Mostly I've only just played music for fun. It's much more fun (and certainly easier) playing at some friend's house every week for 18 months than it is to book performances, market the band, produce works for the public, etc.
I have a sticker on my truck that says "This Sticker Will Last Longer Than Your Band", and that's been true.
I don't regret learning to play the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon and performing it once. I know so much Grateful Dead. I've play dozens and dozens of original songs written by friends that won't ever get any attention outside of the 20 people who were paying attention at some bar.
I've also played with more commercially focused endeavors and have an idea of the horrors of trying to tour and manage the commercial aspects of music. It's not like most of these bands were any worse or could not have been marketed.
I've played with a lot of folks who have only ever been in one or two bands.
The thing I find interesting about all that is this point:
they usually vastly underestimate how much work it takes to market a band
and at the same time (I find this a little beautiful) they vastly underestimate the goodness of their own musical output.
Just because projects don't succeed commercially does not mean they aren't well made or that these projects are not worth doing in as things in themselves.
It is a program that has a countdown, lets say, 100 key presses, and every time you press a key, it goes down by one, and every, lets say second, it recovers 1 key. When it reached like 20 keys, I got a notification, and when it reached 0, I got a typing timeout (I disabled my keyboard). This forced me to, type more efficiently, to use more efficient shortcuts and to think about code before I wrote it more. In the end, this actually helped a lot for my hands, and I was still able to work on stuff.
I ended up never releasing it, because I was too lazy to put in the work to get it to a usable state for other people on other computers.
I lose stuff a lot. It started as a URL (https://www.lost-item.com/eric/) that I can put on a sticker on my stuff so that when people find my phone, wallet, credit card, keys they can contact me.
I preferred that over my phone number or email address because I didn't want to put anything that identifies me on the items, so a form on the internet acts as a barrier.
In general, I find that people are really nice about it. I've recovered my full wallet at least 3 times and my phone probably 5 times.
Yes, I am forgetful. If I were smarter, I would just not lose stuff. But because I'm not, I have that.
Hosted on github pages and uses firebase, so basically it costs me $1 a year + the domain registration fee. So after I recovered my cell phone just once, I basically figured it's been paid for for life.
Lifetime revenue from strangers on it is less than $100. Value of items recovered to myself, probably $3k.
It works well and I still use it with friends and family to play games together. I even designed a logo, registered it for an EU trademark, and made t-shirts.
But when Steam Remote Play Together was announced, I decided that there wasn't a market for it anymore, so instead I switched to building real-time AI tools in C++.
My next idea, funny Webcam filters for desktop, was then pre-empted by Snap Camera coming to desktop. With so many FAANG-scale companies releasing free tools, it has become really tricky to find financially viable niches.
This was an extension of a bot I made years back, that constructed a 6s trailer for every single game on Steam as it's launched (https://twitter.com/microtrailers), which later became part of a thing I did officially at Valve (https://store.steampowered.com/labs).
The @playfullyauto one was my most recent (post Steam Labs) thing, and it's my favorite, because it unearths a bunch of games people like. But I never really spread the word about it.
So as a pandemic hobby, I made a website to scrape eBay laptop listings, extract all the relevant data, cross reference against benchmarks, and sort the result by "value" (aggregate performance / cost). I took inspiration from the parametric search on site like digikey for commodity components, where no one cares about brand.
You can check it out here [1]. Maybe eventually I'll write a showHN, but I haven't been working on it for a while, and there's a few features I want to add before that. Originally I planned to use affiliate links, which seemed like a nice all-parties-win setup, but eBay kicked me off the Partner Network program for not generating traffic. So presently it's totally free and non-profitable.
I just don't have the time to be able to focus on a creative endeavour when I feel like my world is crumbling around me.
I've written multiple versions of the bitmap to SVG converter, I have an XY robot gantry set up and I have a bunch of plans and schematics drawn up to diagram how it all works.
Getting the focused time to be fully "plugged in" to the project is impossible when every day I'm freaked out about how I will pay the bills, will I ever get a job, will I lose everything tomorrow.
Additionally I feel intense shame for having worked on this thing for "years" and still not having any significant progress to report or show. It's a huge embarrassment, but one day I hope it can be something I am proud of.
In the end this pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW and giving me a cut of their profit to support the SW development.
Recently I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I wrote a retrospective of last 3 years [2].
It's a "universal shortener".[2]
You can take any block of text and condense it to a simple code that you can chalk up anywhere. It's the same idea as a QR code but you can just quickly write it out with a pencil or chalk it on the street ... or verbally state it.
I'm convinced there is some use-case that this elegantly solves and would be genuinely valuable to people ... but beyond mentioning it here on HN I have never marketed it in any way.
[1] https://0x.co
If anyone has a use case which does not involve copyright infringement I would be happy to give away the code.
Search for "car key lanyard" on Amazon or eBay.
There's hundreds of sellers.
Markets are big. Finding a niche isn't about a unique product, it's about a unique offering. There's much more to a business than the product.
I never did more marketing than a Reddit post when the proof of concept was made. Coincidentally, I've worked on it recently and added some useful functionality.
Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube2anki/boebb... Source: https://github.com/dobladov/youtube2Anki
It is a very easy-to-use self-contained JS framework for prototyping and making stuff with Android devices.
You can access sensors, NFC, bluetooth, MQTT, websockets, or write a simple UI with a couple of lines of code. Think in the terms of easiness of Arduino for Android
When people try it they always say WOW "why have I never heard of this?!" ( probably because I'm very bad at marketing :/ )
I got it mentioned in Hackaday and some comments here in HN but that's all :)
Tech-stack: OpenVPN + MySQL + some Python scripts as glue + PayPal integration.
Use case: If you need a Venezuelan IP address [0]. you'd just access the VPN front site, pay for a day-pass, and use the VPN [1]. Also banks use SMS-based 2FA, so having the SIM card in the server helps [2].
Turns out there are cheaper VPNs that do have Venezuelan IP addresses, though my offered benefit is to offer home random IP addresses, which makes it more stealth. Also the economics didn't help, and the upstream bandwidth isn't great as well.
I took down the site and just left the VPN for myself and some trusted friends. Also, if someone did something sketchy with it, it'd by tied to my home address.
Maybe someday I'll create a blog post about it.
--
[0]: Something very niche, banks here don't allow people foreign IP addresses to do bank transfers, etc., they could also block your bank account entirely.
[1]: It'd issue short lived certificates for the amount of time purchased.
[2]: With a ZTE MF667 USB modem.
Scraped millions of publicly available property tax documents for a specific region and combined it with Leaflet and OpenStreetMap to visualize the data.
I find marketing to be very uncomfortable so I’ve been neglecting it, but I know it’s the only way to any kind of success.
It could fill an AD with upto 50,000 identities and associated data, which could then be used for testing. The engineer could tweak every aspect before it got created.
Beyond fully writing it and getting it to a version 1.0 state, I never marketed it as I had a sudden crisis of faith and thought no-one would actually want it.
Here's me playing it with a silly wig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgH-WU-9CZA
The artist "Mezerg" uses a MIDI-enabled Theremin to do something similar, but it's costly.
The BOM for my thing is around $30 when building just one at at time (excluding time spent of course); if mass produced the unit cost could probably be quite low. But the market is probably extremely small... maybe 200 devices? So I didn't pursue mass production.
I called this "Meet Anyway", it was my first Svelte app, and never released it for several reasons, among them:
- I had to do some manual video upload and provide the exact video URL to the app to make things work
- the thing had some glitches even if it mostly worked and did the job
- I had other things to do, in particular taking care of an open source network implementation of a popular letter-based game that I started in 2016 and then forgot (ran all this time on my server without maintenance at all, not appearing in top) and which suddenly attracted people during the lock-down.
- and now I'm interested in other things, especially that the lock-downs are over. It would be nice to finish it and publish it though, but I'm more interested in the other things, and there are major issues: the videos need to live under the same domain as the app if I remember correctly because of browser security, so either people have to host the tool themselves or we would need to offer a service that would host people's videos while they are watching it, or at least to proxy them. I did not want to set up such a service and so the tool does not solve the issue for many people, only those who are technically inclined.
This was my second shot at this issue, I had first put together a Python program which allowed two users to watch the same video locally with a regular Linux video player, so I could watch stuff with a relative, using MPRIS, a unified Linux / Free Desktop D-Bus interface to control music and video players. This one I actually released it, but there's actually a mature project that does this better, is actually maintained and is cross-platform: https://syncplay.pl/
Side project I made after leaving a large company; a free statistics package that bridges the gap between Excel and actual coding (R, Python). In the corporate world we used Minitab or a similar package with an expensive enterprise license.
Once I moved to a smaller one and was doing analytics on the side, I didn't have the budget for such things so.... I made my own version...
Never really had the time to build out a full set of features or promote it. We probably could have grabbed a piece of low-rent district for analytics software.
- A public dataset of a powerbank-on-rent provider in India: https://captnemo.in/plugo/
- OpenAPI specifications for some Indian companies: https://stoplight.captnemo.in/docs/simpl/, https://stoplight.captnemo.in/docs/kuvera/
- Publicly updated dataset and release feed of edits to Indian Securities (ISINs): https://github.com/captn3m0/india-isin-data
- Re-published Joel Spolsky's HgInit on GitHub pages as a proper Jekyll website: https://hginit.github.io/
- A regex based validator for Indian PINcodes: https://github.com/captn3m0/india-pincode-regex
A lot more at https://captnemo.in/projects/
The truly abandoned project is FountainCards.com. It accepts typed input, converts it to a “handwritten” SVG, sends to a pen plotter, and mails the card. I built the whole app, bought two pen plotters and was ready for production. the reason I stopped was because I didn’t care enough about marketing to the clientele who needs that kind of thing - mortgage brokers, car salesmen, etc. It felt like I was helping the client act like they cared about their customer by sending “heartfelt” notes without _actually_ caring about their customer. In other words, I was helping them send really nice spam.
After that, I spent some significant time thinking about what project I would really care about, which leads to the second app…
I’ve been working on MoneyHabitsHQ.com in my free time since January. It is a simple take on a personal finance app. The idea is to try to get the maximum benefit from 3 minutes of budgeting per week. There are a bunch of features which will make the app nearly “invisible”, while still helping people keep track of their money.
I haven’t started marketing it because getting the UX right on a budget app is incredibly difficult. I’ve been in quiet beta for a few months, and if anyone wants to try it out, feel free to email me: Stephen@bate-man.com and I’ll get you a promo code.
The data is small enough that you can keep it all in memory. It was a nice toy and it let me play with a few data retrieval techniques I had heard talking about but never actually implemented.
Synergy/Barrier is not horrible, but I find the latency a little painful.
Ended up getting an industrial HDMI switch, with a KVM. Built a server in Go that connects to the serial port of all the devices.
A companion client that runs on all the machines tells the server when the mouse moves to the edge of the screen, so the USB inputs can be switched to the correct computer. Basically, it allows you to have multiple computers connected, to multiple displays, sharing one keyboard and mouse. (You can define layouts on the server, so the displays can move around on the matrix HDMI switcher).
I had a lot of fun testing the concept with quick and dirty prototypes and then making one that I could use on my backpacking trips. It's by far the best tent I've ever used for backpacking. And it also provide a cool place to sit when it's sunny and hot because it can be configured to reflect the sun and radiant heat as well.
I never marketed it because there are way too many people who really shouldn't ever start campfires and I didn't want to expose myself to lawsuits.
The joke at the beginning was that it's a "travel simulator" for a period in time when you couldn't travel. I worked on it every day for about eight months, and I think I showed it to maybe six people. It was mostly a writing exercise, and an excuse to do research.
It's "abandoned" in the sense that I'm not driven to do more work on it, but it is "content complete" at about 300 pages, and it can be played.
Mainly made for myself, so that I can easily sing only parts of the song with lyrics.
Then Spotify added lyrics back and kinda lost interest in this, even though could be used for other purposes as well like teaching purposes: giving link to students to watch only some of the video with added commentary by teacher. Though, currently the actual video is shown only really small so doesn't suite for that.
I certainly haven't abandoned it, but I haven't bothered promoting it in any meaningful way because I derive value from it whether or not others are using it.
There's an invite system in place to help prevent spammers from overrunning the place, but I'm quite responsive to requests.
You can find it here: https://myworkouts.xyz
Then gapps-script updated, broke some stuff, I got tired of maintaining it, and we got a new dev, so I aquiesced to Jira.
I hate jira.
* A scraper and search engine that aggregated digital agencies by the technologies they were known to work with.
* A store locator, I had been seeing the request a lot on eCommerce stores and thought it would make a great SaaS. I was right about that, but unfortunately it wasn't mine that was succesful.
* An API dashboard tool that let you pick and display arbitrary data from any API endpoints you had access to. They were fetched and updated from the client's browser in real time, using a few different auth methods configurable by the user. It used an interface backed by JSON Path to let you select any part of the API's return value to display. I had hoped to go really far with the display UI, and allow for piping and manipulation of data before displaying it. But it didn't take off as an MVP.
* A page creator that used the concept of configurable blocks to build the page, this was way before Gutenberg and I feel like my approach to the UI was pretty novel even today. It was used almost exclusively for religious spam and I took it down because my country has no safe harbour laws, so I was potentially responsible for anything put up.
A bunch of others that never actually launched as well, including a management tool for mechanic workshops, a motorsport app to help manage a small DIY motorsport program, even a budgeting tool for long term travellers/nomads.
Someone who ran a Minecraft hosting business contacted me asking permission to use it in their product, which was very surprising to me.
(it was GPL so I couldn't and wouldn't say no, but I also politely explained that I wasn't their free tech support and that patches would be welcome)
Unfortunately, the ASR isn't great, so I'm holding off on marketing until it's better. Honestly, if I spent half the time learning the language as I have making tools, I'd probably be fluent by now...
[0]: https://letsyiya.com
I eat my own dog food. I publish all my work, as if they are commercial applications, but never bother to tubthump.
Mainly, I use them in my own projects. I've collected a few GH stars, here and there, but I don't really care too much, if anyone else uses them.
The one project that achieved escape velocity is comfortably in the capable hands of a new team, and I just spot it, from time to time, with my backyard telescope.
I’m a carpenter, but I spent a few weeks helping a friend with his gutter business years ago. He would spent 45-60 minutes building an estimate for each potential client.
The app I wrote allowed him to complete each estimate I’m less than 90 seconds.
However he refused to use it because “I’ve always done it this way.”
He lost the business and now works at Kroger. Some people just don’t like technology.
The studio I worked, Rhythm & Hues, was a 2-times Academy award winner. My "resource forecasting and employee scheduling" system was able to prove the presence of institutional learning, and the prediction graph of that learning curve was used by banks to justify the working capital loans made to the studio. It also maintained the forecast of the render farm usage, identifying when and how many additional render servers needed to be leased. Perhaps the most useful was it generated on-demand employee schedules: who works on what, who is most likely to be helping, and insures those that support one another most frequently are scheduled with compatible tasks.
The studio owner thought I should market and sell that system independently. I also came up with a VFX process for automated actor replacement, which I did purse - trying to create Personalized Advertising with you and your friends in the video ads you see when streaming. However, VCs wanted to finance a porno company (seriously! they insisted) and I eventually went bankrupt. But hey, I can claim high morals as the global patent author that invented deep fakes, but refused to do porno with it.
* A budgeting app based on the idea that the only important number is dollars saved.
* An automated newsletter assembled out of RSS feeds, which I built when I quit social media.
I think my next item is going to be some kind of cookbook, but I haven't quite decided what exactly that means.
I was frustrated with how slow and clunky all the existing solutions were for regex searches. The built in file search in MSVC has a UI that wastes a tonne of space (and the search itself is unuseably slow). Constantly changing to a terminal to run ag/grep and then open the file manually in MSVC was a pain, so I learned how to build an extension and put a GUI onto the command line tools I was already using.
Tools like Visual Assist are great if you want actual symbol indexing, but the searches (of a UE4) codebase can take 30-60s. TurboSearch can run a regex search of the entire engine in ~6s and searches of just the game code take ~200ms.
I have only sold one copy, but I use it every day and it's a core part of my workflow. I thought there would be more interest in it when I built it, but since I've gotten so much use out of it myself, the time spent building it was well worth it.
I have been meaning to spin this off into a SaaS. I don't know of anywhere you can actually get the full definition imagery as a slippy map, everywhere else cuts corners and loses fidelity.
Contact me if you would find it useful...
It support uploading jpg, png, gif, webp, webm, mp4 with drag-and-drop, through file picker, API, ShareX (with ready to use configs), and through Android share feature, if installed as a PWA.
The performance may not be the best, but my Pi2 handles it without issues.
I wanted to put up a demo before sharing it, and there's still no demo, but it's quick to try out with docker (but it can also just run through node if you want that for some reason).
So I took a left turn and started making a VR game instead. The marketing path for that is much more interesting.
As a further learning exercise, I decides to try and publish it on F-Droid, which I eventually managed to do (once again solely because I wanted to tinker with it). I made no attempt to promote the app and did not really expect anyone to use it. Since then it has not become a runaway success, but there must be some folks using it since the repo has received a number of stars/issues/PRs. We have continued to mature the app and build out more features. (Not at all what I had expected when I sat down to hack in the first change....)
Wasn't finished beyond a basic PoC, and I did it more fun/practicing than for anything of more tangible value. I believe the code has been lost.
I thought it would be nice to share them with others and offer a weekly quotes by email service too (sadly neglected for a while).
And a kaleidoscopic camera made with webgl: https://kaleido-nft.vercel.app/app
It's my first real website outside of my blog, and it's been awesome learning how to do everything (thank you Firebase for making it so much easier), but I haven't been enjoying the follow-up of all the infrastructure work needed to make it more performant. Classic engineer problem, let me make the NEW THINGS.
On top of that, trying to get people to notice on Twitter with a few hashtags here and there hasn't been the most fun.
In 2019 i started building a video platform allowing you to do both 1/1, 1/many and streaming, setting up booking and charging.
Then covid, then zoom exploded then we kind of killed it, but it's fully functioning.
https://www.realwork.ai Also in 2018 I started building a field management platform for remote teams like construction, retail etc.
We got our first client in 2020, then covid happened and the entire industry closed down. The app is fully functional, the backend is fully functional and we are currently in talk with someone who want to get into the construction industry.
I cooked up what amounts to a wrapper for minecraft protocol ( js lib) that creates a proxy that connects for you, you connect to it when ready and bobs your uncle.
I posted it on reddit twice, it was used as a scapegoat for a guy who did a really clever exploit that exposed peoples bases and that's about it. I stopped playing Minecraft a while ago, but the OSS community is still updating it every now and then.
Https://github.com/themoonisacheese/2bored2wait
I spent about two months building, then went around my professional network to try sell/market it.
It turned out most folks using GraphQL didn't have this problem, because they had good test coverage, or wouldn't have engineers randomly change their GraphQL schema.
I ended up rewriting it to be an Incident Management service (basically, an uptime checker for APIs, web apps, and websites, as well as a status page service), significantly easier to market now.
I have trouble with deciding which ideas to pursue. I always get a couple of weird ideas per month so I get easily distracted on what to build. So I decided to create a simple todo app, which will help me:
1 - rate my ideas (10 questions on a scale from 1 to 10, for self-grading) 2 - answer the important questions first (Revenue, Differentiation and Speed) 3 - keep all of the ideas in one place
Hilariously, a basic todo app for keeping track of ideas doesn't really have a good grade, but I still needed to build it.
- Mental Health tracking app [1] for tracking my daily activities against my anxiety/depression/well-being
- Web3 Contract Explorer [2] for making it easier to inspect and run methods on Ethereum contracts
- GlobalEntry appointment notifications [3] for making it easier to book last-minute interview appointments
[1] https://mental-h.vercel.app/
A fast and easy toolkit for common bioinformatic tasks, such as translating DNA sequences, alignments and primer design. Built more than 7 years ago, I personally still use it regularly for my work. But it never got any traction, although I believe it can be very useful for a lot of biologists.
3D Topography for visualizing GPS Tracks. This is a very recent side project of mine. I did a Show HN a couple of days ago, but also no significant traction. It anyway is a work in progress.
It started out as an educational tool for schools to teach how money creation _actually_ works but now turned into a "family" board game loved by IT people, bank staff and sociology professors. We loved producing it and players are very happy with it because it's so fun but we never really started marketing sadly because we had to take up day-jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) https://www.wikidata.org/
Created the whole site with complete Auth, Billing etc but lost interest when tried to actually market it. I started creating this when I saw someone make >10k$ launching something similar on producthunt. I thought I can make some ez money too.
https://headlineheroapp.herokuapp.com/
Edit: Buy Now won't work because Stripe credentials are expired.
* A KDE plasmoid that let you drop executable files onto it, and when you did the files got executed. Very simple, although I was proud of the name--dropkik.
* An alternative to markdown that has an ANTLR grammar, so it's easy to generate parsers in many different languages. It's not as nice as markdown though. Also it supported direct export to PDF, so it didn't require a LaTeX install.
And it uses OCR to scan the receipt and read the items, amounts and tax. I was amazed how well open source Tesseract worked for this out of the box.
Finished it but never marketed it, too much of a perfectionist. Worked really quite well though.
This was maybe 6-7 years ago, and I've since seem other apps doing basically the same thing.
Also, I have a new song up on Spotify which is an amazing accomplishment for me but I feel too embarassed to share it with others
https://open.spotify.com/track/2GDBj4UnldTDQq7MnVDu7s?si=87e...
Slack bot to streamline customer communications from many platforms. Emails, Slack chats, or mobile text messages can be forwarded to any #channel. All responses in the Slack thread are seamlessly sent back to the source.
Simple integrations already work fine. I am working on "Smart features" like auto classification and smart routing, and implementing of new integrations.
Need help with marketing :)
https://rate.house/ - like a collaborative IMDb but also has music, books, video games, and podcasts
https://wordhoot.com/ - competitive Wordle
None of them are abandoned but I just don't have the resources to do any marketing.
I haven't marketed it much except for a Show HN. I spent $20 on Google Adwords to see how effective it is. The result was a few clicks but no new signups. I'm curious how other folks in a similar situation have marketed their side project? What channels have you found useful?
It is acoustically silenced down to about 70db and doesn't need any external power sources/connectivity
I actually did do a bit of marketing but honestly it's not a service Australians want to pay for and the opportunity cost and risk of pushing it further isn't worth it.
Might dust it off again when/if regulations change to require destruction of other people's data on drives at EOL.
It’s an advanced analytics tool for Mailchimp. It’s mostly targeting regular newsletter senders, but gives detailed insights into an audience w/o violating user privacy. We like to think about it as the Plausible for Email Marketing. Unfortunately the development took too long, my business partner and friend ran out of runway and my kid was born. Still planning to market it, but so far under the radar.
It was pretty fun to build, and although it has 0 users, I use if for myself to keep track of mentions about another product that I have helped to develop (which has ~1M users).
Hosted on AWS, with a low monthly bill, so I have keep it running as I get some actual value from it :)
Sadly, I didn't have the thought or the money or the people to turn it into you know... the iPod. (technically, I was about 2 years earlier, but I'm sure they were working on it)
Throwing this out there, why not… if anyone would like to help me, let me know!
I had initally abandoned it but have picked it up again in 2022 and this time I'm planning to make it big.
[1] formester.com
Tests are just objects where the labels are the names of the tests, and the tests themselves are thunks that return {actual: foo, expected: bar}. These can be arbitrarily nested. No stupid "describe" functions.
I made it because it was easier to make my own little tool than to deal with things like jest or mocha. I sometimes think I should market it - but what's the point?
I developed a 3-D crossword tile-building puzzle. Everyone that tried it was vociferous "You should sell this!" My response was always "I already have a job and I like it. This is a hobby." And I consider it (mostly) completed, not abandoned.
Never marketed because I hate ads as much as the next person, and also because I kept getting messages such as "use a news feed reader." I just wanted everything together in a readable timeline.
Built it when I needed to do some physio exercises. Could also be used for other workouts.
Built using Elm. Will put the Github link in my bio for a bit.
P.S. sticking stuff on Netlify is my go to for projects I can mentally abandon, without them going off line. This has been online for 3 years :-)
https://github.com/siriusastrebe/jsynchronous
Ever get tired of sending API requests and JSON payloads? Wouldn't it be cool if data just synced between server and client?
Jsynchronous lets you share deeply nested object/arrays between node.js and connected browsers – and any changes made to that variable.
Riffbase is a web application to save snippets of Spotify tracks. Save your favorite riffs of your favorite songs! You can search for Spotify songs directly in the app and use the neat Riffbase interface to pinpoint exactly where the riffs start and end.
Online technical leadership training courses
Kinda in this catch-22 where I need the people paying to feel motivated to finish it, but people don’t want to pay for a half finish set of courses with no promise it will get done!
I "marketed" it by posting on HN and Reddit, but that's about it.
Each decal is different, how do you organize 1,000 different ones on a website, much less the stock of physical decals?
We've decided to just print and list batches of 10 at a time or uncut sheets instead, and we don't market to keep the orders light so it's manageable to ship decal packs in a timely manner.
* An app which identifies the 200 hashtags most frequently seen in Instagram's top posts containing a given hashtag.
For both of these projects, a factor leading me not to start marketing them was the complexity and risks in relying on Google and Facebook APIs as data sources, respectively.
This comment is marketing. I'm looking for anyone needing complex, time-series based prompt generation for GPT-3 applications.
Something a couple of friends and I spun up during the Wordle hype. It's PvP Wordle, where you set the word for the opponent to guess and vice versa. The meta is quite different from regular Wordle, obscure words and repeated letters do well.
We were too lazy to market it and have just been playing with friends and family.
Sepnia: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sepnia-calendar-tasks/id151493...
Also a peer to peer parking spot rental platform a la Airbnb. JS with a python backend.
A gamified voter registration Facebook app. Rails backend.
Not that I didn’t think I would market them, at the time I built them I was just unaware of how to effectively, and I have newer projects since.
Some friends and family told me that the IDE was "awesomwe" (well, awesomeness is very a very relative thing with your F&F) but I never found the time/motivation to polish it and market the thing.
Edit: typos.
Current project - small molecule chemistry simulation platform (no marketing, passion project)
I didn't necessarily enjoy writing it, or the process, but thought it needed to be written because I have heard so many different weight loss suggestions through out my life.
JSON document store that allowed you to access any part of the the JSON document by URL (object.nested.value becomes object/nested/value).
Had fun making it and the website above, but was not really interested in the promotion hustle.
https://joincrux.com - weight loss community w/o the snake oil BS
It exists, has a handful of users per day, but I don't market it because it isn't margin positive and certainly wouldn't be with any money diverted to marketing.
It currently gets about 2 minutes of my life per week dedicated to it.... And that's it - times up for this week, bye!
It started out as a hosted database price comparison tool on my personal blog and then just sort of grew. It’s not abandoned, but also I’m just not sure what to do with it.
A webapp for creating calendar events with unique links to meet.jit.si for video conferencing. It was an early pandemic project that I haven’t done anything with since putting it up.
It gets a steady trickle of users searching for the original app, and that's all it's meant for (not monetized), so I don't market it
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.transcrib....
These things were and are valuable to some people, but I find “marketing” them somewhere between tiresome and repugnant, so I don’t.
i tried marketing it, but i could not get developers interested because it effectively eliminates the need to do any backend development. most websites are CRUD and don't need a custom backend. this platform has it all. i haven't done any backend development on my own websites for years now for the same reason.
i'd love to get more people to use this, but where are developers that prefer frontend work over backend work?
It's a web-app that allows you to understand how colours are perceived by different cultures.
You can search by color, culture or concept.
I did post it to HN but that's all. Not really sure what to do with it!
Project collaboration SaaS - never marketed!
I'd describe what it is, but then that would be marketing
It has one user: me
I was tired of not finding any recruitment portals for product people and the affiliated work pipelines.
I added a bit of gamification with the play on words but haven’t marketed it, as I just figure everyone else likes LinkedIn.
I personally feel LinkedIn is a cesspool on fire in it’s current state, so I’ve just given up there.
Mobile app to help track performance of your solar panels. Supports SolarMeter/eGauge
energymeterapp.com
A combination todo list and calendar. It lets you schedule your tasks and keeps track of how much time you're spending/have spent on various tasks.
Also has support for recurring tasks like gym, etc.
I may get back to it someday.
gpsheatmaps.com ; CSV/GPX to heatmap generator. Working on a new version that supports printing.
I get a few donations a year, enough to cover their costs.
I added drag and drop, Wordpress-like UI and lot of complex functionality based on studying extensively the existing systems like Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Originally, I started with a Wordpress theme I designed myself. It was great until it wasn't - I tried to add E-Commerce to it and it was the most pathetic architecture for a CMS I've ever worked with. Although I made a successful theme with E-Commerce in it, I refused to use something as fragile. At the time, PHP wasn't great to work with either and I was a Rails guy. So, I looked into Ruby based alternatives and found Middleman and Jekyll. Middleman was quite powerful, but not powerful enough for a travel website where people could sort content by certain criteria, discover new places to travel, etc. Again, I started hitting the limitations of the language itself and felt frustrated. I tried Jekyll, same story. Over the course of these trials, I would work every weekend religiously with meticulous detail. I would spend all my after work hours on this little project of mine.
During the course of these 7 years, many people left, I lost many friends around me because I couldn't trade off the time for them with the time spent this project. I worked on it because I wanted to. It felt like I was going deep into unexplored territory, discovering so many possibilities with just what people would label as a simple CMS. And then, one day, I launched privately. Just to myself. It was a bliss to watch it in action. By then, I had ported it over to Elixir with a custom architecture that could support any business model you want. Data portability and export were one of my core requirements as I had painfully tried to migrate my content from free CDNs more than once after receiving terrabytes of traffic.
Finally, to test my CMS, I implemented it for a client who is still running their entire business on it. They spend barely 1/5th of their competitors' cost and yet are able to serve 3 times the traffic. This was the biggest validation for me, personally. This thing ran by itself for 4 years without any hiccups or maintenance required on the cloud. It was a business unit on auto-pilot for me. I loved it and it was all because of immensely thanks to the architecture which I consciously disallowed Javascript to not be a part of the whole thing. The frontend was completely separated so deployments to the core/backend wouldn't fail because of some dumb sh*t change Babel made to their config file or Webpack is forcing you to upgrade something. In fact, the JS dependency even for the frontend was quite low and I used Phoenix/LiveView where I could and just static CSS frameworks to make the UI look good and plain old refresh and reload for everything else. This still works well for me.
At its peak performance, the SSG CMS attracted a political party member's attention who was running his own online news site at the time. I got a chance to speak to him over the phone and he was curious how the system worked. I politely told him I couldn't sell him a clone of my system as that would be a betrayal for my client. I valued loyality and would never do something behind his back. He appreciated me for that and got some useful advice to upgrade his stack instead. I had never been more proud.
Finally, as with all good things coming to an end - the contract with my client has terminated and I am now doing Startup School to launch my SSG CMS as a Saas. I am also going to open source the core to enable developers to adopt and reap the benefits of my hard work. I know it is just a simple CMS to many, but I consider it my life's work and I see it as much, much more.
In case you are interested, you can sign up on this page for updates, I plan to launch both the OSS version and Saas version before Q4 this year. Thank you, if you have read so far :)
Only gave a shoutout on a few subreddits but it didn't stick. Oh well, I use it everyday!
