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

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

#181
post #88

http://flowgrid.org Idea was that on mobile, programming would be simpler graphically, taking advantage of the touch screen. It wasn't really. Or I gave up too early... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well scratch is popular as a learning tool. I think there is something in the space between “code” and “nocode”.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome! Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it? Your homepage is all about features and not about users or their problems.

>Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it? I'm trying to find that out. ;0) I think it is probably a non-programmer business analyst, marketer or scientist with lots of Excel or CSV files to munge together. But experience with other products tells me that you often end up selling to different markets than the one you envisage. >Your homepage is all abo…

>>Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it?

> I'm trying to find that out.

You can start with why you use it.

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

#183
I built an android app called NisekoPow which was for the backcountry skier + snowboarders. I got annoyed going on three websites every morning and refreshing to see: * Recent snowfall * Avalanche report * Forecast

So I built a backend service to send a push notification when available.

I was out there for a season and it was good but I didn't return the next year and I lost the urge to fix an issue I no longer faced. Was a great learning experience though!

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

#184

I made https://www.hackersubscribe.com as a way to get email notifications when certain people post/comment on Hacker News. So I get an email with patio11, Patrick Collison, or Alan Kay posts. When I first made it, I submitted a Show HN thread, but got zero response.

This is a great idea and I already set up a bunch of these with multiple people. Cheers!

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

#185

First I'll explain what I mean by "failed". I'm not shutting down or ceasing development. But since I have a previous side project that never became profitable, I made an agreement with my wife that if I didn't get 10 paid users in February, I'd de-emphasize this project and focus on other things. So far I have 2 paid users, and they're both people I know. It's pretty obvious February won't see 10 paid users. Now the…

A tool like this would be great for businesses to help make strategic decisions. Also good for document the reasons why a decision is made for future reference. I think a product like this (maybe not this exact carnation) aimed at enlightened executives would be invaluable. It’s probably a hard sell without educational marketing. It might need a paper or something like that to get people to see the need.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About working with Spreadsheet as database ? About running it automatically etc..

I used Google Scripts for everything. Can programmatically read and edit a Google Sheet easily enough; true DB queries are trickier. Running is based on triggers you can set up for a script; or I think a script can programmatically set them up. Look up the Google Developer site; it's a good resource.

Ok thank you, so the google server is always running and fetching, this is actually something good ! TY

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

#187
post #43
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…

I've been running a very shitty threaded message board for years ("running" being a very loose term - I mean it's still there). There is a parallel facebook group that exists solely to tell me when I've f'd up. The people still on it, are the people who use it as a "separate space" to all the rest of the bazillion dollar alternatives - hellbent on shoving adverts, tracking and all the rest. I'm only going off on this…

Have you thought about using an email group instead of running your own thing? I'm asking this because this is kind of what I'm doing — threaded email groups that act as a message board within the emails. There's a few people using us to do similar things as you, and since we only charge for admins (i.e. you) and not the number of mail receivers, it'd be dirt cheap since you'd only need one seat. In any case, definitely cheaper (and zero maintenance) than running a message board.

It's here at https://aether.app/email/#/force. If that turns out to be your thing hit me up and I can extend the trial for you as far as you need to give it a shot.

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

#188
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Marketing gets people in. Users guide product development and thus the product. If an ”unstable product” is one that users actually want to use, then I guess an unstable product is a good thing?

Treating marketing as requirements gathering gets you overly complicated internally inconsistent requirements. The instability is side product. Marketing is not making trade-off between bugs and features, they are unaware of trade-off. When the "buggy" part happens, they treat it as "we have incapable developers" and not as reason to change something in process and requirements gathering. By overly internally inconsi…

I’m pretty sure we are talking about different things. The marketing I’m talking about is in the context of sole developers or small developer only teams where the goal is to launch a successful product. Be it on a hobby scale or the start of something bigger. These developers/hackers gone founders need to evolve their marketing skills at the same pace the product is built.

I feel what you are talking about is a siloed approach where developers build what the marketing team promises to customers. If these teams are the same people you are the developer and marketing team, and thus over-promising things to customers is only shooting yourself in the foot.

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

#189
Outlook add-on to give the ability to "undo" sending email. It just mimicked the functionality in Gmail where it holds your email for 10/30/60 seconds before sending, which gives you a chance to stop the message being sent if you notice an issue. For some bizarre reason Microsoft built this in their web app but never in the desktop version of Outlook, which is what most people in big corporate environments use.

Finished the project, built the tool and it worked great, had a bunch of people using it. Then I got to the point of having to actually distribute/market it and I gave up - the idea of having to actually support a desktop application was just too much for me.

I'll probably throw the code up on GitHub at some point so people can still get some value out of it, since a lot of people have been asking.

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

#190
Felt like playing with Twilio, and not having released anything in a long time, I thought I'd push myself to finish something.

Since I happened to need to send & receive a fax, but didn't like to commit to a longer subscription plan, I made this website for doing that: https://5dollarfax.com/

I had a plan to promote it by writing a deep blog post about the contents of a fax handshake, and got pretty far into it, but at one point it required some signal processing knowledge I didn't yet have and the post languished.

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