Live data from Hacker News

Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

tannerchristensen.com

111–120 of 197 posts

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#111

Lots of motivational quotes in that article, and I guess it's appropriate considering the product. People often criticise scientific studies for too small a sample size, sometimes even when the effect size is large enough to get significance at small numbers (i. e. n=2 is plenty when studying "can bullets kill"). Yet they'll lap up vague business wisdom with gusto as long as it generally agrees with what they want to…

> middle-class white men from suburbia I keep wondering why people always include white. Is the idea that non-white middle class men from suburbia have superior perspectives and life experience? If we removed “white” isn’t the point still accurate?

Do they have superior perspectives? No, but they have different perspectives.

Additionally minority groups tend to be aware of majority problems, points of views, etc; while the inverse is generally not true.

That is to say a black man generally knows the struggles of a white man, but a white man is often ignorant of a black mans.

This is because society caters to the majority, so most news, media, etc is from the perspective of the majority. LGBT folk have a pretty good understanding of what dating is like for cishet people because their friends tell them, tv tells them, the news tells them. Meanwhile most cishet folk are unaware of the unique issues of dating in the LGBT community.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#112

Sounds cool, but the scratch your itch advice isn't for everyone. Most everything I would want as an app, maybe 1% of the population would every even consider using, and that's assuming they knew about it.

I sometimes wonder about this. Do we really have unique needs that few others would need, or is it just that we lack the imagination to fully appreciate how huge the population is?

Maybe only 0.001% of people need it, but that's still tens of thousands of people.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#113

I wonder how much the app name and icon contributed to the success. The name is unique while still having the know "snap" as trigger in there, and the icon is also quite neat and clean.

The video was also very good, I imagine Apple wants to promote apps that have nice intros.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#115
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a similar experience: I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I like reading through the comments. Often, comments quote specific timestamps from the video and I would find it a pain to keep scrolling between the comment section at the bottom of the page and the video at the top and then find the specific time in the video that the comment was talking about. So, I created a Chrome extension that surfaces Y…

I had a similar case... i want to be able to download interesting videos with youtube-dl in case they or me go offline but i found having to copy the url, open a command line, move the proper folder, etc, type youtube-dl and paste the url be a bit cumbersome, so i wrote a Firefox extension to do all that for me. This is extremely specific (and i had to switch to Firefox Developer Edition to do that since the mainline…

This is actually not even that specific. I did the same thing a few years ago and I bet a lot of other people could use it. One lesson I learned was that writing browser extensions is quite cumbersome if you want to do something that's a little outside the normal use case.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#116
post #92

> “Snaplight serves an extremely niche need: mine.” There is a subtle brilliance in this sentence. With this recognition comes the permission to not try adding a mountain of features and complicating matters. Build something you will use. Solve a problem you have. Enjoy the process and accept the vulnerability that comes with shipping something to the world. Chances are good things will come of it.

Something something eat your own dogfood.

drink your own champagne works..

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#118

I wonder how much the app name and icon contributed to the success. The name is unique while still having the know "snap" as trigger in there, and the icon is also quite neat and clean.

Wow thank you! I’ve always disliked the icon I came up for this, and I hadn’t ever considered the “Snap” as relation to the app/company aspect to the name (I just liked the idea of “snap”ping a photo and highlighting it.

Re: Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)

#120

Just to be clear: the app makes ~20 downloads per day (checked on App Annie premium and Sensor Tower premium) except for the fact that you change the price from paid to free multiple times, causing multiple spikes in downloads generated by sites like https://www.148apps.com/ and https://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free which basically list all apps that have become free from paid. So claiming `about 10,000 downloads each…

> the app makes ~20 downloads per day

That's enough to be ramen-profitable, I suppose.

Post reply on HN