Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#91

Post by Rezo » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:15 PM UTC

I posted https://cloudcraft.co (a service to visualize your cloud architecture) to Show HN around 7 months ago [1] (it feels like only yesterday!)

Since then many of the great suggestions that I received from here have been completed, including AWS inventory import, teams, unlimited canvas etc. I've added paid Pro subscriptions that are working out very well, but also kept and expanded on the free usage tier.

HN got me my first users and was very motivating, but after that initial spike I've kept steadily growing and have added many tens of thousands of new users organically with essentially zero marketing so far. About 50% of my traffic comes from other sites and blogs directly linking, including AWS itself [2] these days, the other 50% is people Googling for AWS diagrams/architectures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942 [2] https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#92

Post by Drdrdrq » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

harvestmoon wrote: post #57

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…

That's cool, thanks for providing this - will surely use it for future projects. Sidenote: it doesn't look like the sort of app which would be heavy on hosting - why large amount spent?

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#93

Post by TheArcane » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:17 PM UTC

jaflo wrote: post #90

I posted a link to Deciso ( https://deciso.audio/ ) here 10 days ago. Didn't receive many comments, but saw a spike in visitor count on that day. HN visitors were interested in clicking the link, but it would have been nice to receive more feedback (good and bad). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11969466

Nice idea. I'm surprised there aren't more services that offer this.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#94

Post by encoderer » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:17 PM UTC

We launched Cronitor.io 745 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917587

We launched after about 6 weekends of work. It took a month or so until we saw our first paying subscriber. The ramp up was slow at first but by January 2015 growth had accelerated and today we draw a healthy and growing income from the business. As we've built out the product we've raised prices slowly and have had he joy of seeing companies we admire use the product.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#95

Post by przeor » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

bemmu wrote: post #11

Almost exactly 5 years ago I posted about a Japanese candy subscription service ( https://www.candyjapan.com/ ), and it is now doing roughly ~$200k in yearly revenue. Lately I've been toying with the idea of selling the business, as it seems like half a decade is plenty enough to spend on a single project and I'm curious to see what else I might be able to do. But I periodically get into this mood and might soon come…

Definitely, you should start accepting BitCoin. I have some of $ it in my mobile wallet and probably I would order some ;-D while I've got an impulse to try a japan's candy ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#96

Post by jaflo » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:28 PM UTC

sideproject wrote: post #9

About 2 years ago, I posted my side project HelloBox ( http://hellobox.co ). Back then, I started as a tool that lets you create your own HackerNews clone. I did this, because every now and then, I was seeing Show HN posts that went like "HackerNews for XYZ". So I thought, I'll create a tool that lets you build your own HN quickly!. Two years later, I'm still going and it's now grown into a community tool. Still not…

Looks pretty cool! Did you launch with the feature set you have right now or did it grow as you gained users?

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#97

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:30 PM UTC

1059 days ago, my buddy posted our project (Show HN: An open-source media hosting service that's anonymous and fast https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397). It's been dead over a year now, we got to the point where we had to pay for server upgrades and realized that donations hadn't improved, ad revenue was shit, and we couldn't justify paying more out of our own pockets to maintain it.

322 days ago, I posted my tiling window manager for wayland: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224608. It's still going very well, I have thousands of users and just today was providing support in the IRC channel and talking with some contributors about features they want to implement.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#98

Post by Two9A » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

554 days ago, I posted about Commodore Clicker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806169

It didn't get any traction, and I haven't had time to work on it since, but I still run into people from time to time who say they've enjoyed a quick game. It still stands as a high-point in my technical achievement, as a full emulation of the interface between the Commodore 64 and its disk drive, all in JavaScript.

Didn't find a way to monetize, though.

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#99

Post by monty5811 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

Shared an open source web-app for churches to manage their SMS communication recently [1].

Not much of a response, which is fine.

[1] http://github.com/monty5811/apostello

Re: Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?

#100

Post by xando » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #86

xando wrote: post #32

Nearly a year ago I've posted "whoishiring.it" [0] as a visualisation for HN's "Who is hiring" thread with all the positions on the map. And it was received pretty damn well. Way better than I've expected. Originally the idea was just to add better search mechanism for "Who is hiring" thread, but i've decided to go beyond that. I've added every big job board that I could find. Right now it aggregates 15956 jobs for I…

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.

I'm far from being confident on any SEO matter. But, it looks like it. IT was treating domain as a local, like .pl or .de. I was trying to change that in google search console. But the option was inactive.

Thanks.