111–120 of 600 posts
My wife has a side project selling antique maps. I built her a shopify site about 1 year ago that costs €30 p/m but it's hardly generating any revenue. I spent maybe 10 hours on it and she has spent about € 2000 on inventory. https://utrechtaandemuur.nl
Recent Failure -- I'm not getting customers. I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online. So, I built https://pipecontent.com -- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link) -- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine. Feedback appreciated.
My (possibly useless) .02 -- I would not pay for this as is. What I would pay for though is an API that reliably converts internet articles to markdown of the same quality your pdf generation seems to have. A couple years ago I poured 3 or 4 months into a site that let users select time-boxed streams of articles clustered by topic (i.e. "give me a 25 min list of content about Glacier National Park for my subway commute") By far the most challenging part of this project was formatting content in a readable way from various sources, which it seems like you have done VERY well here.
Anyway, congrats on shipping something, regardless of customer base that's very impressive!
The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a paid version that just disabled the ads. Instead of jumping on this to release a paid version and expand the game with more features, I ran into perfectionism issues + decision paralysis releasing any changes.
The game blew up for a few weeks and I got something like 0.5 million downloads eventually but didn't do anything to monetise it more so felt like I missed a big chance.
It was a great feeling checking analytics though to see that there was literally years of collective gameplay time being logged, and I've had several emails and reviews from players saying they've been addicted to playing the game for years.
My biggest lessons are probably:
1) Doing/releasing something is always better than doing nothing so don't let decision paralysis get in the way. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".
2) Don't fear releasing or making changes because you might get bad reviews. You'll never please everyone and even the perfect app will inevitable get some brutally unfair and weird/crazy reviews.
3) Some people are obsessed with word games!
Anyway, as a lockdown project for fun, I started making a new web version for mobile + desktop. :)
It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour.
I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, but I think there's something here I just haven't marketed it to the right audience yet :)
My goal is to make this usable via Slack next year and let teams use it to trial new marketing campaigns or other run other small tests before launching. https://www.thisorthat.ai
Here's the post-mortem - https://swapped.ch/certtime
loooong list culminating in ratelimits.dev some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
If I were to do things differently I would maybe refocus it on a niche to start with (e.g. target office managers of a professional firm (law offices, accounting firms)) or really try to focus on remote teams. I had also tossed around the idea of just turning off most of the modules and making it just an expense reporting or just a time-off app. Never did that though.
At the time, there was another website Popsike (still running today) that accomplished the same task, but they only updated the listings pulled from eBay every few months whereas my service pulled the listings as soon as they completed.
My failure was that I ran everything from my cable modem and off of my own hardware. By the time cloud services were affordable, my database was around 60gigs, and I wasn't sure how I would be able to transfer the data easily. Eventually, my hardware bit the dust and I just didn't have the motivation to get everything back up and running. I had always considered to transition to a vinyl marketplace but work/family ended up delaying that indefinitely.
Spent a few years experimenting with touchscreen UI and audio synthesis in my free time on and off, and eventually settled on an engine and interface design. The idea is to create 'instruments' in the editor (2nd screenshot) by connecting basic modules to create and transform audio based on user X/Y touch coordinates. Then, stack a bunch of instruments on screen and use your fingers to create and loop sequences of notes live on stage. The demo video ( https://youtu.be/Qk85IrgXRj0 ) shows how that part works.
Once COVID hit, I was sent home to do nothing with full pay, so I had free time and decided to power through and create a functional MVP and website. My plan was to get some beta users, polish it up, add missing features, and then start charging. I showed it around on some music production forums and to friends who dabble in it, and got terrible feedback: 1. Too hard to use; 2. not compatible with existing plugin systems; 3. terrible demo video (I'm not a musician nor an expert on creating cool synth sounds); 4. "touch screens are *"; 5. nobody wants to do live production; 6. it sounds terrible
Of those responses, #2 was the killer. Without compatibility with existing synth plugin frameworks, like VST, it was pretty much dead in the water. No producer was going to use a synth app that didn't support their favorite plugins, and no plugin developers were going to switch to an application with no users (I built my own custom plugin framework for it). I looked into adding support, but VST uses such a completely different architecture from the synth engine that I created that they couldn't really work together in any sensible way. One suggestion I got was to remove my synth engine entirely and just make the app a MIDI front-end for other synths, which is something I might do in the future, though the limitations of the MIDI protocol would mean removing a lot of functionality. (I have a new WFH job now, so no more unlimited time.) I'm also thinking of open-sourcing the project entirely, but I need to clean up some things in the codebase first.
I did decide to split out the UI manager that I created for the app into a separate open-source Windows UI framework, which I still work on and use for other small utility apps that I create: https://tinyurl.com/upbeatui
If I were to do it again, I'd have started with support for existing VST plugins or MIDI and worked from there. I also wouldn't have wasted so much time figuring out auth stuff. The only costs were the domain and VPS hosting.
I've spent a whole bunch of time on CoolBeans (now OpenBeans http://www.openbeans.org ), a "distribution" of NetBeans. I assumed it would be possible to do a lifestyle business out of catering to a subset of the over 1M NetBeans users. Turns out it is not so easy. I spend some money for a Windows machine to digitally sign builds, the macOS dev certificate and hosting. But the bulk of the cost was the time it all took…