51–60 of 286 posts
I showed ngxtop [0] about 2 years ago as a top inspired tool to quickly check the status of my nginx servers, something I created for my need. I expected some people would find it useful and shared, turned out a lot of people need something to monitor their nginx servers and it got 3k stars in a day or two. So I built a much better tool to help monitor nginx and sell it as a product, Luameter [1]. It didn't take off…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641
By now, we're the largest streaming search engine in the world, having surpassed both canistream.it and instantwatcher.com - and the hybrid app is nearing one million Android downloads now while still being featured on the Cordova and Ionic showcases. All this with zero marketing dollars invested and no venture capital on board. Fun ride so far :)
It's an excellent way for me, to experiment with things and learn on something that other people see/use ( to keep you responsible in some way ).
Most weird thing is that, although I now have at least 100 unique visits every day, no one gives any feedback, positive or negative. Don't know how to interpret that...
I work on it as a side project with a remote friend. We have added a lot of things (automation, architecture redesign to an API-centric mode, introduction of angular, lots of devops...). We use the project as a lab to experiment new trends and it's really rewarding for that (approx 10k users for big events, with surges of 1200+ simultaneous users which is quite challenging).
We managed to charge some companies who use it for internal constests, and it provides the money needed to cover the expenses but not much more. Still we are happy with it, lots of kind feedback from our users, and lots of learning, which is why we made it in the first place.
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 whatsoever. I keep it up because it is incredibly powerful software and I hope it is helping at least some people.
Since then we have head a steady 8% week over week growth. We closed a small seed round and added 4 developers to the team to work on the mobile app and keep improving the algorithm.
For a while it felt like nobody cared, but the minute I went on vacation we started getting some good contributions, mostly from the sideloading community. Although I'm not very familiar with that world. Lately facing some challenges with iOS 10. We know roughly what the changes are, but I'm at the point where I guess I have to provide things like a roadmap.
I 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…