A year and something ago I posted about my first mobile game that I developed for Android. It got some cool traction (~3M downloads) and I've ended up doing an iOS version, and a landing page for it (http://2121.io/). Was pretty cool to do a start to finish side-project, since most of them end scrapped. I expect to start developing a new game later on this year. :)
Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
41–50 of 286 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#42In 2013 we show HN'd Kraken.io Image Optimizer: https://kraken.io while still working at our day jobs. Three years on and gazillions of iterations later, we're in profit, have received significant funding, and are serving thousands of paying customers and tens of thousands more free customers. We have since comfortably left our day jobs, and have built a technology stack we can be proud of. I expect we will still be…
That's quite cool. Would you mind explaining something to me? Where do you find customers? I've always wondered how apps like yours (single isolated feature done well, available many other places for free) get customers. I've only built things which are niche-based so it's easier to find customers, but with your type of project it feels to me like gaining traction would be quite difficult. I always want to learn from…
That's a good question, and as I'm replying from my phone, I'll try to be concise and to the point.
1) It started out as just an image optimization API (so it was a little bit of a niche product back in 2013).
2) Our API covered all major image formats, and supported both lossy and lossless optimization modes, which again, was pretty rare at the time.
3) Listen to customers, fix things, and add sensible features such as image resizing. Always listen to customers and try to understand what they want even if they don't know how to explain it themselves.
4) With enough people using our platform to essentially replace the development work, R&D and infrastructural requirements needed for a decent imaging workflow, the app will essentially market itself.
5) Develop a stack which can be rapidly scaled up and simultaneously allows for costs to be kept as low as possible. Pass on the value to customers at every available opportunity.
6) I'll edit this post and add more detail once I get to a real computer.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#43I have posted both Standard Resume [0] and Amplitude [1]. Neither received much feedback or traffic from Hacker News, but Standard Resume was added to Product Hunt [2] by someone else and got substantial traffic and signups.
Standard Resume now has over 15k users and is still growing with only minor updates and fixes based on feedback. It doesn't make any money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9513076 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846574 [2] https://www.producthunt.com/tech/standard-resume
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#44I shared Cachet [0] 551 days ago, it's an open source alternative to the likes of StatusPage.io and Status.io. It's now used around the world by hundreds if not thousands of companies and I'm always seeing comments on others such as "I wish you could do X like Cachet." which is really cool.
I've made money only by selling an installation service, which is about £1k. I have further plans, but nothing more to add.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#45I did a "Show HN" for my open source project SocketCluster http://socketcluster.io/ almost 2 and a half years ago and it got front page - Since then, I (and some cofounders) created a realtime service on top of SocketCluster https://baasil.io/. The plan is now to turn it into a scalable deployment service for realtime single-page apps.
SocketCluster itself gets between 6K and 10K downloads per month - Almost all of these are direct downloads. Some big soccer/football leagues websites use SC to broadcast results of matches in realtime, also, some education startups and some bitcoin/trading startups are using it too.
A lot has changed but I've stuck to the core mission and the project just keeps evolving to adapt to changing technologies. In terms of monetization, finding a market fit has been a slow process; ironically because underlying technologies have been moving so quickly that I didn't want to commit to the wrong tech. Recently, we have been really excited about Docker, Kubernetes and other container/orchestration software and are doing cool stuff with them.
For a while I was worried that technology would evolve in ways which would make SC irrelevant (and it looked like this for a while) but over the past couple of months it seems that the opposite is starting to happen and it looks like all the pieces are actually starting to fit together.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#46I showed you the Copify WordPress plugin [0] a couple of years back. It allows companies to outsource monthly blog content to Copify's team of freelance writers. The blog posts are peer reviewed, then automatically published with a Creative Commons image to your WordPress site. The link is then (optionally) auto-shared via Twitter.
$60k RR last month.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#47getstream.io, show HN 2 years ago. Stream is an API for building, scaling and personalizing feeds. (Think Twitter/Facebook style feed technology in a box) We now power over 300 production applications, raised funding and have gathered a pretty awesome team: https://getstream.io/team/
Originally from Amsterdam, we joined Techstars in NYC 2015 and afterwards opened up an office in Boulder, CO
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#48I launched https://www.pexels.com/ two year ago - a website to find free high-quality photos. It started as a side project. Now we have hundred thousands of visitors each month and three people are working on it.
Interesting! Is this a full-time job for 3 people? Does your business run solely on donations or is there another source of income? (It wasn't obvious from what I saw on the site.)
Two people work half-time and one guy works full-time on the project. In addition we have 2-3 freelancers who add photos. We make money through donations, ads and referral links to Shutterstock.
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#49I built a developer tool to help users validate Universal Link configuration on iOS [1]. At the time, Apple didn't have a tool to do so, so it was difficult to figure out why it wasn't working if it wasn't. They've since created one, so that's great for the community [2].
I still get consistent traffic of a few thousand hits per week, and my work has been forked by my former employer, Branch, to create their own version of the tool for iOS [3] and Android [4]. My goal wasn't really to take it anywhere, it was just something I wanted to build for the community since I spent a lot of time struggling with the set up, and saw a lot of similar struggle in the beta forums. I'm satisfied with how it turned out, and how many people used it (for instance, the several of the Cocoapods team members linked it, it's all over the forums, etc).
So, no story about how much money it made or anything, but personal satisfaction at least :)
[1] https://limitless-sierra-4673.herokuapp.com [2] https://search.developer.apple.com/appsearch-validation-tool [3] https://branch.io/resources/universal-links/ [4] https://branch.io/resources/app-indexing/
Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?
#50PeerGym is still going on strong, increasing traffic every month, now with reviews and gym edits!
I'm still able to run a hobby instance on heroku because it's all on Phoenix Elixir. Very happy with it as a fun pet project.
www.peergym.com