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 g…
Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
221–230 of 286 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#222https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886337
I originally built Radio Silence as a Cocoa practice project. This spring, I rewrote it from scratch with all the lessons learned along the way. Now it generates enough income that I was able to quit my day job a month ago. Cool beans.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP is an engineer at Google: http://www.ianww.com/
Talk about biting the hand that feeds ;-)
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#224Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#225I designed a new name generation software called namebird: http://shobia.com/namebird It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces) It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return wha…
I used several similar name generators recently and they all sucked each on its own way, but this one rocks.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#226A 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 g…
Webflow is.... absolutely amazing. I'd love to hear about how you guys built it - e.g. tech stack? challenges? :) Great work!
At first (in late 2012), we tried every single frontend framework available - including Backbone, Angular, Spine, and SproutCore (which ended up becoming Ember) - but they were all too slow for what we were doing. React wasn't yet a thing, and the only library that we found that worked fast enough was Knockout.js, so we went with that in the early days.
Since then, we've refactored 90%+ of the app (which is now approaching a million lines of code) to React/Flux/Immutable.js, with the remaining 10% not far behind.
The rest of the stack is nearly 99.9% JavaScript - including Node/Express/Mongo/Mongoose/Redis/nginx+more on the backend side of things.
We're hoping to post a lot more about our full stack in the future, especially since we're rolling out our dynamic website hosting stack worldwide (there's a lot of interesting S3/Lambda/CloudFront/Fastly goodies in there).
The biggest challenge is probably dealing with the huge array of different sites that people build, which range from small one-page marketing sites to huge 1000+ page dynamic web apps. Since Webflow is not template-based (like Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, etc) but rather allows designers to build up a site from scratch (including defining their own DOM nodes and CSS classes), we have to create JSON-based abstractions that need to work in a backwards-compatible way even as we add new features to Webflow.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#227A 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 g…
What sort of advantage/features do you provide over something like wix.com?
Webflow is a much more professional tool targeted at web designers, freelancers, and agencies who create custom responsive websites, usually from scratch (or from a professional template as a starting point). That is, people who create websites for others. To be successful with Webflow, our users need to think somewhat like a developer (e.g. understand the box model, understand how CSS works in principle, etc), so the learning curve is a bit steeper.
For example, everything you see on https://webflow.com/ is built visually in Webflow and deployed to staging and production by non-engineers. There's a full database there with over 20 tables representing different content types, with a complex schema (e.g. blog posts, case studies, testimonials, job posts, templates, tags, etc), all the pages are custom responsive layouts - and all this was created without writing code.
None of this would be possible with Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc - since those are limited to their available templates. Most of the sites created in Webflow (see https://webflow.com/discover/popular for some examples) can only be recreated in Webflow or by writing code by hand, no other visual "WYSIWYG" builder comes even close.
You can think of Webflow as a much more evolved Dreamweaver, or a purely visual next-generation WordPress - minus all the code :)
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#228A 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 g…
I have used webflow to start my own business. Second year into it. I guess in addition to Vlad I also owe thanks to HN!
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#229In 2012 I did a show HN for GitLab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 It didn't trend so I started baking pancakes. When I checked my phone I saw that it got on the HN homepage and comments were flooding in. I asked my then girlfriend (now wife) to take over the baking and started responding. I ended up eating the pancakes behind my computer :) Hundreds of people signed up for the beta. In 2013 the auth…
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did Google dislike the .it domain because it wasn't obviously connected to Italy, or was there something else? Nice project by the way, I saw it for the first time on the last "Who's Hiring" thread.
Most ccTLDs are heavily weighted by Google in favour of their locale, in practice this means if you use a ccTLD you can expect to suffer from a ranking penalty outside of the ccTLDs locale. If you use a .it domain you can expect to rank well in Italy but to rank poorly in the United States. The exception to this rule are "generic" ccTLDs, Google has a number of generic ccTLDs, these are ccTLDs that they will treat as…
We use a .st domain, and whilst it is not explicitly mentioned on Googles generic list there are very few localized .st sites so I am hoping Google is counting it as a generic domain.
Note most of our users are in the US!