Love it, best of the tiny projects so far;)
I started a paper website business
121–130 of 268 posts
Re: I started a paper website business
#122It feels less like a paper website business and more just like a traditional website builder except with some OCR to turn notebook pages into web pages. Like, you've still got to edit the page to add links, images, colours, etc. In fact, that seems like the most complicated part. It's a fun gimmick and a nice selling point. But someone will be able to use this idea for Wordpress/Wix/Squarespace plugin. Would be surpr…
I completely disagree. No one is ever going to write out a url by hand on notebook paper. Even in the rare case that a url would fit on a single line, it's just needlessly cumbersome work to do. I think the project author did a great job allowing for further site customization (styles, images, etc.) without overcomplicating the hand-written portion.
I don't mean writing out a URL...
You could name pages like "Home", "About", "My trip to Paris". And then write on the piece of paper "[link to My trip to Paris]"
Or you could write "[link from Posts]" to add it to a common listing.
You'd basically just create a written form of Markdown.
Re: I started a paper website business
#123Love it!
Re: I started a paper website business
#124Hey Ben, just wanted to say great post! A lot of these comments are fairly negative, and I imagine they can weigh on your psyche. I just wanted to say I am thoroughly impressed with your execution on the project as well as your ability to market your product. Really impressive stuff, big fan :)
Re: I started a paper website business
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't be HN without the "you can build this trivially" [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ] response.
"You can build this trivially" is a fair criticism once you build your own products and realize how rampant IP theft is. Aside from that, the infamous dropbox comment you linked doesn't at all say "you can build this trivially".
Not word for word, but pretty close:
"...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially..."
Re: I started a paper website business
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't be HN without the "you can build this trivially" [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ] response.
It's pathetic. So many egos that need to be assuaged every time a clever execution they didn't do is brought to their attention.
I think that's in play either way--people need to tell or be told that their idea is actually technically challenging, unusually insightful into business or users, etc. Critics are silenced because there must be no way they've read patio11 if they're posting, etc. Capacity for mutually appreciative disagreement is low on HN.
The average business is not brilliant and yet is still not easy to execute long enough to succeed. Life is hard.
Re: I started a paper website business
#127This is a great idea and I’d love a future with an explosion of paper websites. However, I’m saddened that after all the attention and clicks the annual revenue is only $3600. It really shows the difficulty of getting someone to pay for your service. I wonder if an alternate revenue model would have been more successful?
Re: I started a paper website business
#128It's a wonderful project. There's something romantic about it, for sure. And if I could plug my own project, you could also do it by just sending emails: https://publicemails.com .
Ironically, it seems like half of the emails there are just spam.
Re: I started a paper website business
#129This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models. I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible. [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600026614…
It's an old idea, using a language model on top of character level OCR. Works well for general text but doesn't solve random sequences of digits and letters. So you can't use it to correct your invoices where you have lots of out-of-dictionary tokens.
Re: I started a paper website business
#130It's a wonderful project. There's something romantic about it, for sure. And if I could plug my own project, you could also do it by just sending emails: https://publicemails.com .
Neat idea :)