351–360 of 476 posts
Last year, on college, I started working on a bot to consistently win money in daily fantasy basketball. I think I went negative before I paused working on it.
Can you explain how your bot worked from a technical perspective? And/or what did you learn from the whole experience
I wrote a javascript compiler. At the time (2000), it was twice as fast as Microsoft's and 20 times faster than Netscape's. I was correct in anticipating that js speed would become very important, but my implementation was ahead of its time and didn't get any traction. It has since been rewritten in D and is Open Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/DMDScript
Is it still compliant to the EcmaScript spec? Whats the latest spec it is compliant to? And how fast is it now compared to V8, etc...
We managed to sign up some doctors and got a few users to consult via the platform but ended up closing down the project eventually, mostly due to lack of traction and avenues for differentiation.
Lessons learned: - Do proper user research before starting to code - 'Better customer service' is not really an advantage unless you know how to spread the word and/or are willing to spend years on your product
My idea was simple: When you are at some party/pub, there is always some friend which wants to go home and everybody is trying to convince them, that they should have one more drink. So, I have created http://morebeer.today and http://morewine.today . It's easy reaction time test where it's very easy to pass. They never got popular enough to be worth adding some ads there.
To own a firearm in Canada you have to pass a certain test. I made a simple quiz app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca2.testprojec... ) that would help people prepare for that test. My main goal was to learn how to make apps. It did generate revenue in the beginning but it was enough to buy coffee a few times a week. Then the government updated the firearm regulations and now everyone has to take a m…
* 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.
I built Dependabot ( https://dependabot.com ), a service that checks your dependencies are up-to-date every morning and creates pull requests for you if they're not. Intention was to make dependency management suck less, whilst also adding a bit of runway to a bigger startup I wanted to do. * Spent 2 months building it - much longer than I'd thought. The work required to get from a prototype (2 days) to a SaaS produc…
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.
I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for 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…
Two months after hours doesn't seem like a waste of time if you actually finished it. I've spent FAR longer on projects that have never seen the light of day :)
I've maxed out a couple credit cards and spent all my severance pay etc. trying to finish building this '3D abstract visual debugger,' which I'm calling Lucidity [video]: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd 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 Nove…
I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features, mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis. 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…