Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#111

Post by FlopV »

evanspa wrote: post #110
FlopV wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind sharing how have you been getting users and can you share the experience monetizing it?

Because I'm still working on the Android / Android Wear version, I haven't done a ton of marketing yet. I did have business cards printed up with the URL, logo and some screenshots, and have been handing them out to random people :) For monetization, I offer a subscription that costs $11.49/year; with that you get an account enabling your data to be stored on my servers and thus accessible to all your devices, includ…

Thanks, looks cool and makes sense!

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#113

Post by kzisme »

jqbx_jason wrote: post #26

I missed turntable.fm and I found the current alternatives lacking so I built a better one: https://www.jqbx.fm if you're interested. IMO there's no shame in working on your own derivation of an existing idea (take FB as one example). Sometimes a tweak here or there can be the difference between a good idea and game-changing one. Also it gives you the chance to 'edit' an existing product which is both a fun and thoug…

Hey! Nice job I really like the idea and how it works.

One thing I have noticed that sort-of breaks the experience for me is that every song change, room change, or anything else that stops music automatically changes my current device on spotify to the incorrect device.

So constantly change it back to my work computer rather than my home computer it a huge pain currently.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#114

Post by achariam »

I built Elyxel [https://www.elyxel.com] to learn Elixir and Phoenix while building open source community software. I wrote about it in greater detail here - [http://www.achariam.com/elyxel]

It hasn't really caught on but I hedged my bets a little by trying to optimize for learning. On that front it was highly rewarding.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#115

Post by dmlittle »

SirPereira wrote: post #30
gschier wrote: post #8

I solved a problem that I had at work. I needed a tool to make interacting with HTTP APIs easier, and didn't like any of the existing ones, so I created Insomnia [ https://insomnia.rest/ ]. It took a weekend to build a proof of concept, then I released it to the public. As I improved it, the user base grew slowly. Then, a year later, I was able to quit my job to pursue it full-time. If you're curious, I have an Inter…

I would be tempted to try it if you could name a few reasons it would be better than Postman. I know the "if it works for you, stick with it" saying, but I would really like to give it a go if it would have better features I may not be aware about! Congrats on the app and being able to work on it full-time! That's a big achievement!

Postman's links would replace the response of your request instead of opening in a new tab/window and you would lose the entire response body. This was incredibly annoying and caused me look for alternatives. It came down to Paw or Insomnia and Insomnia was free. The user experience is _far better_ than Postman's. For example, it saves API requests/responses, so you can always see what the last X requests/responses were. Most of my team has moved from using Postman to Insomnia now.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#116

Post by teleclimber »

laktek wrote: post #96
teleclimber wrote: post #65

Like many others I got the idea because of an itch I had with work. I run a small SaaS and I found myself constantly creating and updating HTML pages of various types: help and documentation for users, landing pages, product description, in-app content etc... There are myriad solutions for each of these, but none really nailed the use-case to me so I imagined what I really wanted and started building it. It's taken a…

Nice! Looks pretty similar to what I'm building at https://pragma.build (if you like to try Pragma send me a DM on Twitter @pragmaApp)

Thanks! Yes I think there are bunch of us trying to rethink rich editors (for example: all the block-based editors, prosemirror, WP's Gutenberg, etc...)

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#117

Post by Mandatum »

gschier wrote: post #83
SirPereira wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be tempted to try it if you could name a few reasons it would be better than Postman. I know the "if it works for you, stick with it" saying, but I would really like to give it a go if it would have better features I may not be aware about! Congrats on the app and being able to work on it full-time! That's a big achievement!

I've been wanting to write a blog post on this for a long time, but have failed to come up with a concise way to describe the benefits. I usually say something like "Insomnia is better at being an HTTP client because that's all it does". If you use the less-HTTP-client-like feature of Postman like automated testing or mocking, and enjoy it, then Postman is the tool for you. However, if you don't need those features,…

Postman-lite.

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#118

Post by matmunn14 »

SirPereira wrote: post #30
gschier wrote: post #8

I solved a problem that I had at work. I needed a tool to make interacting with HTTP APIs easier, and didn't like any of the existing ones, so I created Insomnia [ https://insomnia.rest/ ]. It took a weekend to build a proof of concept, then I released it to the public. As I improved it, the user base grew slowly. Then, a year later, I was able to quit my job to pursue it full-time. If you're curious, I have an Inter…

I would be tempted to try it if you could name a few reasons it would be better than Postman. I know the "if it works for you, stick with it" saying, but I would really like to give it a go if it would have better features I may not be aware about! Congrats on the app and being able to work on it full-time! That's a big achievement!

I've found that Postman doesn't always play very nicely with CORS because it's limited to what Chrome is willing to let it to, Insomnia doesn't have this problem at all so I've made the jump

Re: Ask HN: How did you find your great side project idea?

#119

Post by quickthrower2 »

jmduke wrote: post #78
quickthrower2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up there are a couple of broken images on the home page on mobile.

Would you mind sending me a screenshot at justin [at] buttondown [dot] email? All the icons are emoji, so I'm guessing there's some weird unicode issue.

The image for the two captions below shows as a box with an X in it.

* A nice, pretty subscription page. (There's also an embeddable widget and a REST endpoint, if you'd prefer that.)

* Newsletters are all automatically published to an RSS/ATOM feed.

On Chrome/Android.

Post reply on HN