Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#371

Post by sethlesky » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:37 AM UTC

2017 has been an intense, yet extremely rewarding year to say the least. This year I learned the meaning of "grit".

- Launched my startup on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/slackpass-2).

- Interviewed with YC, sadly didn't make the cut.

- Had hundreds of of calls and thousands of chats with founders looking to create paid communities.

- Helped many create their own profitable, paid communities.

- Became a solo founder.

- Became profitable enough to cover both business and personal expenses.

- Rebranded to LaunchPass (https://launchpass.com) due to inevitable trademark issues with the use of "Slack" in our name, and plans to expand beyond Slack. (btw Slack has been awesome regarding the transition)

- And plenty more I intend to write about in a "year in review" post I'm working on.

Becoming a founder this year was one of the most challenging, fascinating, and deeply rewarding experiences I've ever had.

Here's to a happy, healthy, productive, and successful 2018

Happy New Year HN!

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#372

Post by mfrye0 » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:39 AM UTC

I've been finally making serious progress on my startup, and have been picking up bigger customers lately.

I kind of fucked up and decided to try the whole solo founder thing. I don't recommend it.

I had a few bad experiences with cofounders at previous startups, so my rationale was to wait for the right person to come along. But that never happened... so I decided to just go solo.

Being a solo founder has been by far the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been brutal at times.

So what did I work on in 2017? Keeping the company alive and trying to make shit happen.

I'm now 2 years in, still alive, and 2018 is looking really good.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#373

Post by nicwilson » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:41 AM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #71

1. on-device speech recognition and command clasifier. V. Proprietary. 2. antigen target filtering system for a boolean logic platform for using CAR-T with AML. 3. Database and retrieval system for a series of experiments in gerbil and chinchilla cochlea to study wave propagation along the organ of corti. 4. a unity-based traveller RPG character management suite. 5. A system to measure whisker deflection in rats as a…

links/info for 2&3 please! Sounds really interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#374

Post by crawfordcomeaux » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:42 AM UTC

Entry -17 (-437 - -420) @ 4:43pm-5:00pm PST: Wrote response below. Realized I could use this as a journal & started it by editing and adding metadata. #hnjournal

I registered wwpjd.com, which my partner paid for as a gift to me. I renewed ourfirstmind.com. I'll develop them in 2018 & track my progress in this thread.

-1 (-367 - -366) 5:53pm-5:54pm PST: Updated to add timezone data.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#375

Post by austenallred » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:44 AM UTC

ploggingdev wrote: post #161

austenallred wrote: post #137

Lambda School - a rigorous, live online computer science education that’s free until you’re hired. https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this. We now have 20 employees, including instructors from Google, Apple, Blizzard, etc. and our first graduating students are getting hired for great salaries all over the US. (Average is $85,000 in…

> Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this Would be interested in learning about the backstory. Did you blog about it somewhere?

Have been too busy building it.

Started with 20 students, they performed remarkably well, started adding classes each month, got into YC and raised a large seed round, solved 2 or 3 other problems that hadn’t been solved before, and now we’re ready to open the gates to more people (our acceptance rate right now is right around 2%)

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#376

Post by fiatjaf » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:46 AM UTC

polote wrote: post #280

I started coding a platform to save webpages.(Evernote like) There are two main ideas: * Build a personal webarchive so that links you like never disapear * Being able to find any articles you liked in the past by searching them from their title, content or similar sentences of the text (like you can search "wooden house" and it will find an article which contains the sentence "wooden home") The platform will be avai…

I believe Pinboard.in offers these features.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#377

Post by notamy » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:46 AM UTC

I wrote a few free SaaS-like services that combined have over a million users. Sadly, due to the nature of them / the "niche" that they're in (LOTS of competition in this space...), monetization is incredibly hard so I don't profit a ton - maybe a few hundred dollars per month.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#378

Post by songzme » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:46 AM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #363

songzme wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the support! Would love to share donation link but it has not been set up yet :)

(Moral of story: don't announce genuinely amazing new initiatives without taking the time to get the donation links working first!) Curious how/why something like PayPal/Stripe integration couldn't be done in a short amount of time. Not as a criticism, just "is this actually technically hard?" (or is it just a time issue?)

1. I was genuinely sharing what I did this year, was not hoping for any positive financial outcomes.

2. Integration with non-profits donations is not trivial. After registering as a non-profit, it takes some time for the list of registered non-profits to propagate through to donation tools (facebook, gofundme, etc). Sometimes, I have to fax in documents to prove legitimacy, and it takes a few days for that to process. I could easily create a gofundme for "help me do x" in my name instead of the non-profit's, but I didn't want to do that.

Hope that clears things up.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#379

Post by songzme » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:49 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #368

songzme wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the support! Would love to share donation link but it has not been set up yet :)

If at all possible, let me respectfully suggest you make that a priority. I realize with an NPO it is a bit more complicated than for an individual.

Thank you, I'm on the same page. And you are correct that NPO takes longer and is a more complicated process, but we are diligently working to make it happen.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#380

Post by lbbenjohnston » Mon, Jan 01, 2018, 12:49 AM UTC

My wife and I worked remotely (~4 days a week) and we traveled the world. South east Asia, Europe, US and back via Asia to end the year home in Australia. It was an awesome year, saw some incredible places and also got to work on some interesting Dev projects. I had a chance to get a few open source PRs through to a Python CMS and towards the end of the year got invited to join the core development team. Getting more involved with open source has been lots of fun, seeing how bigger teams work together and also actually contributing some complex (for me) fixes has been great.

Fixed: Spelling