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

Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 223 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#51

Post by stazz1 »

danfang wrote: post #35

https://get.thread-app.com It's an ad-free social network that is supposed to be a richer and more private alternative to Facebook. It's been adopted by my closest friends and family, but hasn't grown much beyond these initial users. The product itself tries to do a ton of stuff: messaging, photo sharing, event planning, location sharing, video sharing, etc. Perhaps that's part of the problem -- it doesn't do one thi…

Seems really cool -- what's the unifying idea? It's gotta become my "go to" for some one thing. What is that one thing? My recommendations are: personal or public Journal; ability to make combination timelines with friends (photos/experiences) to "weave"; build it around location with a more tethered approach to specific zipcodes -- now you can host actual meetups via app; dive into the idea of clubs or groups. If it can become the "go to app" for some one thing, it could take off pretty quickly

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#52

Post by williamdclt »

matt_heimer wrote: post #44
modoc wrote: post #8

https://www.thechillypony.com An email alert for horse owners/barn managers when the forecast will be colder than a configured threshold temperature. It's saved us a lot of mental energy this winter (having to check not just the forecast but also making sure to check the temp at 3 AM with windchill factored in, etc...). Got zero interest from various equestrian forums. shrug . I taught myself Spring Boot through so t…

I'd suggest making it a little more generic and targeting the agriculture space. Have templates for animal alerts etc but also days without rain when plants need to be watered, etc. You might get more usage from busy people trying to have a backyard garden than more professional farmers that have already solved this problem. And email doesn't cut it as an alert mechanism. You'd need to support both SMS and have nativ…

> And email doesn't cut it as an alert mechanism

I wouldn't invest any time in any other alert medium before verifying this. I doubt it brings anything to the value proposition of the product (but I don't know either, so that would need to be verified)

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#53

Post by williamdclt »

tyrust wrote: post #40
botwriter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

forums are a tricky one. It needs multiple accounts to shill for you and praise you. I've got BHW and a few other forums wrapped around my little finger.

Contributing to the destruction of online trust is a pretty uncool method of growth hacking.

I'm hoping they're talking about multiple legitimate account, held by people that legitimately and individually support what you do.

If not, shame

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#54

Post by stazz1 »

embrassingstuff wrote: post #46

My situation is the complete opposite. I have a great idea, did some decks/mockups/simulation's. Was actually offered 6-figure angel investment (I passed). Yet haven't been able to make reall progress with an MVP. I am a very experienced developer, but never did any web/saas stuff. I feel embarrassed. I have tried joining recently a tracking and discussion forum and it's been really helpful.

Web is its own beast -- even movie making software has to be learned, certainly true of new software domains. I'd recommend researching your tools thoroughly before diving in, and finally when you choose a few candidate tools try and build small prototypes in each that would become modular chunks of your main app. In this way you can evaluate which tools you'd like to use from some low-risk investment of time and effort, and walk away with clear tool commitment. Once you commit to a toolset, you can dive into development as much as your toolset accommodates expression and feedback. I'd recommend using something that has a REPL (Clojure/script with Selmer and even Python with Django have this) which is a way to get immediate feedback from changes in your code. The feedback loop in traditional web development is way too long to make responsive apps in a reasonable amount of time.

Definitely find forums for the tools you are using and ask questions in the beginners channels. No need to be embarrassed, if you've never held a cup it's not a big deal, it just takes time to learn how to hold one. Then time to walk to the river, then time to scoop some water into the cup. But eventually, piece by piece, you'll get a delicious drink that satiates, and you'll know how to fashion a cup even more cleanly for the next time(s) you need a new cup. Aha, at this point one can start seeing code reusability, state management via atomic actions through swaps, and functional approaches as fundamental to achieving incremental progress. Laying the foundation hardly looks like progress, but actual progress is impossible without an excellent foundation.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#55

Post by edwinwee »

ron22 wrote: post #6

A crowdfunding site for product feature requests. Stripe closed my account before I was able to launch as it was "unable to accept payments for crowdfunding"..... Their marketing doesn't match their policies.

Stripe supports crowdfunding sites. I’d be happy to take a second look if you email me at edwin@stripe.com.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#56

Post by mattmanser »

RikNieu wrote: post #15

https://coddle.app/ Coddle is a service that checks if your sites are online, how fast they load, and lets you know if something is wrong. As a bonus, it takes screen shots of your sites with a selection of device options. It didn't pick up the traction I was expecting, guess this is not really something people need. I learned a lot making it though and will use it for my own sites, so not a complete loss.

There's a lot of these type of services and there have been since the mid-2000s. It's not that there's no demand, it's that the market is very crowded.

I know of one that closed 10 years ago offering exactly the same services.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#57

Post by speps »

raksoras wrote: post #42

https://www.scanfortable.com/ No traction so far most likely because of founder not good at sales.

Blaming it on the founder is harsh... Restaurants actually like having long queues all the way to outside. It shows they have a good reputation.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#58

Post by noir_lord »

BooneJS wrote: post #45
noir_lord wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the early planning stages of doing something somewhat similar for motorcycle riders (which I am one), you feed it your commute route, typical times and it then sends you a summary of the next days commute (or ride) including interpreting the forecast in the context of a motorcycle (i.e. gust delta against base wind speed, temps below 0 in the preceeding 12hrs, estimated windchill at 40mph, 50mph, 60mph and sug…

My wife and I took a road trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA for our honeymoon in 2002. We were passing through a storm along I90 in South Dakota when we later realized we drove between 2 tornados. Since then I've wished that Google Maps would add a road trip weather option given that it predicts roughly where you'll be and when for possibly the next 10 hours in a drive.

Yep, I've looked for the country I'm in (UK) and no one seems to be doing it, which is weird since in the UK our weather data from our national meteorological provides it's main forecast data under an open license (5000 points, to 3hr accuracy for 5 days) https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/datapoint/datapoi...

Between that data and open street maps I have most of the raw data I need, the rest is a halfway usable interface, aggregating and interpolating the data and figuring out a nice way to present the results to be easily grokkable.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#59

Post by cdiamand »

supercall wrote: post #27
cdiamand wrote: post #11

I launched, and have now shut down oppsdaily.com. https://oppslist.com is still up as a zombie. We asked people about problems or inefficiencies in their industry that could be solved by Saas products and then sent those ideas out as a daily newsletter. I learned a lot, but had difficulty making money with it. Also, I'm not totally sure my heart was in it. I think about it a lot. I've recently launched a new project…

how did you survey people? if you dont mind me asking

Hey! I started with Mechanical turk, and then did fair amount of cold emailing.
Post reply on HN