Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be / what would you do differently if you did it again? How much time/money did you spend building it, and what kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
Appreciate any and all answers!
It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.
Moral of the story: never trust big tech.
P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.
The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a paid version that just disabled the ads. Instead of jumping on this to release a paid version and expand the game with more features, I ran into perfectionism issues + decision paralysis releasing any changes.
The game blew up for a few weeks and I got something like 0.5 million downloads eventually but didn't do anything to monetise it more so felt like I missed a big chance.
It was a great feeling checking analytics though to see that there was literally years of collective gameplay time being logged, and I've had several emails and reviews from players saying they've been addicted to playing the game for years.
My biggest lessons are probably:
1) Doing/releasing something is always better than doing nothing so don't let decision paralysis get in the way. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".
2) Don't fear releasing or making changes because you might get bad reviews. You'll never please everyone and even the perfect app will inevitable get some brutally unfair and weird/crazy reviews.
3) Some people are obsessed with word games!
Anyway, as a lockdown project for fun, I started making a new web version for mobile + desktop. :)
It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corners to stay in budget. I was unsuccessful in recruiting a team - partly because I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away. In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
I attempted to carry on but the shutdowns of tourism in Hawaii and sheer exhaustion over my co-founder mistakes led to shuttering this project we thought would be the next AirBnB.
All told, this was a budget MBA program for me which ended up costing about 1/4 what a quality MBA would have cost me and probably taught me far more.
Lessons learned were: 1) the importance of a founder agreement 2) the importance of doing enough due diligence to understand the true scope of a project and then doubling or tripling the amount of work it will take to achieve that scope 3) the importance of working with the right people and refusing to settle when it comes to product or team
It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour.
I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, but I think there's something here I just haven't marketed it to the right audience yet :)
My goal is to make this usable via Slack next year and let teams use it to trial new marketing campaigns or other run other small tests before launching. https://www.thisorthat.ai
The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activations, etc.)
The free/open core supplies all the basic operators, but many users would need extensions of the core to support their particular networks (or even just software to feed their parameters into the system and get results out) and hardware companies benefit from the software's existence because they sell chips and NN-512 makes the new vector units on their chips more useful
But it didn't work out that way. NN-512 did generate offers to work on other projects (a generous offer from Intel, for example) but nothing that extends NN-512
Why? There are numerous free end-to-end deep learning tools developed by large, company-sponsored teams (Nvidia, Facebook, Google, Intel, etc.) so a specialized tool that requires integration effort is unattractive. That's my guess. So beware, if you're working along similar lines
Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone
and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a...
You can also use it to figure where something was used https://theymadethat.com/things/3r1/storyboard/show_used_for...
Different versions of a product also have their own profiles https://theymadethat.com/things/6wy/apple-macintosh/show_ver...
I'm still maintaining it, with some modest future goals of making the UI more mobile friendly
It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my app, or you are going to pay ten times more to a late fee bill
After the Windows app failed, I doubled down on the niche, by making it a Linux app.
I thought as plan B, if I do not find users, I could sell it to the library itself. I thought that was a sure sale, because the library had bought software from me before, but they did not want an app
Then I made it open-source, so I do not have to deal with it anymore, but no one understands Pascal code. It only lead to much more work. Now I have been working on it almost every free hour for 14 year. And I really should not have written my own HTML parser for it
Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focused cursor point via keyboard accessibility APIs.
LabelScope printed to label printers but wasn’t a design app or a driver. Instead, like MASS it floated above other apps as a “scope” which would real-time capture and dither the image inside the virtual label. Double-click would send the dithered image directly to the printer using the printer’s native commands via USB (no driver).
Fast forward a few years and I started on ANOTHER label printer app based on Electron. I’m happy to report it’s a healthy business and growing! Learn more at https://label.live
1992 A 1U rack mounted utility component for pro touring musicians that included a direct input (DI), tuner, metronome, front and rear rack lights, and surge protected outlets. NAMM attendees loved it. So did all the musician's that I worked with on the road at the time. But it turns out there's a lot to building physical products, especially ones that include custom electronics. We got a PO for 25 units from Guitar Center, but didn't have the chops to get it together and deliver. In the end it came down to capital and we had none left.
2000 A SaaS solution (then known as an ASP) for project management for commercial construction. Not sure what went wrong here. Probably lack of sales competency. A peer and competitor at the time, eBuilder, just sold for $500 million 2 years ago. That was a long ride. We shut down in 2008.
It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the images through Google Cloud Vision APIs to re-order the images putting first the ones with children, pools, playgrounds, etc.
With that done, just an app to find hotels by searching anywhere.
It was more built for personal use but ended up being quite attractive. But marketing apps is hard so never really pushed it. Then, also... covid happened.
"Congrats, you've been inactive for 4hrs 32m: A new record!"
"Lacktivity has crashed due to sheer boredom."
"Wow, 100 steps in an hour! Next time, try taking the longer route to the fridge."
"Putting the fitness tracker on your dog and then playing fetch in the house is no way to go through life."
It was a fun idea, but I totally lack execution.
Domain for sale if anyone wants to pick up the idea.
I assumed it would be possible to do a lifestyle business out of catering to a subset of the over 1M NetBeans users. Turns out it is not so easy.
I spend some money for a Windows machine to digitally sign builds, the macOS dev certificate and hosting. But the bulk of the cost was the time it all took.
PS: The .xyz domain in combination with the Windows antivirus solutions (looking at you ESET) was a major annoyance. Switched to .ORG just in time for the whole debacle there.
I would have done better if I'd tweaked the algorithm more, done an iPhone version, or just taken it seriously, but it mostly came out of a personal need and in the absence of clear signs it was valuable it was easy to let go (especially when later sandboxing rules for Mac apps broke some fundamental stuff around persistent documents).
You can see some screenshots at:
Sadly, the next version of Flash showed that they were thinking the same thing - all those UI widgets I made were built-in on their next release, which came out the day after I finished my first version.
Lesson learned - know the roadmap of the products you are consuming.
I started getting too many alerts so I built a machine learning based system to weed out uninteresting/unrelated stories (basically a spam filter, was 98%+ effective). By this time the service had a database of 100,000+ headlines for crypto stories, so I had good data for the filter. I built a UI to quickly allow me to train the ML algorithm by manually rating stories as good/bad and give me the ability to train/retrain/enhance the models on an ongoing basis as my crypto interests changed.
When the market crashed I lost interest. Was already full time on something else as well. I had visions of deploying the system publicly as a SaaS product, allowing people to sign up, and replacing the config/xml files with a nice web-based UI, and then charging something for it.
Managed to take all the wind from my sails.
User created API consuming dashboards, I drove lots of traffic to it but it was a really niche product and I just don't think there was a path to revenue with such small numbers.
Static pagebuilder before Square and the like had that kind of thing dialed. Still proud of the technical achievement, had some users, but it never took off. I couldn't afford to market it.
A more traditional digital agency I started with some colleagues. It went well, and then it fell apart when one member grossly mismanaged the money and then took some big clients on his way out. I regret not sticking with it, but it was really demoralising that such bad behavior was rewarded and we were left with nothing. Many lessons learned though, I would never allow it to happen again.
Many other small projects that just waned or never got built to completion. I do all of this on my own and with my own money outside of any tech bubble, so it is pretty easy to get derailed. I have been at it for more than 10 years.
The target audience was supposed to be gamers (back then typical SSD was 150GB and GTA V was 55GB alone). I even got greenlit on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61003...
I have a couple cities using it for free at the moment, but would like to get more signed up to at least break even on hosting costs. It's a pretty niche service, and so far it seems like there isn't much interest...
I still think a large manufacturer of wallets could easily popularize this as a standard wallet insert, but so few leather manufacturers are in the US anymore I couldn't even contact them to give away the idea.
Didn't work.
Biggest failure was SAAS for organizing wineries and generating reports for carious government bodies. There are various old software from 90s that do that or you can use paper books (depending on country you are not allowed to use excel).
I've spent around 3 years of fulltime work but it turned out farmers do not care about software. They might use some old desktop software or just hope that inspection is not going to come. Software is still up and running and there are some paying customers, but it just doesn't make sense to spend much time working against the wind. Also my addressable market is not big enough to support additional development.
As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.
Eventually BitInstant came around they actually had people that were paid to deal with this stuff, so they did pretty well. Then the dude that ran it went to jail, so I'm pretty happy with the fact that I got out when I did. Coinbase came around shortly after and they did a much better job than I ever could.
It was never more than a hobby project, and I would twiddle with the website, buy coins to restock the dispenser, answer support emails all on the train to and from my day job every day. Good times.
[1]: https://logsnitch.com.
It's a physical game requiring at least 2 people so it's a tough sell this year. Still managed to sell about 100 copies though.
One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction.
My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few features, but blurbs saying to contact me if they wanted more features. The lesson here is what people wanted. In my mind, I was thinking of how to handle tough technical challenges and new features with domain specific functionality. But what people want was simple. A recently opened files menu. To expand database browsing to database searching. To then expand searching to allow case insensitive searches. To again expand searching to allow wildcards. This was all fairly simple, the features I thought people wanted were much more complex. I would not have learned this lesson if the market had been more mature, if people had another option to use.
I did other niche apps without lessons learned other than that niche markets are small.
Then I had my success (for me a consistent $2000+ in revenue a month without much maintenance work needed on my end meant success). The difference between my success and the previous apps I did was I aimed for a broad mass market, not a niche one, and there were some significant competitors. This is a startup lesson that is heard often - don't aim for a niche market just to avoid competition. There were two main differentiators for me - my app was a book reader, but I did a lot of work to make sure it was easy to browse, search and download tens of thousands of Project Gutenberg books (which I hosted for speed). The other differentiator is I focused on EFIGS languages, not just English, so I was #1 result for libro and libros (books in Spanish) for a long time, and also did well in France, Germany, Italy etc. Project Gutenberg having done the legwork of a supply of many foreign language books helped.
So the main lesson was to aim for the mass market for the Android form factor, and try to find a way to differentiate from competition. People appreciated my niche Access database app, but it took some weeks for me to make $20 advertising revenue from it. Many more people wanted to read Alice in Wonderland and other books.
It is being used by individuals as of now. (freelance translators, marketers, ecomm resellers) . But we wanted to integrate it with a bigger localisation tool as it would be of much more value for their day to day translation jobs. We couldn't close a deal there.
I just realized a week ago that I should have made an app out of it. I checked and somebody's grabbed the name already.
For the curious - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharman-What-Animal-Am-I/dp/B081GV8...
Feedback and conversion were amazing but SEO was lacking since Google hates search engines. I needed written content (or advertising) to compete with classical review websites.
Bittersweet, but I learned a lot and it got me my first job in the bay so I don't regret it!
For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration.
The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.
A cryptocurrency exchange, that I've been working on for several years now. It's up and running, allows you to swap 60+ currencies. So far, it has processed a grand total of 1 transaction. The transaction was made by... me.
No idea what to do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After months of doing nothing much, I decided to implement a game (which I came up with in school, and had also created a basic version in college). I had an electronics background, so I did know programming basics and had to write Perl scripts at work. However, I didn't know much of Java (had a course in school) and Android. Somehow, over the course of a year, I made the app.
The main game idea I had in school was simple inspiration from tic-tac-toe. Make squares instead of lines on a 4x4 board. While writing the code, I was ever trying to make it impressive. So, I came up lots of choices - larger board sizes (up to 12x12) for both tic-tac-toe and the square ones, with blocking moves.
To monetize, I added ads. After release, I got about 0.12 dollars or something over few months. I just removed the ads instead of trying to salvage it. I had bought a domain/hosting, so financially, it was a loss.
In hindsight, biggest issue was UI/UX and not knowing how to promote. I'm still proud of the code I implemented for computer moves.
App is no longer on play store (because it stopped working on newer versions), but you can still see screenshots here: https://github.com/learnbyexample/squaretictactoe
I wanted to re-implement in Python later, started it but never finished. May be next year ;)
It’s taken years and countless hours of my time but it’s really fun and I’ve learned a lot.
The project is expanding into an IDE and online pattern gallery, and all sorts of fun additions. People are joining and making really impressive works with it. But it can be tough to keep the momentum going sometimes.
What has been nice is that even when I was the only person using it, the result was still something I could enjoy - there’s no network effect required to make something cool for my living room.
Turning a side project into a business is tough. I’ve been working with a factory to produce them in quantity. This has been a struggle. “Hardware is hard”, and manufacturers are not fun to work with, at least compared with software.
But at the end of the day the thing is in people’s houses and they like it.
Here’s the lamp I’ve been making: https://shop.soulmatelights.com/products/square and the IDE I’m building is at https://editor.soulmatelights.com/tutorial
1. homepagr.com: a tool which lets you organize bookmarks and show them on your "new tab" page. I use it extensively, but have gotten 0 adoption, even when I made the price free. (I've since taken down the landing page, but it still works!)
2. audioremarks.com: I've taken down the site, but it was a service that let you upload audio clips and leave annotations at specific timestamps. Made at the start of the pandemic for music students and teachers to do remote lessons and leave feedback. Nobody used it.
3. spry.store: Also taken down. It let you create an e-commerce website from a google sheet. Didn't realize that there were already players in this space, and it's hard to compete in the ecommerce website builder market.
In all of these cases, it was pretty clear from the beginning that nobody would use it: when I talked about the idea to friends, nobody said "wow this is neat!" They all said "huh, okay, why not just use x instead?"
There are two contradictory pieces of advice on HN: one, to talk to customers relentlessly, and two, that "ideas that seems silly are the ones likely to be big." Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!
My first couple attempts sucked and never saw the light of day.
My 3rd attempt launched and was called Paperback Writer. No one was remotely interested in using it, so I eventually shuttered it. (Didn't even have any free users to be worried about.)
That was a few years ago, and my conviction about what would make for a good ebook writing app have only grown stronger. There are glaring shortcomings in all of the existing solutions: Scrivener, Vellum, Sigil, iBooks Author, Calibre... they all kinda suck for writing and publishing novels in particular.
So I'm now working on version 4 of the idea, this time rechristened as PaperbackAuthor: http://paperbackauthor.com
(I still like the name "Paperback Writer" better, but it's a nightmare SEO-wise. When you google "PaperbackAuthor", my twitter handle comes up first. So I consider that an early win.)
I have no idea if this one will attract any users, but I'm passionate about it and need to get it out there. If only so that I can stop thinking about it.
-- I'm not getting customers.
I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online.
So, I built https://pipecontent.com
-- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link)
-- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine.
Feedback appreciated.
Posted a video demo on YouTube and keep getting the few odd messages once a month asking if it’s available for sale but I’m still clueless on how to properly validate whether it’ll sell.
To make it a complete product would require a lot of time which I don’t have right now
I wanted a not-too-intrusive Github notification system that would give me a broad overview of what happened in my starred repos (i.e. repos for which I'm only a consumer), as some kind of ‶real-time″ changelog. Indeed, I star quite a lot of e.g. emacs packages and other small utilities, which don't have a strict release schedule/changelog cycle, so it's easy to miss a new feature.
So I developed a service that would send me a weekly newsletter of ‶what happened″ (issues, releases), and I decided to make it public, as I assumed I was most probably not the only person with such a need. I never planned on making actual money out of it, but I thought it could recoup hosting costs, which it didn't.
But on the other hand, I learned quite a bit while doing it, so it's probably still a net win.
There was a time when I dreamed that my "side project" - Scrawl-canvas[1][2] - would bring me fame and fortune, or maybe a few sponsorships, or a job ...
> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?
There's a number of very well established Javascript libraries for the HTML5 canvas element (Konva, Fabric, EaselJS, Two, Three, Pixi, Processing/P5 ... and many others) and, seriously, the world didn't want to know about yet another one.
> What would you do differently if you did it again?
Actually, nothing! The primary goal of my work when I started it was to have a project on GitHub which I could use to help leverage me into the world of professional web development. My library helped me land my first full-time gig, so in that sense it achieved its goals 100%
> How much time/money did you spend building it?
18 months full time before I managed to get a job. Since then, maybe 2-3 days a month (if that) on maintenance and feature development. The upside of having an unpopular JS library is that nobody bothers you with questions about how to do stuff.
For the past 18 months I've spent a lot more time on the project - approaching full-time in some months - rewriting it from scratch, giving it a new focus, etc. The work has helped me come to terms with all the new Javascript shiny, and the ever-evolving Web API standards
> What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
I'm not in the business of "salvage" - nowadays I work on the library partly to keep my coding skills sharp (next on the to-do list is learning Rust/WebAssembly to see if I can make the library run a bit faster), but mainly because it's creative and fun[3] and after this year we all need a bit more fun in our lives!
[1] Scrawl-canvas GitHub - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
[2] Scrawl-canvas home page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
[3] My creative coding collection on Codepen - https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv
I eventually closed the service down because the reality is the edtech market for these type of products is very small.
It's a job board site specifically thought for developers. All the jobs are scrapped from companies' carreer sites.
I stopped adding companies/countries because the visits to the site are underwhelming, not more than a couple per day. I unexpectedly got "many" visits from Nigeria even though there are no jobs from that country. Maybe I could try adding Nigerian jobs; if anyone has a github link with tech companies from Nigeria similar to the ones that exist for other countries I could scrape them
It allowed you to quickly and easily share your location with anyone. Also gave weather conditions at said location and nearby landmarks to look for in order to help find it. Worked cross platform as well.
Everyone who used it thought it was great. However, not a whole lot of people used it. Originally sold it for 99 cents and eventually switched to a free, ad-based version.
Made about $1000 in total over a couple years and pulled it from the app store once Apple implemented pin drops and location sharing natively.
Here's the post-mortem - https://swapped.ch/certtime
To be fair, I built it primarily as a way to teach myself Rails, and in this regard it was a great success. But in the back of my mind I figured I might be able to make some affiliate revenue out of the traffic but it never took off.
It has failed so far because: it is a small niche (most people just use Spotify these days), I haven't marketed it very well and haven't found the niches where likeminded people hang out (building is definitely easier than marketing). I could definitely do more on the homepage to explain the features, particularly around tracking artists and being notified when they release new albums, but at the end of the day I just haven't been able to market it (nor did I spend a lot of time on this aspect of it). For a long time it only worked in the UK (an even smaller audience compared to the global market), although I did just roll out an update for it to work in the US, but have not done anything to advertise the fact.
Feedback welcome!
Very simple app really, had a list of questions to run through, stuck peoples names into the question etc, but my issue came with the Android store. I called it "Beercules: Drinking game", but even after months (and a rating between 4 and 5 stars) you couldn't find it in the store unless you searched that full name. Searching Beercules or Drinking game didn't even put it at the bottom of the list, it just didn't exist. Oh, and then they updated the ToS and took the game down due to me not having a privacy policy, and gave no guidance on what that even is, never mind how to complete it, so i just gave up on it. I never expected it to be super successful, but I'd hoped it would have been given a chance.
0: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldevel...
- https://linqable.pro/ - https://podradio.live - https://arounda.world/
All three built in 2020 with the awesome Elixir Phoenix. Hopefully, at least one of them will take off in 2021.
I've been working part-time but consistently on Alchemist Camp for three years now and it still earns less than 1/3 per hour of what I could previously contract for as a dev.
I think the biggest reason is because I optimized for multiple constraints. I didn't choose the market or the product purely for the immediate economic opportunity. I was also optimizing for increasing my skill with the tech stack I saw (and still see) as most advantageous for a startup founder to have skill with. On top of that, I was optimizing for a third constraint of something that I could do with a maximum of two hours a day of keyboard time.
If you're curious about the project, I just shared a full break-down today: https://questinglog.com/2020-year-in-review/
Will probably push more, just after the holiday window, then expand to an adjacent market where there are more clear triggers for purchase.
I built this in 2016 and, in fact, it has made some money ... a handful of people have, indeed, purchased custom Oh By Codes. But very few.
I remain convinced that there is a collection of interesting, compelling use-cases for Oh By Codes but I, and others, have not come up with them yet ...
[1] https://0x.co
The second was a remote job board like weworkremotely called remote-first (https://github.com/gravyboat/remote-first). This was when weworkremotely was younger and I was pretty dissatisfied with the fact they didn't even support searching for jobs, it was just a messy list that was a pain to search so I thought I could do better to solve this.
Both projects failed.
Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date".
It's made a little money, but not much.
Github recently rolled out a feature at Github Universe that has overlap, so I'm guessing it won't get much more traction.
A few lessons I learned: - Especially when building on a platform, make sure you have the right niche. In this case, it probably has a wide enough audience that Github decided it was worth it to build as part of the platform. - Like any engineer, I spent too long building and let scope creep delay me from launching.
All in all, it's pretty cheap (read: basically free) to run, but I probably committed somewhere over 120 hours on it.
It all started because I wanted to build a changelog, but one that came with videos of what changed. So I made a simple tool that allows you to zoom in on a video. Friends and family had fun making cute videos of their dogs and whatnot.
Then I grew obsessed, and 3 months of midnight coding later built a second/current iteration - a video editing app for making short animated videos for social media. Hasn’t made any money yet, but I’m trying my best.
App here: https://www.glitterly.app/
- I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;)
- I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not.
- It was a very strange, happy feeling when the first customer paid us. They decided to give actual money to us, some complete strangers??? To a website that looked totally amateurish, with no design whatsoever? Felt weird.
- I would have made way more money by working at McDonalds for the same amount of time. But that was not the point.
- It did not make sense to continue after the event, not enough $$ to be made.
Overall a very, very positive experience. I helped with my programming skills, and gave me confidence that people would buy something that works, even if ugly and unknown people.
* https://gravityextend.com/ - Gravity Forms add-ons
* https://woo-plugin.com/ - WooCommerce add-ons
I started with Gravity Extend, which was a personal need. Since this sort of worked, I added Woo Plugin. Results on these sites provide (in part) affiliated links. They generate some money, but not that much.
Things I hadn't anticipated:
- Sellers not allowing you access to their affiliate program because a) you haven't bought the product yourself or b) the sites only 'list' products, but don't actively sell/review the product.
- Most sellers are okay, but some need a continued reminder that they actually have to pay the generated affiliate fees, increasing required labor input.
I am working on nextlesson.com as a way to help kids learn programming. I have not made any money from this, but it is a lot of fun.
Only a couple went live but didn't get traction: - A site for ip geolocation lookup - A curated index of conference talks and meetups
Last year I decided that I'd do much more market research before writing any code, and that I'd see it through all the way. So I'm working on https://www.nslookup.io for about half a year now, which isn't profitable yet (€50 monthly cost). I'm still confident I can get it profitable. There's enough search traffic, other tools have horrible UX, and I've committed to spending time on it at least weekly next year.
It used a genetic algorithm to generate the pairings and handled all the messaging so the organiser was also kept in the dark about who got who.
I slapped an Amazon ad on there and it worked great, but I never bothered marketing it so it got very little usage and eventually I took it down when shutting down an old server.
I learnt a lot about mysql and genetic algorithms, both of which I've gone on to use extensively in my job so it was well worth it overall, just sad it didn't generate a bit of passive income :/
Unfortunately, only after several weeks of development I found out that it is not possible to run Google Ads for locksmith keywords, because in the past they were exclusively occupied by scammers. Now I'm torn between abandoning the project or getting involved in the tedious SEO battle with little chance of success.
From the name (Every.ID), you can say that it aims to be the one app to keep track of everything you collect: domain names, postage stamps, games, etc.
My end goal is to make it pluggable with API e.g. connect with your Steam account to auto-sync your game collection.
Unfortunately, since I'm doing it as a playground for learning new techs (I learned Flutter and Dgraph), the progress for the app itself is slow.
Fortunately, since I'm also a user (I use it often), it keeps being enhanced.
The idea was simple: I signed a contract with OptaSports, providers of real-time data from Rugby World Cup and Six Nations matches, and I created real-time visualization of that data directly in an app. Some of the features were a direct translation of Colm's app from football to rugby (for example, showing the location of kicks became the location of passes, etc), but I also added a way to draw a full animation of a game in real-time.
The app was picked up by The Guardian, the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, it was used on the ITV Wales blog, and got coverage on Italian TV. Success, eh? But I sold a grand total of 140 apps. Luckily, Opta had been very generous because they want to invest in rugby, so I didn't lose a lot of money. A year later, I decided to try the free app route with ads and without using Opta data, and generated all the updates myself, without the visualization stuff but by simply sending text updates during the games. The app got 15,000 downloads, and thousands of concurrent users. I got slightly more excited, but after 6 weeks of usage I netted £100 in ad revenue.
I stopped and accepted that time required vs benefit achieved wasn't good. All in all, it might have been that PR wasn't really my thing, compounded by the fact that rugby has a smaller fanbase than football. With Opta, we even tried approaching several potential media partners, but we never got anywhere.
However, it was fun.
It got me a few contracts as developer and as trainer on mobile development, and it solidified my credentials as an all-round data expert (I used it in my most recent successful job application), so although it didn't directly made me any money I'm happy about it.
If you're curious of what it looked like, I still maintain its webpage at http://liverugbyapp.puntofisso.net/
If I were to do things differently I would maybe refocus it on a niche to start with (e.g. target office managers of a professional firm (law offices, accounting firms)) or really try to focus on remote teams. I had also tossed around the idea of just turning off most of the modules and making it just an expense reporting or just a time-off app. Never did that though.
I thought about aggregating books by prizes their authors had won, so you could browse books written by chemistry Nobel Prize winners or Fields Medal winners. I quickly gave up on the project, but I'm sure I poured hundreds of hours into it before that. I'm not too despondent about it anymore, and learned a lot (it's my first ever website, and only one so far!) - it was quite gruelling to manually go through all of the authors and choose pictures and attach affiliate links.. I'm sure the affiliate links have already expired as there wasn't a single buy through them.
* I wrote an eBook and sold maybe 3 copies per month for $9.99, for a while, but it wasn't the success I thought it would become. I made it free eventually, because I thought the SEO helped more than having it as a paid product.
On the membership landing page is a free signup. You get access to a 12-lesson course with tutorials and tactics I’ve used to land three FT remote jobs in my career.
The upsell was group coaching. Some people got excited about this. Only a few people paid.
I learned that unemployed people are not usually willing to pay for a service (especially if there are no video testimonials).
I’m confident that if I persevered this could have become something but I lost interest. Many people are still registering for the membership. I may return to the project soon and find a way to turn the content into a paid, self-paced course—-without paying for SaaS.
A poop device. Well, Kickstarter coming soon so we will see.
Video demo: https://youtu.be/XSBPfK-ZIsA
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463...
So far, my main win has been to qualify for the apple small business program, so I will qualify for the reduced apple commission next year.
http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).
You can expose your APIs to third party developers by adding your endpoints, choosing the type of authentication and setting rate limits.
The app takes care of provisionimg API tokens and tracking requests. The documentation is auto generated from the swagger file.
I haven’t launched it yet, but starting to build up the Twitter (https://twitter.com/@jobsindevrel) and the mailing list so that when there is some actual traffic coming in, it should (ideally) be profitable pretty quickly. Hoping to launch next month!
Granted, it launched at the beginning of this month and I'm only spending minimal amounts advertising it. 200 signups, only a fraction actually bother using the site after signing up.
I created it after using another online typing site, which charged quite a lot, and said to myself: "I can do this, and charge a fraction of what they do". So I did, pretty much my only more-or-less complete project after probably a dozen good-hearted attempts that I gave up on eventually.
Its a very lightweight community search, designed for mobile first but won't suck on any platform...
I haven't put as much effort in promoting it and also not much in the last year due to personal reasons and general COVID-19 uncertainties. But I think it will come in handy as things wake back up either next year or soon after... Still have ideas to try out for improvement/refinement, which besides something that I can show off what I can do is also a proof of concept for ideas in its niche.
I've also learned that if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn (probably). I did not know this and had incorrect assumptions about promoting the project.
- BillDivider: a SaaS to help housemates divide bills and other expenses
It was my first side-project, I wrote it in Django with Bootstrap. It barely worked, and I gave up due to the cost of running it.
- Jobs? Ok!: a job board
This was probably the dumbest idea I had business-wise - I would scrape jobs from other sites, and ask people to pay to post their own jobs amongst the scraped jobs.
On the tech side of things, it was my first time using React and GraphQL, and I really enjoyed it. Oh and I used DynamoDB for highly relational data, which I wouldn't recommend.
- Appointment Scheduler: a SaaS kinda like Calendly
By this point I sort of had an idea of how to build, I started using infrastructure-as-code (terraform), and building new ideas was just a matter of having one, and copy pasting assets. Tried selling the idea to consultant friends of mine, but they were happy using Outlook.
- Room Booking Co: Same idea as Appointment Scheduler, but for meeting rooms
This one I basically built to test the Google Calendar API. Turns out it's extremely limiting for interfacing with public calendars.
- Online Or Not: a SaaS that performed contract testing on GraphQL endpoints, pivoted to an uptime monitor
I feel like this idea had legs, just launched too early: basically it would snapshot a "good" version of your GraphQL response, ping it every X hours, and alert when the response changed.
I actually took sales meetings on this one, built features that potential customers said were must haves before they could use it. Punchline: those "potential customers" ended up ghosting me.
All of those projects led me to where I am today: running https://PerfBeacon.com - (PerfBeacon helps you keep your app/site fast by automating Google Lighthouse checks), and https://MaxRozen.com - where I write weekly about React, and have started selling a book on useEffect.
It was a time when mobile plans were still costly, so free calls over the internet sounded good. We got a hotel to implement our service, but it didn't get much use, we killed it a few months later.
Overall it was a few months of work, and I don't regret doing it, but looking back, it probably wasn't a great business model.
Romylms.com - A learning management system/training website for companies to train their employees with courses and modules and quizzes and such.
I currently used both for my own company coalitiontechnologies.com. Neither has made money commercially on its own though although a few dedicated users love it.
I also launched a website where you could pay someone of any faith to pray for you for a dollar. That never took off either haha.
I built it for myself, and really expected to make something on it. But didn't get anywhere.
Hasn't made any money yet but I think it's on the brink
I've also worked on Block Hooks (https://block-hooks.com) but that's very early days. I expect as the Celo ecosystem grows I'll get customers.
It started well, increasingly growing audience and Adsense revenues until Google's May 2020 core update. Since then, the site started sliding in the SERPs and finally it now disappeared from Google.
Honestly, I still don't understand why Google has penalized the site so much. Any feedback will be appreciated.
It's feature complete, but I need more people to beta test it to see if the flow works or not. Check out www.threefiveapp.com and fill in your email if you are interested.
Annoyingly there is no pay via atlassian for bitbucket cloud yet, and I was not prepared to do my own pay,ent which sort of negates the marketplace value.
It’s something I plan to launch when that is released eventually though.
At the time, there was another website Popsike (still running today) that accomplished the same task, but they only updated the listings pulled from eBay every few months whereas my service pulled the listings as soon as they completed.
My failure was that I ran everything from my cable modem and off of my own hardware. By the time cloud services were affordable, my database was around 60gigs, and I wasn't sure how I would be able to transfer the data easily. Eventually, my hardware bit the dust and I just didn't have the motivation to get everything back up and running. I had always considered to transition to a vinyl marketplace but work/family ended up delaying that indefinitely.
I tried to make a job board in the UK for Civil, Mechanical and Electrical engineers (and other "real life" engineering) because I'm in the field.
Really, I did it to have a list of jobs to apply to. I'm not even sure I can make money from it though. Learning a lot about the internet and websites, so not all a failure.
Maybe next year, I'll start charging.
Here is the chrome extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/savvy-li/ncddkklmi...
Spend most of the second part of the year developing a solution for people that are struggling with skin care consistency. Launched one month ago, still trying to build a community and see if people will be willing to pay for a service like this.
Then I realized there are launched products with the same idea and the bigger problem: what if Zoom tries to do it? So I never completed the app.
Anyway, zoom.page is for sale ;)
Sites like this were nuked off search for 'reverse cypher violation' Very small traffic mainly used by youtubers to download their own videos or to make clips. No revenue.
I added subtitle generation (unreleased), which adds the punctuation. All for fun, which was indeed fun.
I wrote (and am still writing) Gig'o'Books (http://www.gigobooks.com) -- Accounting for gigs and side income.
I'm the first user (ie. dogfooding).
Thing is ... I'm sure there's a lot of people with gigs who would find it useful but for some reason, I'm having trouble finding them.
some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
I’ve made some but not sure how to go about marketing it, especially in foreign markets.
I’d post a link here but idk if it could lead to a c&d although it’s not much different than those dumb autoswipers.
More of the story: Back in 2001 I was a very burned out video game developer. Back in '93 I was a OS developer on the 3D0 and then the original PSX. By '01 I'd lived through the EA Spouse era, wanting out of games, I transitioned to VFX. While being a hybrid developer / digital artist, I did some actor replacement work that was generalizable - meaning with some preparation, anyone could be inserted into a prepared video clip, with feature film quality.
At this time, about 2002, I realized that short form video, such as conventional TV commercials and pop music videos, treated with consumer faces and actor replacement, become a type of Personalized Advertising. Around 2002, digital cable and streaming video services were just starting to take hold, which meant individual consumers receiving digital video streams receive unique-to-them delivered streams - streams that could have Personalized Advertising in place of ordinary ads. In some cases, this would be very desirable, such as film trailers, or really any desirable wish fulfilling product or service.
So I got serious. I started an EMBA program while continuing at the VFX studio, making the actor replacement project my masters thesis. During this I recruited a team of other VFX people, 2 of which have Academy Awards for their work. By '06 I graduated my MBA program, 2nd in my class, and left working at the VFX studio to work on "the company" full time.
By '08 we had awarded global patents for Personalized Media: a combination actor replacement and product placement process, designed for global scale. We also had an operating VFX pipeline. But, this was 2008: we were in the midst of the global financial meltdown. From '08 through '11 I met with everybody and anybody, presenting and pitching to film studios, recording labels and major advertising firms. I was often met with disbelief the technology was possible or scalable or economically viable. If given the attention, I could explain and demonstrate, but that rarely happened. It was not uncommon for the pitch to receive a rude response, like the idea was crackpot.
Three times I managed to put together an investment pool, but each time one of the investors would realize what the tech could do with porn, and they'd fixate on that. They'd sway the other investors, and no matter how I explained the difficulty of controlling a system that let's anyone put anyone into porn, they insisted that become the direction of the company. I refused, and three times the investment pool disbanded.
After '11 I pivoted to a 3D geometry generator for digital artists and games. The twitter site for that is still at https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media?lang=en. That managed to squeak out an meager existence until '15. Never really generating traction, as people simply expected everything free, and these were professional products.
Simply to eat I'd been doing MBA and developer consulting. Over time, that became the majority of what I was doing, and the freaking global patents were $40K a year to maintain. In '15 I sold the patents, and took a job with one of the company's technology partners I'd licensed the 3D Reconstruction tech. The entire effort covered 13 years, I learned a lot, and destroyed my life savings. Can't say I would not do it all over again.
We haven't yet made any income from it, and covid hit us pretty hard because of our customer base. However we're using the end of 2020 to build momentum on a few social media platforms in order to start gaining traction.
An app to simplify choosing a restaurant with friends/partner. I mostly created it to have something to do during lockdown, but it would have been fun if it took off.
I don't think we have any subscribers for the non-free variant.
I’ve accepted that I’ll never reach my goal of financial independence.
But I do believe I can supplement my diet enough to make it a zero-cost hobby. And that’s alright with me.
First App was a birthday calendar (Back in 2012-13), where I pulled Contact book, Google Plus and Facebook and at one time also had a section of born today. But it had bugs, it took too much time to solve. When I fixed things, Google Plus was shutting down, and FB APIs also got more restricted. I dropped working on that project.
Second App was a utility around a service called PushBullet: Still active and one of the must have utility back in the day, I developed an open-source utility around that app. I couldn't market it properly, (Didn't know real possibility of Product hunt or Hacker news back then). Then PushBullet went behind paywall and I stopped using it entirely. Also lost interest working on that project.
Third App was another utility managing (and intelligently deleting) files in Android Phones: Current Files App (Started as Files GO) didn't exist then. I worked on this longer than any other project. Even tried to do marketting, at it's peak (when I posted about the app on reddit) it had ~100 users a day, then daily job got on the way and I couldn't work on the app. Then Google Happened, their restrictive play store policy meant I have to chose between other aspect of life and this project. I dropped working on this....
Not counting many ideas that didn't go beyond failed or unconvincing POCs. I have stopped developing apps entirely since couple of years. Got some backend certificates, and now in a free time I indulge in Chess, Reading and writing blog post (80% in native language on non tech stuff and 20% on tech stuff).
Edit: Started working on a POC of a service I had in my mind since long. Let's see what happens.
Open to any and all feedback! :)
Maybe it'll make money yet. I dunno. Search for homes for sale in Ireland by proximity to fibre broadband, schools, cycle routes, train stations, and proposed infra (new metro route, cycleways, etc.) and by site area. Ended up buying myself a dirt cheap thatched cottage an hour from Dublin by train on a few acres with it and figured I'd see if others would benefit from it.
Spent a few years experimenting with touchscreen UI and audio synthesis in my free time on and off, and eventually settled on an engine and interface design. The idea is to create 'instruments' in the editor (2nd screenshot) by connecting basic modules to create and transform audio based on user X/Y touch coordinates. Then, stack a bunch of instruments on screen and use your fingers to create and loop sequences of notes live on stage. The demo video ( https://youtu.be/Qk85IrgXRj0 ) shows how that part works.
Once COVID hit, I was sent home to do nothing with full pay, so I had free time and decided to power through and create a functional MVP and website. My plan was to get some beta users, polish it up, add missing features, and then start charging. I showed it around on some music production forums and to friends who dabble in it, and got terrible feedback: 1. Too hard to use; 2. not compatible with existing plugin systems; 3. terrible demo video (I'm not a musician nor an expert on creating cool synth sounds); 4. "touch screens are *"; 5. nobody wants to do live production; 6. it sounds terrible
Of those responses, #2 was the killer. Without compatibility with existing synth plugin frameworks, like VST, it was pretty much dead in the water. No producer was going to use a synth app that didn't support their favorite plugins, and no plugin developers were going to switch to an application with no users (I built my own custom plugin framework for it). I looked into adding support, but VST uses such a completely different architecture from the synth engine that I created that they couldn't really work together in any sensible way. One suggestion I got was to remove my synth engine entirely and just make the app a MIDI front-end for other synths, which is something I might do in the future, though the limitations of the MIDI protocol would mean removing a lot of functionality. (I have a new WFH job now, so no more unlimited time.) I'm also thinking of open-sourcing the project entirely, but I need to clean up some things in the codebase first.
I did decide to split out the UI manager that I created for the app into a separate open-source Windows UI framework, which I still work on and use for other small utility apps that I create: https://tinyurl.com/upbeatui
If I were to do it again, I'd have started with support for existing VST plugins or MIDI and worked from there. I also wouldn't have wasted so much time figuring out auth stuff. The only costs were the domain and VPS hosting.
Open to all feedback! :)
It's a community building through food sharing attempt.
Last side project which ended up becoming a bit of a rollercoaster was Brring Conference, a conference calling app where you could schedule conference calls ahead of time and it'd send out calendar invites and then automatically dial everyone in when the call time arrived.
At the time of inception I noticed that the UK had terrible conference calling providers. They'd bill ~£50 for a one hour international conference call with 10 people. I did my numbers and realized I could provide the same call for 1/10th the price using outbound dialing and least cost routing via Twilio/Plivo etc.
I thought I was off to the races but I made the cardinal mistake of making every startup mistake in the book.
It took a few months to build a basic prototype and then using lots of my own money (and some begged, borrowed and raised) it slowly grew to become quite the monster in my life.
I wasn't a complete idiot though, I ran the idea by whom I figured my target market would be, wrote up a business plan, projected costing/break even and looked up how much my competitors were making via their company filings - the market (at least in my eyes) was there.
By the time I launched it was too little too late - our big competitors in the UK (and US for that matter) had completely revamped their products in response to Microsoft Teams. As an example of how competitive things became Google Ad spend for the term 'conference calling' literally went up 10x when I launched in response to competition between Slack, Microsoft and our own local competitors.
We obtained 100+ users and two dozen paid within the first month but the pace didn't really pickup much beyond there so after several months of adding features and running ad campaigns instead of parking it I decided to pivot the whole thing and turn it into a lead generation widget - like Intercom or Drift but supporting phone and WebRTC calling via the browser to a sales agent.
Things did better this time, I signed up paid customers ahead of time to figure out what features to launch with and ensure there was a market there once our product arrived - I was pinging maybe 30+ business owners a day asking if they'd be interested and I managed to get hoteliers, estate agents, cruise ship companies and travel agents interested in using my product.
We built Brring Live Dialer in a few months and things were growing better. Then COVID hit and our customers just evaporated. I decided I'd had enough of this side project which had become my life and slowly wound things down and started interviewing.
I have to say the experience of the above was instrumental in leveling up my resume. I came from a background of XMPP and telephony - where our software was deployed on-prem. I'd allowed myself to become deskilled so building an app from scratch using the latest web technologies of the time meant I had zero issues interviewing and landing a job.
Still smarts though, making so many ruddy mistakes!
ls ~/projectsHowever, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I would be glad to listen to.
Btw, the link to side-project: https://www.zudvpn.com GitHub: https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN
Please explain HN moderators?
I write novels: I've published 10 so far. I didn't make any money for a while, but all in all I've sold about 80,000 copies. I haven't published anything new since 2018 and my sales have since dried up completely.
Fiction is a product market fit game first: if you don't write what people want to read, they won't read it. After that, it is a quantity game. New books come out every day, if you don't keep releasing more stories, people will forget you.
getting back to writing is one of my 2021 goals.
By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/
I paid for a little advertising but those already in industry more interested than business people. LibreOffice needs Android update.