91–100 of 285 posts
A power user tire search with affiliate links. I did make some money off it but got super discouraged when I realized people were using the site to find tires, then searching for coupons or discounts, and my commission was being harvested by shitty SEO sites.
Had several: last minute airline seat bidding app with an interested airline. Fishing competition app with paying users. Housing valuation app for a city council, with the actual city council interested and opening up their API to us. The city council also wanted a parking app and water billing app. A telco requested a reloading app that was basically CRUD but offered 6 digits for a few days of work. There was a diet…
> They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership. I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning to…
An RX-8 back when I knew the guy would cost about 25% of a good tech salary (senior big tech, or tech lead/CxO on a smaller one), on a 9 year loan. It's not a family car. And it's the cheaper of the three.
I bought my first car at 32, with a manager job, and that was with quite a lot of arguments with my wife. It's a cheapish MPV.
I have some emotional anchors to those cars. Partly because I ride with them going to a client's office. Partly because it's the last thing I see from them.
As for partnering with them, there's a longer story and every story is different, but it's not car related. Most had proven themselves to some extent. In some cases they had already had the deal on the table, and just needed a prototype. And somehow I went from prototype guy to only person who cared. It's why I couldn't close some of those deals myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership. I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning to…
GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression? My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success
A doctor directory. Google black listed it after 30 days. No reason provided. https://www.opendoctor.io/
I worked solo for three years on a 3D cyberpunk shooter all in a custom C++ engine. It was a hybrid single/multiplayer idea, where you would progress through the campaign and encounter other players at the same time. The twist was, in keeping with the cyberpunk theme, once you got to the end it would be revealed that all the players were actually bots the whole time. At first I was going to commit 100% to the decepti…
A game where bots turned out to be real players would have been fascinating though.
It’s a cool twist on the PvP of the game where you can be invaded by a player at almost any time but you can usually opt out of the PvP but this particular encounter is needed to progress.
botrank.pastimes.eu
Parses reddit comments looking for "good bot" or "bad bot" and keeps track of bot score. It's actually quite popular because it spams reddit when you write good/bad bot, where its not banned.
Lessons learned: Gets a few k hits a day, but that drops off if the bot doesn't spam reddit. Very fickle users. How do I monetize this?
stox.dev
A stock screener terminal with auto-complete. you can write things like:
filter profile.industry contains "auto"
filter quote.price lowPe = quote.pe 0
Lesson learned: No market for this or didn't do enough marketing. It was fun to build a mini grammar parser and learn how to use monaco editor although I wish I built a more formal compiler
chartit.io
Create simple charts in browser with data pasted from excel or csv. Basically typed out and exposed chartsjs and google chart library in UI
Lessons learned: I suck at SEO and marketing. Who actually wants to use this anyway?
deep-chats.com
Transcribe audio or video using aws speech recognition. Charge using credits.
Lessons learned: Again, unable to find customers. Got too far deep into the output editor and should have scrapped or scaled that down
There are more...
I was a cofounder of a fashion and consumer startup, it was sort of like a focused Pinterest. We had a very enthusiastic user base before taking on SV money, but unfortunately never grew much beyond that. I was the engineer (and briefly CTO), and the foremost thing on my mind was marketing and promotion. I was constantly told that word-of-mouth and natural virality was how things worked in the Web 2.0 era, so put it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They own a Mercedes, BMW, or Mazda RX-8. I'm not trying to be glib, but what quality of a person or partner were you looking to assess with this measurement? Asking because I've never thought to consider the car a person drives as part of evaluating a potential partnership. I guess what I'm trying to land on is how you encountered and partnered with people who did as you described multiple times, and I'm leaning to…
This probably means a lot less if you live in a developed country. Malaysia probably has some of the most expensive cars in the world. They're like student loans in the US. People here get very emotional about them because they're "necessary". You can live without a car, but it limits your opportunities by a lot. A car often takes 9 years to pay off, the prices are artificially high thanks to bad government policies,…
Given the context, I can't blame you for assigning significance to a car.
What indicators are you looking for to avoid making the partnerships you described?
http://atomicarmies.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ever have any users? Or did the technical challenges stop you short of shipping the product?
No users - no launch. I have many conversations with potential users though... I'm 100% positive this is something that people want. E.g. right now the way they solve the problem of collaborating on flashcards is by using _google sheets_ to collect errata on shared decks. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/f0bj27/o... This workflow involves manually checking the sheets link, downloading it, convertin…