybe they would have been just as happy paying $29, or more.
If it does turn out you're "competing with free," there are articles out there discussing tactics you can use to compete. Can you white-label it and sell to businesses, such as temp firms (I assume they still do typing tests)? Or professional training programs?
If that doesn't work, can you give away the tests and sell something else? Use it to generate traffic and promote a broader/different product, etc.?
I'm not sure if you scale the dial showing your speed, but at 100 words per minute, it's not maxed out, but it is at 123 words per minute (I'm assuming the max is 120 words per minute). I'm assuming so that people can target 60 wpm? I would actually suggest it go either up to 100 or have it go up to where 50% would be the target or average, and maybe scale past that.
Also, for the accuracy on the test, typically it is measured by whether the word was correctly typed after the spacebar is pressed to move to the next word, not a character by character as it's typed (as in, type tou<delete><delete>hough<space> and it's correct). I've always thought it odd that it was done this way, but I naturally correct while I'm typing and that had negative consequences on your test.
That said, you've got something really, really solid here, worth way more than $9.95. It almost lends itself to a subscription model.
As for measuring typing accuracy, that's surprisingly complicated. I wrote up a blog posting on this:
http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/measuring-typ...
Thanks for the feedback!
One thing, though: http://i.imgur.com/rCTzE.png
I type between 130 and 140 WPM. The fastest I could get on your speed test was less than 100 WPM. Maybe some other fast typers can verify that this is a bug?
Good work!
What tool have you used previously to measure your rate at 130-140 wpm? QBF counts every 5 characters as a "word"; other apps might measure differently. Did the tool not keep pace with your typing?
Thanks for the feedback!
Or maybe not. The sort of people showing off their mad typing skills probably wouldn't also be people who want to buy your service :)
First I bought a downloadable version, which then sent me on a wild goose chase for Stuffit Expander, which was required to uncompress the image. Then when I finally got that, it wouldn't run on my OSX Mac.
Finally I learned that there was in fact an up-to-date version available for Mac, but only on CDROM. So then I purchased THAT (yeah, I paid twice!) Ultimately, the software was great, but getting it installed was a major PITA.
I imagine that there are a lot of traditional desktop apps like this that you can only get on CD (or dodgy software downloads). That's the "niche" I'd like to target.
Please keep working on it.
We're especially happy with our changeset feature for git/svn/bzr/hg: http://vimeo.com/17363481 and would love to hear feedback.
I have to say, though, that if the app was only $10 I probably would have bought it for personal use 9 months ago. As it stands, I'm still struggling with the price, even though I'll probably cave in and buy it after the trial ends on my new computer.
1. In Versions, the active Timeline/Browse/Transcript button is the one that doesn't look pressed. Why didn't you go with the opposite? http://yfrog.com/fyh6rp
2. What's up with that navy background on the initial Versions screen?
Not big issues, just curious! Keep up the good work.
I launched http://sleepyti.me as a "weekend project" at the very beginning of November. It's a simple site designed to help users figure out the best time to go to sleep in order to wake up refreshed.
I have been working steadily on improving the user experience thanks to really helpful feedback that I've gotten from HN and reddit users (thanks!). The site is currently "profitable" from the standpoint that the money I'm scrapping together from ads pays for its share of the (cheapest) Linode plan I have.
I consider Sleepyti.me to be a success (not bad for a guy who doesn't know web design!), and I'm looking forward to building bigger, better and hopefully more monetizable projects in the future.
I'm also in talks with Twilio about producing something with them about it. Preview of coming attractions: everybody should use Twilio. Oh goodness. It is freaking amazing. It is like email: add it to an application, just about any application, and it gets suddenly, radically better. (And the existence of it makes possible applications that wouldn't be possible otherwise, like AR.)
The site is pretty simple to use. Think twitter for your app. Just send a message containing 140 char message, a double, latitude, and longitude. Then login to create a dashboard where you can display gauges, charts, and message streams. You can filter on the message and the double value that was posted. You can also create counts, sums, and averages in the charts and gauges. There’s a messaging system that allows you can set up status logic to send of messages if certain conditions are met. The dashboard and messaging evaluates metrics, updates dashboards, and sends out messages pretty close to real time, 20-30 seconds.
The site is up and running. You can check it out by going to bzzard.com and logging in as jerry@bzzard.com and password of jerry. I have page view and application restart messages from bzzard.com displayed. It’s still a bit buggy, and it is sitting on the cheapest godaddy server. But, I’m still pretty surprised at what I was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
It basically lets you meetup with other hackers. You post lunch plans and let others join in.
Its very buggy (I am not a coder, and I don't think I'll manage to become one) and at this point has a rather ugly interface (ironically I'm a web designer). I worked on this for two days and released it, which is a big deal for me since this is the first time I actually launched something.
I haven't received much feedback from the HN community, which is a bit discouraging, but I plan to keep working on this.
In the immediate next release, I will make it a bit more stable and improve the interface (new design: http://i.imgur.com/KOaA8.jpg). And after that, if I get any positive feedback, I'll add features like adding more personal (links to you social network profiles), filter by location, etc.
If anyone has any feedback on the site, the current version or the future plans, please share.
http://www.44tips.com/b/Eric/Where_to_submit_your_Startup/
It's a simple web service for converting markup from one format to another. Most of the conversions in the app are done using the Haskell library Pandoc, but I'm also using Discount, Python's Docutils and Ruby's RedCloth. It was also an opportunity to use MongoDB a little more. Right now it just converts snippets to snippets, but I'm in the process of adding additional options, like autolinking URLs when outputting HTML and adding headers and footers for formats like RTF that require them for complete documents.
I really liked the November sprint idea and am going to try to launch at least one thing a month this winter, even if only a simple microapp.
Getting it out the doors is a great feeling!
http://www.photosherpa.com
We think it has potential and it is just a matter of finding motivated users and will push in that direction but we shall see....
If you have ideas, please share or email me
To get around this problem you could make a bunch of assumptions and just present people with some good financial tips in the form of questions.
For example, let's say the person says they want to buy a $10000 car.
Your app would respond:
Are you paying in cash? If so,
- Do you have enough saved up for an emergency? You should have at least 6 times your monthly expenses saved for emergencies.
Are you going to make monthly payments? A 3 year loan for $10,000 at 6% interest will cost you about $300 per month.
- A car should cost no more than 1/3 of your annual income, do you make at least $30000?
- Your monthly expenses shouldn't exceed your income, do you make at least an extra $300 per month?
- Some of your monthly income should go towards retirement. Are you saving at least 6% per month?
Etc.
Then you could offer people the option of putting in their information to make the feedback more accurate and personalized.
However, I got a little sidetracked because I had fundraising opportunities pop up. I ended up spending more time in the last two weeks of November talking to investors than I did talking to customers. I don't know that I should say that I was "sidetracked" because I am responding to investor inquiries, not seeking out potential investors.
My goal was to launch the app and have a paying customer. Instead the app is ready for customers, and I have customer interest, but I did not meet that goal. I was using the HN November push as a way to try and accelerate the execution of a business I had already started working on (in September).
I am not going to claim success in Launch an App Month, but it was great for me and I have been killing it all month. Now I am going to do "Close the funding December" so that I can get back to building the business. I am really excited by this opportunity.
The inspiration for this project came from the feedback I've received for my ASK HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815344
I have no idea what your pricing will be like (and I'm guessing that you don't either, at this stage), but it would be great if you had something for micro-ISV type shops (read as: cheap).
As a solo dev, I'd love it if there were a service that would set me up with a linux image on AWS, nicely configured for MySQL/Postgres, JBoss/Tomcat, SSL cert, firewall rules, etc. If I could pay you a one-time fee for that, and then be off and running it would be very attractive.
http://pepbot.com
- released a JavaScript version of the API
- released an ActionScript 2 version of the API (AS2 is an antique I wasn't going to bother with but one of my users back-ported my API for me so I took it from there)
- added custom data for leaderboard scores, can't wait to see what my users do with that
- added some awesome new reports to help developers make their games more engaging and generally ease them into data-driven development, a lot of casual game developers "launch and forget" which is something I'd like to see phased out
- launched the level sharing API for user-created levels
- announced pricing, still haven't implemented it yet but that's coming ASAP
And I made the whole thing real time ... 8 billion events a month and growing!
its basically a statistics gathering/analytics app for a sport. 24 hours and about 150 registered users. it currently only has a free version and i'm working on new features for a paid version.
i'm stuck on pricing, though. not sure how much people will be willing to bite on any paid version of what i'm offering, even if i added some super awesome features.
i use it, though, and thats what counts.
In the end my day job got in the way, and while I was up for spending evenings and weekends on it my wife had arranged something on nearly every weekend that I couldn't back out of.
I have a large block of time booked off in December, a lot of which I'll be using on Minklinks so it's likely to be a 'launch december' app now. You can still sign up for the Beta at http://www.minklinks.com/.
I decided to build a revenue generating URL shortener. This was one of the first full projects where I basically did everything myself - research, design, development etc, which was a bit frustrating a times. It's ridiculous how unproductive my design days were compared to my development days, but I guess I'm just going against the grain there (I'd be interested to know how many people have 'mastered' both design & development.) That said, I learned quite a lot about the whole process, so definitely a good result.
I decided to launch before a lot of the esential functionality was complete (conversions, payments etc) just to get a feel for what people wanted, and most importantly if it was worth persuing the idea further. I'd probably do the same again next time, although I must admit I felt a bit helpless in the first week of launch when bugs were being uncovered/features were being requested and I was still working on the core.
I'm now onto marketing my app with my business partner. The market we're trying to is obviously insanely saturated, so it's a little frustrating at times, but I'm super motivated to get this out so lets hope we get some traction sometime soon :)
The URL of the app is http://shrtn.co
Haven't gotten around to making workflow to add new ones automatically though, school and work take a toll.
I'm making those upgrades in December, which some of us are continuing into :-)
Right now you have to make an account to have a look (that's one of the things I'm fixing in December), but it's pretty neat.
stk8.co allows you to stack several Links or Text and share them under one shortened url.
It embeds a preview of the link for common services like youtube, vimeo, amazon, cnn, scribd, etc...
Here are couple of examples:
It also has a bookmarklet for easy stacking. The bookmarklet is transparent, one click is all what it takes to stack a link.
I really like the idea of setting a deadline to launch an app though. November wasn't really a workable time period for me personally, but it would definitely be helpful for me to set a deadline and possibly make it public so it would force me to really get something done.
Even my similar submission to HN about the status of the apps launched didn't go so well (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955031) :)
But, as I said there, I'll keep working on this.
It is basically some web app to learn other languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Czech right now, few will follow soon). Principle is very simple: you assign foreign words to its english equivalent.
I build this because I am learning Portuguese right now and it is hard to learn grammar without knowledge of basic words. There are around 300 most common words in the app right now.
Getting encouraging feedback from users. We are now heads down working on the next version due in a few days.
Would love HN feedback, email for free coupon.
It is an easy way to remember the things that you hear about on the go so you can check them out later (Books, Movies, Restaurants, etc). You send an email to things@wanna.do and it'll be sorted and stored for later. Lists are public by default so it can be used as a way to check out the things that your friends are interested in doing (working on proper user accounts so that there is a way to keep things private/actually discover your friends).
You can try it out at http://wanna.do or by sending an email to things@wanna.do with the list name you'd like to create in the subject line and the item you'd like to add to that list in the body of your email. We'll set up an account for you automoatically a-la-Posterous.
One to facilitate collaborative tabletop games (think Settlers of Cataan or Dungeons & Dragons) between remote parties. Built with node.js, redis, jquery, html5, css3, buzzwords.
Another smaller, quicker app that spun off the first was a web interface for the OS X `say` command. Sometimes I'm on ubuntu or windows and I wish I had access to make a mac actually speak a sentence. Built using the same stack, same tools, just much smaller in scope.
I only pivoted late in the month, the day after thanksgiving, so I'm hoping to launch that after I tidy up the UI and come up with a name. Anyone have any suggestions?
Do you have a link to source or a blog post about it or anything? Could you talk more about what you tried to build?
A Twilio powered free disposable link generator for phone numbers. The goal is to enable users to be contacted by phone on the internet, quickly, easily and privately.
I'd love feedback!
It's now a monthly launch pad group
BTW we are working on some kicking ass API to allow developers use premium licensed content in your apps, sites, games. So thing you can make your Guitar Hero with Lady GaGa music or something like watch Netflix movies with friends and Facetime. How cool is that, huh? Signup on our site if you want to stay in touch :)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popn-learn-abc/id400222528?mt...
I purchased this game when you posted there and now it's my 2 year old's favorite game!!!
We absolutely love it, good job.
stats: ~350GB songs streamed in 64KB bitrate. ~13048 hours of songs played.
New UI is pending.
for example: http://ymitrimusic.appspot.com/share/5ef46
You can login with your google account. The front end is based on the open source sound cloud player, and i've left some of the soundcloud functionality in for streaming.
Then I built http://castmyclips.com, which is not quite ready for prime time, but is usable. It allows you to take text (copied from web sites) and turn it into audio. then you can listen to the audio & even subscribe to it in iTunes. It was quite fun to build, and I'm actually kind of proud of it.
Sprint was a great idea and the last two weeks were my most productive in yesrs.
Sample page: http://b.estprice.com/laptop/under-1000
Looking for advice and suggestions to the alpha release version:
Feel free to login as foxhop, no authentication needed, and try it out with a buddy.
Uses ajax long polling to update the games.
http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without-lau...
It will get done.
I'm not disappointed... much. However, I did get some important stuff done, and after the holidays (which involves another big trip), I'll have some time where I'm not going for weeks at a time that I can put together an app.
In customer acquisition mode now.