Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your project is seriously cool, I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.
Thanks dude
Where did you land?
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
511–520 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#512NN-512 ( https://NN-512.com ) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activation…
Just wondering, what makes NN-512 superior to Intel's oneAPI DNN library?
For example: try to find a deep learning framework that uses Intel's oneAPI DNN library and achieves 80% of the performance of this: https://nn-512.com/browse/DenseNet121
Tell me if you can find one
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#513When I was at uni, we played a lot of drinking games, and sometimes (when we didn't have cards or anything) played a mobile one called Picolo. It's just like if you took the rounds out of games like ring of fire and truth/dare and turned it into an app. Only problem was it had some super buzzkill questions, like "What's worse, slavery or war?", and I thought I could do a better job.
Very simple app really, had a list of questions to run through, stuck peoples names into the question etc, but my issue came with the Android store. I called it "Beercules: Drinking game", but even after months (and a rating between 4 and 5 stars) you couldn't find it in the store unless you searched that full name. Searching Beercules or Drinking game didn't even put it at the bottom of the list, it just didn't exist. Oh, and then they updated the ToS and took the game down due to me not having a privacy policy, and gave no guidance on what that even is, never mind how to complete it, so i just gave up on it. I never expected it to be super successful, but I'd hoped it would have been given a chance.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#514My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…
I haven't been in a library for a long time, but in 90s I never had this issue. We had a "card" where librarian would stamp the date. Books had a paper on the back where they would stamp the issue date and return date.
It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany?
I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".
Libraries might be more interesting customers but they have little reason to reduce late fee bills as it is extra income to them. You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.
Hope you enjoy working on it.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#515Spent a huge amount of time (more than a year) working alone in a face detection API. The hardest parts were 1) marketing, how to make business know it existed and 2) keep up with the state of the art research implementations. The 2) was not difficult if I had had at least one client to pay/motivate me to keep up with the development. It is still on at www.rosto.io but I am not actively developing anymore. At least I have learnt some stuff tech-wise.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#516I 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…
Looks quite interesting. I'm curious if market product fit is there, you are trying to sell an app to people who are looking to travel cheaply.
Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#517So many!
1. homepagr.com: a tool which lets you organize bookmarks and show them on your "new tab" page. I use it extensively, but have gotten 0 adoption, even when I made the price free. (I've since taken down the landing page, but it still works!)
2. audioremarks.com: I've taken down the site, but it was a service that let you upload audio clips and leave annotations at specific timestamps. Made at the start of the pandemic for music students and teachers to do remote lessons and leave feedback. Nobody used it.
3. spry.store: Also taken down. It let you create an e-commerce website from a google sheet. Didn't realize that there were already players in this space, and it's hard to compete in the ecommerce website builder market.
In all of these cases, it was pretty clear from the beginning that nobody would use it: when I talked about the idea to friends, nobody said "wow this is neat!" They all said "huh, okay, why not just use x instead?"
There are two contradictory pieces of advice on HN: one, to talk to customers relentlessly, and two, that "ideas that seems silly are the ones likely to be big." Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#518So many! 1. homepagr.com: a tool which lets you organize bookmarks and show them on your "new tab" page. I use it extensively, but have gotten 0 adoption, even when I made the price free. (I've since taken down the landing page, but it still works!) 2. audioremarks.com: I've taken down the site, but it was a service that let you upload audio clips and leave annotations at specific timestamps. Made at the start of the…
> Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!
You still want some core users that love the product, even though many bigger players dismiss it as a toy. Think Bitcoin, Google, Apple (In the very early days, it all sounded like silly/toy ideas, but a core group of users loved them)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#519Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…
> due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.
> importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs
I'd argue it's more important to work with someone you've worked with in the past and know you can trust and will work hard. The operating agreements and due diligence are there for the worst case scenario, but from your story it seems pretty clear they were questionable co-founders to start with.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#520An app for finding the best hotels for traveling with kids. It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the im…
This pandemia really crush all tourism industry...
For at least two years