Didn't launch, But the idea is well under development.
It was a month long project, but with life and a gf sometimes its hard to get things done.
It will get done.
Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
51–60 of 120 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#52I am still working on mine. It'll take a few more weeks before the MVP ready to be launched. I have my landing page up at http://www.serverfabu.com/ The inspiration for this project came from the feedback I've received for my ASK HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815344
Just signed up for your contact list. I'm itching to move off of Google App Engine, but not looking forward to jumping back into the sysadmin game, which is what I'd need to do in order to move to AWS or Rackspace or whatever.
I have no idea what your pricing will be like (and I'm guessing that you don't either, at this stage), but it would be great if you had something for micro-ISV type shops (read as: cheap).
As a solo dev, I'd love it if there were a service that would set me up with a linux image on AWS, nicely configured for MySQL/Postgres, JBoss/Tomcat, SSL cert, firewall rules, etc. If I could pay you a one-time fee for that, and then be off and running it would be very attractive.
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#53I did alright, I got the technology built and am working on getting customers to use me as the UI.
http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/customer-1-without-lau...
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#54I put up a MVP at bzzard.com a couple days ago. The problem that I was trying to solve is that I have a bunch of small websites, and I wanted to see all my sites stats on one page. So, I’m just scratching my own itch.
The site is pretty simple to use. Think twitter for your app. Just send a message containing 140 char message, a double, latitude, and longitude. Then login to create a dashboard where you can display gauges, charts, and message streams. You can filter on the message and the double value that was posted. You can also create counts, sums, and averages in the charts and gauges. There’s a messaging system that allows you can set up status logic to send of messages if certain conditions are met. The dashboard and messaging evaluates metrics, updates dashboards, and sends out messages pretty close to real time, 20-30 seconds.
The site is up and running. You can check it out by going to bzzard.com and logging in as jerry@bzzard.com and password of jerry. I have page view and application restart messages from bzzard.com displayed. It’s still a bit buggy, and it is sitting on the cheapest godaddy server. But, I’m still pretty surprised at what I was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#55Inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I launched Quick Brown Frog: http://www.quickbrownfrog.com http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com It's at the MVP stage, and while a technical success (I think it's an awesome in-browser app), no one seems to be interested in paying for it. I reduced the price to $10 prior to launch, and I still haven't had a nibble. I burned through about $200 in Adwords/Bing/Facebook ads so…
I think your "free typing test" might be sort of a marketing vehicle if you could provide embeddable badges of results for blogs, or shortened links to your results for a Twitter stream, FB, etc...
Or maybe not. The sort of people showing off their mad typing skills probably wouldn't also be people who want to buy your service :)
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#56I got http://wantmyjob.com in passable shape, and realized some new things I should really have done with it. It's a peer-to-peer job search site -- asks questions about your jobs, recommends other people's jobs to you based on what you say you like.
I'm making those upgrades in December, which some of us are continuing into :-)
Right now you have to make an account to have a look (that's one of the things I'm fixing in December), but it's pretty neat.
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#57Inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I launched Quick Brown Frog: http://www.quickbrownfrog.com http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com It's at the MVP stage, and while a technical success (I think it's an awesome in-browser app), no one seems to be interested in paying for it. I reduced the price to $10 prior to launch, and I still haven't had a nibble. I burned through about $200 in Adwords/Bing/Facebook ads so…
I tried your app once and loved it. I just bought an account. Congratulations!
Please keep working on it.
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#58It is amusing with our app, we launched 'Can I afford it now?' http://caniafforditnow.com and when we showed it to friends, everyone got excited and started telling us how we could monetize it and how they might use it but they never actually went and used it. We think it has potential and it is just a matter of finding motivated users and will push in that direction but we shall see.... If you have ideas, please sha…
The main problem I see is that filling in information sucks, and you have to fill in a lot of information to get an answer. The other problem is that people who bother to keep track of all that information probably already use something like Mint. Mint already has a Goals feature that let's you do something similar, and they already have all your data.
To get around this problem you could make a bunch of assumptions and just present people with some good financial tips in the form of questions.
For example, let's say the person says they want to buy a $10000 car.
Your app would respond:
Are you paying in cash? If so,
- Do you have enough saved up for an emergency? You should have at least 6 times your monthly expenses saved for emergencies.
Are you going to make monthly payments? A 3 year loan for $10,000 at 6% interest will cost you about $300 per month.
- A car should cost no more than 1/3 of your annual income, do you make at least $30000?
- Your monthly expenses shouldn't exceed your income, do you make at least an extra $300 per month?
- Some of your monthly income should go towards retirement. Are you saving at least 6% per month?
Etc.
Then you could offer people the option of putting in their information to make the feedback more accurate and personalized.
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#59Inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I launched Quick Brown Frog: http://www.quickbrownfrog.com http://quickbrownfrog.wordpress.com It's at the MVP stage, and while a technical success (I think it's an awesome in-browser app), no one seems to be interested in paying for it. I reduced the price to $10 prior to launch, and I still haven't had a nibble. I burned through about $200 in Adwords/Bing/Facebook ads so…
I think your "free typing test" might be sort of a marketing vehicle if you could provide embeddable badges of results for blogs, or shortened links to your results for a Twitter stream, FB, etc... Or maybe not. The sort of people showing off their mad typing skills probably wouldn't also be people who want to buy your service :)
My intended market was the kind of person who googles "learn to type", finds Mavis Beacon, and then orders a CDROM from Amazon. That's what I did a couple of years ago, and it was a painful experience.
First I bought a downloadable version, which then sent me on a wild goose chase for Stuffit Expander, which was required to uncompress the image. Then when I finally got that, it wouldn't run on my OSX Mac.
Finally I learned that there was in fact an up-to-date version available for Mac, but only on CDROM. So then I purchased THAT (yeah, I paid twice!) Ultimately, the software was great, but getting it installed was a major PITA.
I imagine that there are a lot of traditional desktop apps like this that you can only get on CD (or dodgy software downloads). That's the "niche" I'd like to target.
Re: Ask HN: How did everyone do with Launch an App Month?
#60Was one long night away from launching www.rankoro.us on the 30th when the power chord for my laptop died. Ordered a new one but we're in the middle of a snow storm in Dublin so it's delayed. With a bit of luck, break in the weather and a solid nights work i should be up in the next few days.
Sprint was a great idea and the last two weeks were my most productive in yesrs.