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Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#141

Post by coolmitch »

pcarmichael wrote: post #140

A bit over five years ago I posted an 'Ask HN' ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123 ) for my side project PCPartPicker ( http://pcpartpicker.com ). I received great advice and many feature requests that would later get implemented. A few years after that post I left my job to work on PCPartPicker full-time. Then a year later I hired my first employee. Now we're a larger team working toward expansion. The fe…

Used it last month to build a new gaming pc -- amazing site. I was really impressed with the amount of useful data you guys have managed to collect, and the thoughtful UX. I've recommended it to several friends since then. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#142

Post by pcarmichael »

coolmitch wrote: post #141
pcarmichael wrote: post #140

A bit over five years ago I posted an 'Ask HN' ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123 ) for my side project PCPartPicker ( http://pcpartpicker.com ). I received great advice and many feature requests that would later get implemented. A few years after that post I left my job to work on PCPartPicker full-time. Then a year later I hired my first employee. Now we're a larger team working toward expansion. The fe…

Used it last month to build a new gaming pc -- amazing site. I was really impressed with the amount of useful data you guys have managed to collect, and the thoughtful UX. I've recommended it to several friends since then. Thanks!

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#143

Post by phoboslab »

Almost 6 years ago I posted my HTML5 Game "Biolab Disaster"[1] and my JavaScript Game Engine "Impact"[2] here.

I have sold about 6000 licenses of the Game Engine since.

Impact was my bachelor thesis and I wanted to release it as open source initially. However, after I finished university I poured a whole lot of time into polishing and documenting it, so I thought "what the hell, I'm going to try to sell it". Surprisingly it worked. Impact pretty much financed all the other projects I've been working on since.

I believe I was at the right place at the right time. Apple just announced that they won't support Flash on iOS and Impact was one of the very few solutions to make (substantial) games in HTML5.

Impact has only received minor updates since its launch. I tried to start with a fresh new version a number of times, but always stopped short - I felt like I couldn't deliver anything worthy of the high expectations people had. Sales have died down slowly over the last two years, partly because Impact is somewhat outdated now and makes some things more complicated than neccessary and partly because there are now very strong Open and Closed Source alternatives in this space.

At the beginning of this year, I finally found some new perspective on what a "Impact 2.0" should deliver and most importantly, the motivation to implement it. It's currently my favorite project to work on. It's a complete rewrite. Simplifying everything with the insights I gathered over the past few years is humbling, but I love it.

My plan is to have 2.0 ready at the end of the year. I'll probably publish Impact 1.0 under GPL then.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686572

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779632

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#144

Post by frakkingcylons »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #97

1059 days ago, my buddy posted our project (Show HN: An open-source media hosting service that's anonymous and fast https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397 ). It's been dead over a year now, we got to the point where we had to pay for server upgrades and realized that donations hadn't improved, ad revenue was shit, and we couldn't justify paying more out of our own pockets to maintain it. 322 days ago, I posted…

Which ad networks did you use/consider?

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#145

Post by WA »

phoboslab wrote: post #143

Almost 6 years ago I posted my HTML5 Game "Biolab Disaster"[1] and my JavaScript Game Engine "Impact"[2] here. I have sold about 6000 licenses of the Game Engine since. Impact was my bachelor thesis and I wanted to release it as open source initially. However, after I finished university I poured a whole lot of time into polishing and documenting it, so I thought "what the hell, I'm going to try to sell it". Surprisi…

Thanks for sharing. I always wanted to ask you: do you also work a normal job or is Impact your main source of income?

Also, I'm excited for Impact 2.0

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#146

Post by elliotec »

pcarmichael wrote: post #140

A bit over five years ago I posted an 'Ask HN' ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123 ) for my side project PCPartPicker ( http://pcpartpicker.com ). I received great advice and many feature requests that would later get implemented. A few years after that post I left my job to work on PCPartPicker full-time. Then a year later I hired my first employee. Now we're a larger team working toward expansion. The fe…

Absolutely LOVE PCPartPicker. Honestly don't know what I'd have done without it. I think I was one of the first users and watching it grow to what it is now was amazing. Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#147

Post by rgbrgb »

Shitty Listings helped us find a lot of great repeat investor buyers. We actually (probably because of the gimmicky name) got more traffic from Shitty Listings than the launch of Open Listings proper and ended up tying it into our main product -- you can now get a Shitty Feed (tm;) on openlistings.com to see only fixers.

http://www.shittylistings.com/

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#148

Post by chipperyman573 »

pcarmichael wrote: post #140

A bit over five years ago I posted an 'Ask HN' ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123 ) for my side project PCPartPicker ( http://pcpartpicker.com ). I received great advice and many feature requests that would later get implemented. A few years after that post I left my job to work on PCPartPicker full-time. Then a year later I hired my first employee. Now we're a larger team working toward expansion. The fe…

Out of curiosity, how does PCPP make enough money to hire two full-time devs? Is the ad revenue really enough?

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#149

Post by callmevlad »

A little over 3 years ago, my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499), which was just a proof-of-concept / experiment.

At the time, we had been working on Webflow day and night for 6 months with no other income coming in, we had gotten rejected from YC a few months before, I was over $50K in credit (and medical) debt, and the Show HN was our last-ditch effort to get some traction before going back to our jobs.

The post did really well - we had the #1 position for most of the day, got over 500 upvotes, and in the resulting days over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list. This gave us the confidence to keep going and helped us get into YC for the next batch.

Since then, Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has grown into a profitable business with 400K+ users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and 25 employees (also all over the world). I'm not sure any of this would have happened if the Show HN would not have taken off the way it did.

TLDR: A+, would post again ;)

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#150

Post by phoboslab »

WA wrote: post #145
phoboslab wrote: post #143

Almost 6 years ago I posted my HTML5 Game "Biolab Disaster"[1] and my JavaScript Game Engine "Impact"[2] here. I have sold about 6000 licenses of the Game Engine since. Impact was my bachelor thesis and I wanted to release it as open source initially. However, after I finished university I poured a whole lot of time into polishing and documenting it, so I thought "what the hell, I'm going to try to sell it". Surprisi…

Thanks for sharing. I always wanted to ask you: do you also work a normal job or is Impact your main source of income? Also, I'm excited for Impact 2.0

I'm self employed. Some of my projects (mostly Ejecta[1] and jsmpeg[2]) spawned a lot of contract and consulting work lately. I'm also selling licenses for my games[3] so other gaming sites can host them and the AdSense banner on ZType[4] provided an impressively stable ~$500/mo for the past few years.

[1] https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta

[2] https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg

[3] http://phoboslab.org/#games

[4] http://zty.pe/

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