Got to 40k maps in a few months (it somehow got viral in a forum, then went from there). I even made $1k in ads one month. Some of the users included indie artists, setting up maps for fans, and diverse groups of people (there was a map for "moms of kids with cancer", for instance, which is pretty cool)

Then Google banned me for serving ads in porn sites. Then Paypal banned me (and took my funds) for taking money from shady accounts. Then my hosting service asked me to leave because they found "adult pics" on my site. A quick audit on the profile pics revealed that there were quite a few maps with porn content (including all the illegal stuff). I took stuff down as fast as I could, but never managed to get Google to pay me again. Tried my luck with a few redesigns, setting up a new adsense account (got shutdown immediately), etc. In the end, I let the domain expire and that was that. At least I didn't spend a lot of time or money on it...

Ouch.

Edit: registrar > hosting service

Were people putting a pin in and commenting with a naughty pic? What does that mean?

Is any major platform more restrictive than the regional law?

Your domain registrar? Would any of them do this?

I got kicked out of dreamhosting, then kept it alive on railsplayground for years (but w/o the ads/donations)

Additional curiosity tidbit: I made that product to learn Ruby on Rails - the v0 was a Java Struts/JSP, so I rewrote it as an exercise and “launched” on mine & my friends personal blogs. The internet felt a lot more viral back then, at least to me (we ended up launching two other side projects that actually got some traction too, but could never focus on or monetize)

I started working on it in 2014 and it's been on my mind ever since. I applied to YC with it a long time ago (was not accepted, and I can see so much wrong with the application I sent now...) I was laid off in November so I jumped back into the project and have been working on it since.

The main thing I'm planning on changing up now is: it's too general purpose—closer to a platform than a specific product. So next I'll focus on building one particular product on top of it: something kind of like Chrome's object browser (which you get when using console.log)—but showing dynamic structural changes in time (steppable/reversible), and being multi-language.

The other main issue is that, even though I'm trying to get it into user's hands as soon as possible, it has been a giant task for me to get even an alpha of this thing together on my own,—though I am damn close now. And my sister has been helping a bit recently.

Edit: direct link to video: https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY (looks much better full size!)

I'm thinking web frameworks (like WordPress) and CRMs (like SalesForce). Easy to comprehend visualization of business data is a lot more valuable than visualization of internal program data structures. If you can populate structures from 3rd party sources then you could have a valuable product.

I can see how a business would be interested in visualization of contact growth or website structure.

I agree that must be true in an absolute sense, but part of the reason I'm making this is that I find visualization of internal program data to be valuable. I have other things I want to use this to help me build. But it's definitely a gamble whether I'll be able to convince many other developers that it's valuable :)

Thanks for the suggestion though. I do think it's interesting, but if I understand correctly, the volumes of data involved would require different sorts of visualization approaches, whereas I've spent lots of time specializing mine for high-level program state. For instance, the visualizations are specialized for common data structure types, and can be stepped backwards and forwards through, like in a stepping debugger. So if nothing else, I'd be very reluctant to pivot without really giving this a shot.

Let me know if I've missed anything about the kind of data you're thinking of—maybe it's more suitable than I think.

There are plenty of ORM libraries. I am familiar with python, so sqlalchemy etc for me, but most languages have ORM libraries now.

It could be as simple as some glue to pipe data from the 3rd party into native objects (via ORM) and then use your visualization efforts directly.

Your visualization looks smooth. It may require limiting visualization to certain fields, rather than every attribute as you would want debugging.

In my opinion, though, you've done the hard part.

And volume wise it seems you already have the ability to handle relatively large complex tree structures (I think your examples showed 500+ nodes). If you can hide/show sections dynamically then that should be sufficient for some very large structures.

I'm working on something similar, with similar motivation. I often need application-specific diagnostics and I haven't had a framework for building them. So I decided to make one.

I'm approaching LuaJIT diagnostics in a really similar way to you. I instrument the VM to snapshot key data structures (e.g. JIT code) and log them to a file. Then I make a UI that visualizes them as a graph. My snapshots are raw C data structures straight out of memory with only a subset of references crawled. The UI decodes the objects the same way as GDB i.e. using DWARF debug information.

LuaJIT example: https://github.com/raptorjit/raptorjit/pull/63#issuecomment-...

My main project for the tooling (early days): https://github.com/studio/studio

Anyway. Maybe our paths will cross further down the line. Looks to me like your work is more targeted, more polished, and that you are likely to find an excellent niche e.g. Redis as another commenter suggested. I am more interested in breadth i.e. object graphs are just one of many problems I am interested in and so I'm always looking for 80/20 solutions so that I can move on to the next thing.

End braindump. Once again - great work, and great presentation! Open an issue on the Studio repo if you want to share your work there some time btw :)

You are correct that for the moment I am attempting to be more targeted and find a good niche. My first priority is to generate some passive income so I can relax a little and work on things at a reasonable pace. From there, I have some more grand ideas for this project, though I will probably remain focused on abstractions of program state. I'm curious to see what other useful things you find to visualize—I liked the execution time/trace trees. I could definitely use that.

Thanks for the comment—feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you ever feel inclined: westoncb[at Google's email service].

Get something working and throw it out there. Then find out what actual paying customers want, then go from there.

Although that isn't cast iron advice as early take up customers tend to be less risk adverse (they are paying for an unknown software) and perhaps more technical than others, so you run the risk of making a very technical program based on their feedback, which then when you get popular alienates users because unless they were with you from the beginning, they have no idea what half the features do, because obviously you didn't document things well enough.

Or so has been my experience, but perhaps I am an odd case, still creating desktop applications and don't give trial versions. You pay the money you can have me contactable all day and get your features added. If you haven't paid any money, then I don't care. I'll take word of mouth sales every day of the week

Think you're on to something that this talk points out very well.

I highly recommend coming up with a small enough use case to ship sooner so that you can build something that users want and pay for. Also, if you can document the client/server API, other devs will write monitored data structures for you.

That's a cool idea. I've been working on something similar, but that takes kind of a different angle which I like. What I have at the moment is a way of specifying filters for which properties should be displayed or not.

Yes, small enough use case... unfortunately the smallest one I can think of is MASSIVE :P

I will document the API and probably open source the client before long. Clients pretty much just send serialized Operation objects as JSON. Operations are like add/remove to/from whatever location, using a shared addressing systems for all data structures.

Reminded me of a conversation with my friend over a year ago about using VR for data visualization. His son had sold a VR startup, another of his friend was working on DNA/RNA visualization with VR, and he was exploring dashboard data visualization with VR.

I'm glad people are pointing this out to me because I hadn't really given it any thought. My first instinct is that the data being visualized here is somewhat unique in how its structured—but if nothing else, once I get graph/state machine visuals in, I could see that probably being useful elsewhere.

With a lot of the dashboard kind of stuff though (which I admittedly haven't had so much exposure to), it seems like line graphs etc. are more appropriate from what I can tell.

As for monetizing, I'd like to sell it as a cheap utility for programmers or CS teachers (those would be two different products). If I can make enough to visit the dentist regularly and maybe just supplement with part-time grocery store work, I'll consider it a success. Of course I think it has the potential for more than that if properly executed on...

Your visualizations empower the livestreaming coder.

Also all of the YouTube channels that put up tens of programming videos every month. I'd love to watch coding tutorials and courses that use that kind of visualization.

I haven't seen too much livestreaming, but I'll check out Jonathan Blow's now!

> Is your display client using some sort of "open" protocol that you could hook other things?

Pretty much, except it's technically the server which does the rendering etc., and the clients send over information about data structures (as JSON 'operations' which say thing like add/remove to/from some position in a data structure). It probably would not be very hard to write a client which observes React programs and sends that info over.

Lessons learned:

* I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design"

* Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal for the user but in actuality sets off peoples' "IAP == crapware" alarm

On the upside, I also made a fake corporate website (http://ineptech.com) to promote it and that was so much fun that I'd probably waste all that time again.

    Upon a stack of bits, about so tall,           // Boolean[] isprime = new Boolean[n];
    just think, O traveller, what we could do      // Arrays.fill(isprime, true);
    if every other bit was set to false            // for (int i = 4; i < n; i+=2)
    beginning with (but not including) two?        //   isprime[i] = false;
    
    Now take two lowly numbers, A and B            // for (int a = 3; a < n; a += 2)
    that equal three and two. What would happen    // {
    if they, by twos and ones respectively,        //   for (int b = 2; a*b < n; b++)
    were incremented in a nested fashion,          //   {
    
    And if we falsified, at every turn,            //     isprime[a*b] = false;
    the value offset by A groups of Bs?            //   }
    Then to the aether let those bits return,      // }
    to fly back home to Eratosthenes!              // return isprime;

The fact that you made it a poem, reminds me of some extempore poems that I made up as a kid - inspired by reading a book that my uncle bought me as a gift - The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense [2]. It had a lot of funny poems, limericks, etc. in it.

Here are two I made up at the time:

Poem 1:

Mr. Jolly had a brolly [1]

Its handle was made of silver, and its body was made of gold.

And Mr. Jolly used the brolly when it was very cold.

[1] Brolly is a Brit term for umbrella.

Poem 2:

I climbed up a mountain.

There I saw a fountain.

One, two, three, four, five!

In it I'd like to dive.

Go ahead, laugh. It's meant to be funny and silly.

I'll also mention a few good ones I read in that book:

Into the drinking well

Which the plumber built her.

Aunt Eliza fell.

We must buy a filter.

Old Father William:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William

[2] The book is suitable for kids of all ages:

https://www.google.com/searchq=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+no...

Sorry, typo in that URL. There should be a "?" between the "search" and the "q":

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+n...

That made me laugh so hard. Man. Great site.

>Here is a small sampling of our Services offerings:

>GUID duplication

>Lamp stacking

>Despondency injection

>We're hiring! If you're a best-in-breed, 10x, full-stack rock star, we want to talk to you about joining our "posse". Here's what we're looking for:

>Senior Java Developer - Develop 15-20 Senior Javas per day

Maybe you should try to monetize fake companies instead. You're good at it.

Ineptech CEO Dick Hallerson wishes to apologize for describing the Quality Assurance group as a "necessary evil." Mr. Hallerson did not mean to imply that QA is necessary.

However, I think you just exceeded your hoster's bandwidth quota...(error message when I try to access it).

Back up now, and I broke the path to the silly stock photos, should help keep it up.

Cursing myself for not checking hackernews more often...

Classic. I miss simcopter

Unfortunately, I never managed to find cofounders that were as much motivated as I was - each one I worked with was working on it as a hobby more than anything else, and I usually had to tell them what to do, which was exhausting considering I was the only developer to develop such a big beast. Adding marketing on top of that was just too much. We still applied to Y Combinator with the last cofounder I worked with, but he wasn't really ready to move to another continent for the project and quickly started looking for excuses to drop it. He got one when we ended up not being selected :) We're still friends, but I learned that it's hard finding people to build things.

I'm still extremely proud of this project, tho. Both technically and humanly, I learnt so many things! And the project is still running without needing much maintenance, so I guess it's still a success in some way. Plus, it helped me to find jobs, since people are usually a bit impressed when you can explain to them in interview how gameboys work under the hood ... :)

[1] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15846752/sega-forever-net...

- The userbase cannot grow enough without publisher, because the requirement of asking people to upload their rom is too much complex for most people.

- With no publisher by my side, I fear advertisers will not invest in a platform that is on the grey side of the legality (Start9 is legal, since we clearly state everywhere that only people uploading their own roms can use the service, but some might see this differently). Especially for the low amount of user (cf issue #1).

Everything comes down to publishers ...

The bitter part of this is that some people put together shitty implementations of this concept, but without any vision, any regard for the legality of the project, or even the future of the platform. They just make an html page with a flash emulator, add a bunch of porn and/or blackjack ads on the thing, and call it a day. They certainly bring more money than Start9, and they'll never get shut down by Nintendo ... go figure.

The initial emulators were handmade in Javascript, but the asm.js-compiled ones ended up much faster in practice.

This change effectively made my somewhat useful app almost completely useless, at least in my eyes, because now there's little incentive to self study.

I could have tried harder to market it but I'm glad I left it alone.

Lessons learned: - Politics suck. Any business related to firearms is going to be vulnerable to government regulations. - Money matters. Once you start charging for something, you automatically feel the need to deliver a product of higher caliber. You also get immediate validation on whether or not your idea is worth it and how much it could be worth.

Even knowing that tidbit I forgot on my first read and so thought YOU as the author of the application now needed to take a course.

I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't very helpful to people.

Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing, and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality marketing.

I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time, where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the outcome.

If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.

He's also big in the local Chamber of Commerce and said that lots of Chambers are willing to spend money to position their town as outdoor-friendly.

I'm not trolling here, just in case I've missed a really obvious one

The closest thing I found to something like that was Simbi (https://simbi.com) but I hesitated to make an actual step forward as I never heard or read of anyone going down that route and wasn't sure if that was the "right way" to do it.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/

One thing that doesn't seem quite right though.

Shouldn't location, not activity, be the first bit of information requested from the user?

Yeah, that was the idea -- provide a high quality database of outdoors activities to the end users and then charge the providers / venues a fee for some extended information etc. But in order to even approach the providers / venues I had to have some kind of traction from the end users, which I failed to achieve.

>One thing that doesn't seem quite right though. >Shouldn't location, not activity, be the first bit of information requested from the user?

At the beginning I wasn't sure how to pull off the location filter nicely (should I use HTML5 geolocation, Gmaps geolocation, simple dropdown etc.) and just went without it but I have received this same piece of feedback more than once so I might go and add that, just for kicks.

That and an easy way to add your favorite venue near you (since it looks like there is only one venue in the US outside of CA).

Visually and concept wise it looks interesting. I bet there are outdoor adventure meetups in most cities that would be interested.

It's a plugin to bring gesture-shortcuts to graphic design tools (Sketch, Photoshop, etc.). I've worked on it in bursts of my spare time for a few years, and took a break from development the past several months. At some point I started calling it more of a 'passion project' because I just really wanted to see other forms of UI in the world outside of the sandboxes of gaming, and a hope that it'd maybe serve as some portfolio piece in trying to work as a software developer/designer.

At the moment I'm trying to motivate myself to work on it again, partly because even in a touch-bar age I still find myself using it. Yet at the same time need to figure out how to get it past a beta phase and to a point where I'm more comfortable marketing it.

The hardest thing is trying to find time/motivation, it's easy to endure isolation and keep the day job when you're excited with the product and haven't gotten feedback yet. It gets vastly harder once you start wanting more of a social life again and the numbers so far haven't made it seem like a product worth going full-time on.

Take heed people, this is how you explain a product.

Could sell just 5 of them, still have about 30 in stock, so commercial failure, but at least got two things out of it:

1) Bragging rights about having sold something to large aerospace organisation. 2) Finished something from start to finish.

Solid!

It has since been rewritten in D and is Open Source:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/DMDScript

It's still quite a good scripting engine, if you want to, for example, have scripting in your IDE so users can extend it. JS is a good language for that.

It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year.

I spent about one year of fulltime work (spread over two years). I always tried to expand the product: I started with vineyard management software, then add the production part and then started coding all the CRM, POS and warehouse management. I hoped to attract more users with more complex solution, but I was wrong.

After three years I am still using it daily (I do own winery), but I am only active user right now and I did give up trying to sell it. I do some occasional development, from time to time when I need something in my farm, but thats it.

I first came across this sort of advice here:

The Montana Mogul: RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte (Part 1)

http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/07/31/the-montana-mogul-rig...

Interesting story. RightNow was later sold to Oracle, IIRC, for a good amount.

Greg used a similar technique to what you advise.

In wine business thats quite complex thing: you might want to sell bulk wine, you might blend different stock together or bottle one lot in multiple times. There is strict requirements by govt about declaration of those thing. Each country qlso have different requirements and reporting formats.

Got a few hundred users but no real traction yet :-/

Still 'beta' but you can signup under /signup/ Please share feedback :)

It pays its way, but at a huge cost of time spent on support and maintenance. When non-trivial feature requests come in, we can't feasibly drop everything else for long enough to implement it. We signal this by asking the customer to pay a lot (compared to our SaaS subscription price). Usually this dissuades them.

Every so often, we lose a customer -> support dies down -> we can add some real direction and features to the product -> we gain more customers -> we get swamped under support and maintenance. The cycle continues. I don't know what the solution is.

With spreadsheets, the customer can always fall back to cobbling together a new report or visualization by themselves.

Say you are tracking work done in vineyard, but nothing else. Then your calculation of price of produce is off, because you havent add the price of input. There are multiple roles in the company and they are usualy using they own systems for reporting.

Also quite a lot of production tracking have to be done on paper using special notepad with marked pages (another funny story) and people dont want to do this bookkeeping twice.

It sounds awesome though, as do most of the projects in this thread. I'll be bookmarking it.

More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It's a good base application, but without customers, it's wasted potential and engineering time. Guess I'll add a link: https://kronikl.io

There is an added benefit that I built up a lot of custom Vue components and flask modules which can be added to later projects (braintree painments, address inputs, settings pages, &c.), so I'm not considering it a complete loss.

I've decided to pivot most of my time to a more marketing based approach for the time being and, once customers role in, tailor the solution to their needs.

If you're not averse to the niche scheduling appointments for such people could be an interesting thing to work on. That could cover both men/women working "at home", and those who are going on tours to various cities (something that is pretty common).

Depending on where you're based this might be an immediate non-starter, but I've talked to a lot of people who hate the established publishing platforms, and scheduling is a recurring source of pain I hear about.

The basic pitch you described here sounds good, but compare your homepage with others in a related space: https://youcanbook.me/ or calendly.com/ or https://clarity.fm/

The first thing I did is go to the page to see if what it does. I know what it claims to do, but the actual mechanics matter.

And then I want to know how much it costs.

Without those two, I might as well use a competitor that lets me see what it does and for how much.

I think there's a lot of professional services that could use it, say photographers, psychologists, etc.

That said, I could see a service where experts (think node.js and others) could put a badge on their blog site and answer questions for an hour while getting paid for it. That would be something I might use if I can get an hour of an experts time (even if it cost me $50-$100) to get some information from an expert. So instead of me taking 8 hours to learn information, I can learn that info in 1 hour. It seems like a bargain.

Setup a customised website/landing page directly targeted at these people from your home town and try to get their attention and feedback. Be polite but determined: send an email, call over the phone and meetup.

Selling a generic product nobody knows is hard, so try to become #1 in your vicinity for a certain niche, and make sure all your marketing material is focused on that niche. Once you're the reference in that niche expand vertically or horizontally. Repeat ad infinitum. Combine your outbound marketing with proper inbound marketing, and after a while you'll gain traction and leads will start dripping in slowly but consistent.

Don't offer free trails, but tell them they can get your product at a reduced rate forever. Free customers are hard to convert to paying customers, so charge them something (even if it's peanuts). You can always upsell later.

Gradually increase your prices for your new customers as you expand your market. Keep old customers at their old price; it will take them feel special and reduce churn. At the perfect price point people will complain it's too expensive, but buy anyway.

After you've done this (I'd assume it will take anywhere from 6 months to a year) you will probably already have a long term vision in how to proceed.

I think it's an excellent idea, you just need to narrow down your market and update the design accordingly. Doctors, hairdressers, physios... lots of people are looking for something like this.

Make an embeddable plugin version for WordPress and physically go shop it around to potential customers. Show them and get feedback.

I'd suggest putting the app right on the homepage, so that people can set it up immediately, like this popular group scheduling app: http://doodle.com/

I think my main problem is that I create solutions that are great for my problems.

Flaming Notes[0] - iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Web game to learn music notation. Total revenue: 10 USD over 2 years.

MelloNote[1] - Android app to sync audio files with text (lyrics, guitar chords, etc). Think 4-track subtitles that can be used by a band. Earnings: 6 USD in 1 year.

Tasktopus[2] - Desktop kanban app (Windows, Mac and Linux). Earnings: 500 USD in 1 year.

See N Tell[3] - A web-based sentence construction game to help 5-10 year-olds to learn words via images from Google Image Search. Earnings: 0

[0]: http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adhyet.mel...

[2]: https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus

[3]: https://seentell.me

Update: he loved it and wanted to keep playing - "I want to do more! I like the music!"

Update:

Glad he liked it :-) Now I have 2 satisfied customers.

BTW, you can create your own custom lesson plan by clicking the Settings button. That will take you to https://seentell.me/settings.

Do let me know how your son likes it.

It's been pretty successful usage wise, but paying users are another matter entirely. Donations and account upgrades keep the lights on, barely covering the hosting costs of the main collocated front-end server, but lack of funds is a constant struggle. I've spent tens of thousands over the years on hardware and hosting costs, and expenses keep going up as coverage expands. As for why, I guess there's just not enough of a reason to upgrade at the moment. Free is hard to beat, I'm my own best competitor.

The site's current design is basic to say the least, and the account creation page does not leave users feeling especially comfortable about the site. Everything about everything needs polish.

Related to that, I'm almost finished with a redesigned and much nicer looking front-end, but that probably won't magically solve all my problems. ;)

thumbs up

* Spent 2 months building it - much longer than I'd thought. The work required to get from a prototype (2 days) to a SaaS product (2 months) was way bigger that I'd thought. So much polish, and so many edge cases to consider when the client goes from "you" to "anyone else". Lesson: building something for other people takes a lot longer than building something for yourself.

* Tried to launch on Hacker News but failed to get any attention. Our blog post on "10 years of Rubysec data analysed" never made it off the "newest" page, despite being pretty solid content (spent two days building a Jupyter Notebook so anyone could replicate our results, etc.). Was a big psychological hit at the time. Lesson: there's lots of randomness in launches - don't rely on them to much.

* Thought GitHub Marketplace would list us and help with distribution, but it's been extremely hard to persuade them to. The jury is still out on this one, but they (understandably) want us to have lots of users before they invest in even assessing the app. Lesson: don't rely on the goodwill of third parties - unless you've got something they want/need, you'll be stumped if they decide they're not interested.

I haven't given up yet, and I still really believe in the product, but it's been a much harder journey than expected! Marketing has been by far the toughest part, and I don't have a solution to it yet.

Regarding the marketing part: if my own start-up learned me anything, it's that great marketing can launch a mediocre product, but if you have mediocre marketing, your product will need to be extremely good to gain any traction.

TL;DR: business requires hard work, and shortcuts usually don't work. Outliers and survivorship bias apply to the posts that claim otherwise.

What is the tech stack?

Does it cost much to keep it running?

Adding new languages is as easy as the package manager makes it... which is normally still quite hard! The core logic for Dependabot is open-source here, including all the language-specific logic for Ruby, JS and PHP, and a starter (lots of work still required) for Python: https://github.com/gocardless/bump-core.

For the app itself, we used Ruby (because we'd built the original core gem, which was https://github.com/gocardless/bump, in Ruby at a work hackathon years ago).

Costs under £50 a month to keep running at the moment, creating about 2,000 PRs a month. We could really do with getting it into the GitHub marketplace so we can start charging people and cover those costs!

Jessica Livingston says it better than me: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-startups-need-to-foc...

Great link, and I totally agree with that lesson. Side project feels like a good way to have learnt it!

We wrote a blog post about it here: https://dependabot.com/blog/the-latest-dependency-version-is...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cat-game-aquarium/id56449037...

I've had this iPad app up and running for about 4 and a half years - I don't think I've broken even yet on the amount I paid an artist for the graphics for the app. I did the coding for it myself.

RobotBridge PDF Conversion as a service (API)

https://market.mashape.com/jefflinwood/robotbridge-pdf-conve...

This service is pretty straightforward, and has users, but doesn't really cover the server costs. On my list of things to do is to switch it from PhantomJS to headless Chrome, and then to migrate the server.

The idea, I think, is sound. I worked on the system for over a year, and there are many interesting ideas. The big problem is that it took way more resources to launch than I could ever do alone. I would need sales, support, sysadmin, developers, designers, etc. Everyone calls it my billion-dollar idea, but I truly couldn't and can't do it alone.

The lesson learned is, think big, but not so big you can't handle the work-load. If you are working every day and falling behind two days, the side project is far too large.

https://github.com/dt1/itemhut

I built it because of a need and it's worked fabulously. It's hands down doubled my monthly affiliate revenue (i.e. to be clear, that's in the 4 figures).

I think where it failed however is that it's really hard to explain and I sure haven't cracked it. I get a few signups a day, few use it at all.

It's not for everyone - but it definitely works for me and it would work for anyone in the same boat (someone who needs to affiliatize hundreds/thousands of outgoing links)

It took me a little while to understand what Clickrouter does. The very first line, "Monetize Outbound Clicks", contributed a lot to my confusion. It made me think that maybe you were just a frontend to e.g. Amazon's affiliate program.

It was only when I read Step 4 of "How's it work" that I understood what it did: "Watch ClickRouter route each click to your best (i.e. most profitable) merchant network every time !"

I would've been much happier if the very first line was something like "Maximise your revenue by automatically using the best affiliate links."

Straight away I know _why_ I should be interested in your product, and how it works.

Will for sure give this a shot.

I suppose people in the affiliate game would already know this stuff, but there's a lot of dumb people like me who might see it as a way to get into affiliate stuff easily.

I make ~$50 a month right now with it, which is enough to cover the hosting. I haven't really marketed it much beyond my twitter circle of friends but hopefully others will find it useful.

It took about 3 weekends worth of work to complete and is based on Laravel Spark.

Some suggestions (only because I really want you to succeed!):

- Please consider the use case where I want to protect against a domain having its nameservers changed at the registrar. I don't think you currently handle that case, as e.g. pulling the NS records from Route53 will always show Route53 as the authoritative NS, which may not match what the registrar says. This is actually the main feature I want.

- I couldn't find docs or advice regarding how alerting or notifications work. I don't even know if I will receive alerts.

- Please support "plain" DNS-based checks. As in, ability to add a zone and add a number of records (e.g. MX) that I want checked and it is done via DNS protocol query to the authoritative NS.

- Fix the "flash of not-yet-parsed-by-Angular content" that appears on the signup page, it's pretty jarring on a medium latency connection

- For the credit card form, I had some misgivings about putting my details in until I dove into the HTML of the page to check that you weren't sending the card details to your own server. Maybe add a "powered by Stripe" icon or something.

They can also make good money if you set the boundaries right. If a lot of your customers have ~30 domains, a boundary at 25 might make you more money than per-domain pricing.

I would also look to see if you can add failover as a feature. With the recent DDOS attacks against DNS providers, a lot of companies are considering failover planning for DNS who previously ignored that. To really hit big bucks with this, you will need to integrate with bigger DNS providers like Dyn, UltraDNS, etc.

I agree that you're not charging enough. Keep the free level but then I would charge at least a dollar per domain.

In 2010-11, I worked on lug-it.com to let people carry stuff in their luggage for others. It leveraged FB's social graph to engender trust. I just wasn't ready to market and grow the user base because my cofounder decided that he was going to be the "vision" guy and I was going to do all the work.

I launched a couple of iOS apps one of which got thousands of downloads in a month but since it was very niche (BLE/iBeacon related), I stopped working on it.

There is no possible way that could go wrong. Especially when TSA or Customs asks: "Are you carrying anything for someone else?"

Then you go on to explain, "Oh yeah, I am, but I know them. They are paying me to do it."

In fact, I often carry stuff for my compatriot coworkers and friends to/from the home country. This was just a more regularized and systematized version of that.

All said and done, you're right - even my cofounder and I felt a little uncomfortable being mules for others even if the item being sent was totally innocent.

The one and only delivery we made successfully was from Toronto to London via New York for the then CIO of British Telecom. He loved the idea so much that he covered it here http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/12/02/hauling-bits-around... on his blog.

:-) This happens more often than not. All the success and visibility, but none of the work.

When the standard was released 2.5 years ago I figured that exacting security code against an unevenly documented API was worth paying for, but nobody understood what 2FA was, why SMS is garbage for 2FA, that you could now get devices for a couple bucks that would work on dozens of sites while respecting your privacy, etc.

I spent about a month coding and tried to sell it for a couple months, but I simply didn't have the resources to try to do all the education needed. I put it on the shelf.

But this spring I've gotten a couple inquiries about updating it to Rails 5.0 and 5.1, so I guess the knowledge is getting out there. I did another survey and there are still no drop-in libraries for the languages I'm comfortable in (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP) - either they require a lot of fiddly customization or they're half-finished hobby attempts.

I'm considering updating the gem, automating the license purchasing, taking steps to enforce the dual-license, and seeing how it does.

I am trying to visualise all of world's knowledge with interactive mind maps focused on learning anything in a linear way.

Here is the search engine that searches all of these interactive maps : https://learn-anything.xyz/

Both the search engine and the maps are open source so I am not so sure how and if I can ever make money from this aside from the Patreon page that we have set up for the project.

If anyone has any ideas on how one can monetise this in a good way, I would love to hear it. We don't want to put any sponsored content in there as that would defeat our vision of having most quality resources available for all subjects.

Sell subscriptions to companies? Companies generally like to pay for services, even if the underlying software is open source.

how do you generate the maps? maybe you can sell that to companies so they can index their internal documentation into mind maps

I think the biggest issue is marketing. I tried a few Twitter/Facebook ad campaigns that didn't really pan out, and an HN submission that didn't make the front page. But really I haven't done much to market it, and it just sits there chugging along with few users other than myself while I work on other stuff.

Sure you can market with sweat equity. Forums, Show HN, Product Hunt, etc but to get real money you often have to advertise. And advertising is not cheap.

I do actually have a product in this category but I don't want to post it with a throw away account.

I am a marketer and at times I have ideas (for websites or apps) that I would like to get built, but since I have to pay for that and since not all ideas are going to be winners it can become an expensive proposition.

Although threads like this can be valuable since I can reach out to developers who have created a product that I see addressing a real need in the market and reach out to them to see if there is any scope to work together, but these are few and far between.

Hey, you don't have any contact info in your profile, but if you'd like to get in touch I'd be keen to have a chat, my email is eli@ux-app.com

I use a throw away account because it gives me the freedom to discuss things openly without being judged based on my real world reputation or which company I work for.

My thought was to throw it away initially but I have so much karma on this account I can't bare to part with it.

Building the adaptive test system for use on the Internet was a great learning experience that felt a bit like a capstone project for a masters program. The two main challenges for monetizing it: 1. Finding a market beyond the small autism research field. 2. Contracts. Since the test was oriented to autism, many of the potential customers were hospitals and universities with the former requiring liability clauses that were perpetual (such as addressing problems from a drug trial 20 years down the road), and the latter requiring a free license to all background IP so that their research could build on any results without any possibility of infringement. Even with the help of a lawyer I was not able to reach agreements under these circumstances. I am still unsure if it is better to have a set terms of use or leave the door open for negotiation with potential customers.

I am still pleased having spent the time as the amount of personal and professional growth has been great. http://hrs-mat.com

Made $10 over the ~8 years it was up...from one donation. Yey.

I agree with your assessment of the potential and hope to work on this idea. If you are interested in focusing on the collector, let me know.

What would you do differently if you were going to do it again?

We tried selling the data (amazing data if you think about it!!). Anonymous of course! And/or selling the recommendations (easy enough since everything was organized by UPC/ISBN). But that's something it seems like you need to know people -- CEO's/CTO's of bigger companies. We just didn't have the connections, nor the personalities to kiss that much ass. But we tried for several years. I think they're all of the mindset that they've got "good enough" data on their own...or two guys in their garage are too small peanuts to trust. It's funny that just this week Amazon had a post here about it's 20th year of recommendation engine, ~yey~ -- and they still can't get it right (sour grapes? yeah...).

If we were to do it again, we'd probably focus on core functions (the site did A LOT). And seriously work on marketing aspects. Not dark patterns (https://darkpatterns.org/) but more organized and focused efforts.

Honestly though, if we did it again, it would not be for the money - it would be for a cool product and for our own fun...maybe integrate with Kodi...

We'd be smarter on hosting. We were at Rackspace first for $30k/mo...then realized we were being hoodwinked and found PEER1 for $1200/mo...then realized we could get away with a $300/mo DO droplet by converting everything to open source and optimizing -- granted over the course of the 8-10 years, tech improved. But, no more MSSQL, no paid search engine (we ended up on Solr -- AMAZING!), no Windows and just all open-source. I ran our recommendation engine on my computers at home and uploaded results from there. As with hosting, I think the open source stack has improved a lot.

Smarter on who we hire for PR - I got all our serious PR (Mashable, LifeHacker, Makeuseof, etc). We spend about $30k on snake-oil PR companies. Our first PR company took $20k and literally did nothing (not even a press release blast or PDF) - but suing would cost us way too much time/money so we ate it and went to another referral - who did the job, but it ended up more or less a pointless exercise.

After all that time, going into personal debt -- with creditors calling at all hours, no income in sight, thousands of hours devoted to it, alienating friends and family borrowing from them to survive, we finally decided to call it quits.

I attempted two other web apps which also had dismal results, before my fourth (current) one, which is doing great and getting better.

Since writing that blog post, that particular web app (which is still running BTW) has had a handful of users sign up and is generating around $40-$50 per month. It covers the AWS cost, and lets me buy a beer every month, so I figure I will just let it tick along... :D

Feel free to ping me to reply to this thread if you want any more information, but the (somewhat long) blog post pretty much explains it all.

[0] - https://medium.com/@dsabar/the-zero-dollar-web-app-8886bf4ae...

My current SaaS app that is actually doing well and making money (and just hit profitability) is www.hrpartner.io

I blog about some aspects of it at http://devan.blaze.com.au amongst other things. One day I will sit down and construct a full post on that particular journey, but I am afraid that survivorship bias might take over and I will forget some of the hard stuff that happened...

The site is janky AF because I'm still in the neophyte stages of front-end/css. I do still think it's a good a idea, so I'm planning a revamp of the sales site in time for a big push at the holidays.

Then I thought I'd want to exclude the middle of the night (don't want to give people heart attacks thinking somebody died). Then I thought of excluding the work day (who wants to sign up for a service that will randomly call them in the middle of meeting?). Finally I decided it would be easier to set a specific time.

Maybe you're right though. Maybe the angle of "we'll keep trying until we find a good time for both of you" would sell better.

You could of course go the other way and just do this without the user choosing anytime at all. When they register to send their mother flowers record their number and their mother’s from the delivery details and then just set up the “blind date” without letting them know. Each will think the other called them first.

Lets people send checks in the mail from their bank account. Also lets you send photos you take as documents in the mail or via fax.

Mostly it was built for fun, to play around with Ionic, and to occupy spare cycles in between client projects. But hoped it would make some money.

So far, just has a few random users.

The main problem is that it's a pain in the ass to get bank accounts verified. You have to wait to confirm test deposits into your bank account, and, by that point, most people churn. Considered adding Plaid to get around that and do instant bank verifications, but it was too expensive to make it worth it from a user perspective.

Recently started thinking it might be fun to make a web version that lets users pay with cryptocurrency.

Its an experience I've seen a lot. You think if you create a great product and advertise a little it will go viral - but in reality getting people to use it in the beginning is the hard part.

Next time I'll try to build the community before the product. Spend more time on marketing and less on coding.

Plus I think selling to developers sucks, esp now so much free and open source stuff around. Non-tech Users are probably better customers.

I actually managed to get some traffic and ad revenue ($100< a month) when I first developed it and got it into the Google web app store and was featured for a little bit. I think there where quite a few bugs that I ignored and I stopped work on it for a long while.

I continue to try and improve on it, but it rarely gets the bulk of my free time.

Its been difficult for me to get _any_ feedback on it, so I bounce back and forth between feeling like its a worthwhile venture or its just a pet project that is useful to nobody but me.

Not as bad on mobile because it's so thin, but on a desktop with wide screen it is not ok.

I don't usually bikeshed on layout (not a graphic designer), but I am begging you please.

Sounds like I am doing it wrong though :) thanks for the feedback

I figured Google would kill FB soon enough, the writing was on the wall: killed Adsense integration, broken stats, halted development, disabled new cnames for a while, disbanded the team, etc.

I liked to think even one big client from FB (cough CNN cough) switching over after Google finally killed the plug would be worth it. They never did. It's been years now and FB still languishes neglected, but it seems that it is fated to die by attrition and nothing more.

[0]: http://feedsnap.com/

I decided to do it after seeing a total lack of decent workout trackers that work well on mobile and provide a web interface.

It's made using React, Redux and I don't expect it to make any money :)

However, I think that for data entry it is good to go. There will be some improvements there as well like for e.g. better superset indication and allowing copying workouts.

I'm also very happy to get feedback so don't feel shy.

Cheers!

I got a mentor, and we pushed me to try to put out any kind of product for the... 2012? election, so I figured out a neat way to make word clouds of the legislation written by a person; I figured it'd be a decent bad way to find out what topics they're active about. I put it up as an IndieGoGo, and had some fun with friends and family exploring the database, seeing what interesting statistics we could pull out. Made maybe a grand from 3-10 donors.

Ultimately, as far as I could get as a one-man team, I couldn't actually take it anywhere solo. Theoretically, one can, with all the tools that are out and about - but I'd run into the motivation / momentum issue. Carrying an entire thing on just your own shoulders doesn't work out very well.

I spent a year-ish building it off-and-on, starting as a side project during the last couple months of regular employment; but I also skipped the country to hitch-hike for three months, and otherwise didn't dedicate myself to it like a real job while I was unemployed and "trying" to make it work.

However, I basically taught myself web-dev / RoR in order to do it, and now I'm a nearly-senior RoR dev, so that all worked out pretty well in the end!

--

About a year ago, I started making a little mindfulness widget. You'd sign up on the website, give it your phone number, and it'd text you mindfulness questions throughout the day.

Currently, I'm working on what's basically dependency management for cosmetic ingredients (cosmetics are made of stuff that's made of stuff and you need a breakdown at that 2nd level), specifically for a friend who's a chemical process engineer and needs more than spreadsheets can deliver. This one I'm doing properly as a side-project, rather than trying to do it "full-time".

--

The big take away from these for me is: Have a team before you try to make it more than a side-project. Doesn't have to be other programmers - it can be you and a "primary customer" - but you need other people to share the emotional burden of keeping momentum.

It got a little attention, but the biggest surge was when I created a text editor inside of it that rendered to a texture, rather than using CSS3D transforms of existing, content-editable text editor components like a few other demos had done. I called the text editor Primrose, but people seemed to respond to that branding better than Psychologists, and nobody seemed interested in a myriad of small components, just a single, integrated solution, so I sunk the text editor into the framework, rebranded everything as just Primrose, and spent a ton of time writing a website and basic documentation.

I've been trying to build a business around VR ever since. First, I tried to sell the framework. Made $10 on one license sale. I tried consulting services. Made about $2000 for a company I had joined that pledged to sponsor my development and do marketing and sales for me. I tried building a WebRTC teleconferencing app, but couldn't get enough focus from the company to push it well. After a year of no movement from the sales team, I'm back to being on my own now and back to trying to figure out my own path.

I think the teleconferencing app idea still has merit, and I have a few other idea that have some potential, but I don't really know anything about marketing and selling SaaS. So I guess that is my next project, to learn.

https://www.primrosevr.com

https://www.handsfreechrome.com/

Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

Judging from my five minute test drive, you could probably increase adoption if you made it 'discoverable'. It's hard to determine what to do once it's installed. Turns out, you have to click the browser action to start listening for user input. After that, you have to refer to the website to find out what commands are available. It would be great if there were on-screen suggestions of commands to voice. Using it was really frustrating and unreliable until I read the instructions on the web store page to disable 'ambient noise reduction' on macs. Showing an 'instructions' page on installation would help a lot. An instructional video would be great too.

Other nitpicks: * I couldn't get dictation to work. * More tab manipulation commands would be nice * I'm not a huge fan of the link hints placement and styling

I'm actually developing my own keybinding extension like Vimium/cVim/VimFx/Surfing Keys

https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key

with the intent to use the codebase to later create a voice commands extension like yours.

After all the work I've put into my extension, I can see why only $10 in donations for your efforts is disheartening. Good luck!

I think adding an instructions page + video would be great, I agree.

I'm surprised you couldn't get dictation to work. That distresses me. Much time went into that. The link placement is rather tricky, and I'm not sure what type of styling would be less obtrusive and equally readable.

Windows has built-in speech control that lets you scroll and click, doesn't it?

1> After uploading all sides of a greeting card, use some animation/visualization that will allow you to interact with a single card by clicking/swiping.

2> Allow this to be embedded into FB/Twitter

3> Make the service free - the most likely monetisation will be advertising, so it's all about MAU

First launched free around 2012 I think. Then there was a relaunch where we tried to go subscriber-based. At the time, the only online payment options were Paypal (shudder) and Amazon (a mess to configure). The subscription model flopped, so we relaunched free again.

We have a very small set of very rabid fans, but have had difficulty explaining this thing to potential users. Fortunately the Digital Ocean hosting is cheap enough that we can just leave it running on autopilot. (the old AWS hosting was a money pit)

While connecting from up-to-date chrome on win10 desktop!! You are probably weeding out a good chunk of users for no reason.