71–80 of 600 posts
https://letsfork.app An app to simplify choosing a restaurant with friends/partner. I mostly created it to have something to do during lockdown, but it would have been fun if it took off.
A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made about $1,500 in total for the event. - I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;) - I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not. - It was a very strange, happy fe…
https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :) As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.
I hear monster charges something like $300 for a job post for 1 month. And $400 for 2 months.
I would think at this rate, that there would be a lot of competition.
Craigslist ran for years just on job posting fees in San Francisco alone.
A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made about $1,500 in total for the event. - I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;) - I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not. - It was a very strange, happy fe…
Why didn't it make sense to continue after the event ended? Most sports events happen on a recurring basis. I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..
There was a time when I dreamed that my "side project" - Scrawl-canvas[1][2] - would bring me fame and fortune, or maybe a few sponsorships, or a job ...
> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?
There's a number of very well established Javascript libraries for the HTML5 canvas element (Konva, Fabric, EaselJS, Two, Three, Pixi, Processing/P5 ... and many others) and, seriously, the world didn't want to know about yet another one.
> What would you do differently if you did it again?
Actually, nothing! The primary goal of my work when I started it was to have a project on GitHub which I could use to help leverage me into the world of professional web development. My library helped me land my first full-time gig, so in that sense it achieved its goals 100%
> How much time/money did you spend building it?
18 months full time before I managed to get a job. Since then, maybe 2-3 days a month (if that) on maintenance and feature development. The upside of having an unpopular JS library is that nobody bothers you with questions about how to do stuff.
For the past 18 months I've spent a lot more time on the project - approaching full-time in some months - rewriting it from scratch, giving it a new focus, etc. The work has helped me come to terms with all the new Javascript shiny, and the ever-evolving Web API standards
> What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
I'm not in the business of "salvage" - nowadays I work on the library partly to keep my coding skills sharp (next on the to-do list is learning Rust/WebAssembly to see if I can make the library run a bit faster), but mainly because it's creative and fun[3] and after this year we all need a bit more fun in our lives!
[1] Scrawl-canvas GitHub - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
[2] Scrawl-canvas home page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
[3] My creative coding collection on Codepen - https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv
Unfortunately, only after several weeks of development I found out that it is not possible to run Google Ads for locksmith keywords, because in the past they were exclusively occupied by scammers. Now I'm torn between abandoning the project or getting involved in the tedious SEO battle with little chance of success.
I spent about 6 months building Itinee ( https://itinee.com ) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it…
How'd you come to the pricing model? To me only having 24 hours before losing data would probably preclude me from putting effort into trying it out. Have you thought at all about a freemium model?
All the best for when travel is common again as I really like this idea and think there’s untapped potential.
I began releasing my own Android apps in 2011, and the first several had little or no success. One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction. My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few f…