191–200 of 476 posts
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.
I made Word Nazi, which is essentially just a dirty version of Taboo (in the same way that Cards Against Humanity is a dirty version of Apples to Apples) in app form. 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 those checking out the ineptech site, please don't miss the poetry compiler joke! It's the bit I'm the most proud of. It's in an unlinkable modal so actually I'll just paste it here: 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 (You may have figured out t…
I wrote, edited, and published-as-EPUB an entire fiction novel. It made about $22, before taxes. I then decided not to bother publishing it in print, due to obvious lack of demand. It didn't really cost me anything but my leisure time, though. I'm still working on a second one (but I don't feel quite so motivated to finish it in a timely fashion). If I cared at all about making money off of it, I'd have to hire someo…
Is the novel still available?
If you can figure out who I really am on your own, go right ahead and read the book, but there's no way I can tell you exactly how to find it without spoiling one of my principles for this forum.
I made an Android Wear game. I did not think my first game would make money, but I thought if I learned how to do it I could make other games that could generate revenue. In my opinion the install base is too small and the price point for games is too low for it to be a good business for me. I spent $300 on a watch, everything else was free. I learned a lot and it was fun, so I will continue to update the program. ht…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should consider integrating this visualization in a few third party applications with a significant database component. 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.…
> Easy to comprehend visualization of business data is a lot more valuable than visualization of internal program data structures 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 dev…
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.
It never had a real monetization strategy, so I never made any money from it. But it was fun developing and I learned a few things I could use for my current product https://info-beamer.com. So it's still a win.
I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak of. It pays for itself.
It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they didn't all see the value in it.
Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR and not much churn.
Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/- a few dollars. I think I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.
I made some mistakes:
1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a workaholic.
2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our personal relationship.
3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred folks.
I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not breaking it somehow in that time.
I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.
I built Thrail ( https://thrail.io ) 6 months ago wanting to solve my own difficulty to find and book quality outdoors activities in a certain area, especially when coming to a new place (tourism or recent relocation). 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 m…
Marketing is hard. Is there some kind of service out there where marketers will help you sell your app for a share of revenue? I'm not trolling here, just in case I've missed a really obvious one
https://www.gigalixir.com is a platform-as-a-service for Elixir apps. It only just launched a few months ago, but so far hasn't generated a profit. I spent 6 months building it and still hope it may take off as Elixir gains in popularity.
I had the idea to do the same thing dedicated to Django. I eventually stopped as I realized that I clearly underestimated the amount of work required to make it work better than Heroku. The landing page is still visible at https://prodmatic.com