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Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#71

Post by klausjensen »

rikkipitt wrote: post #10

I built https://www.quikk.co.uk which gives users a better audit trail and backup of their Xero accounting data. I’ve never really marketed it, but MRR-wise it’s doing ok. Promising volumes so far. I keep meaning to put effort into getting it into the hands of those who would benefit most from it but always get sidetracked with my other projects. Throwing this out there, why not… if anyone would like to help me, let…

Slightly related: I wrote a small converter for a couple of unsupported bank formats (like zen.com) for Xero. https://xeroconverter.com

I don't even know if anybody else ever used it, as I don't track anything at all - but most likely not.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#72

Post by toast0 »

badtension wrote: post #41
fxtentacle wrote: post #7

I built my own GeForce Now / Google Stadia clone for up to 8 gamepads to connect to the same instance. It's GPU-accelerated, UDP-based and all C++. It works well and I still use it with friends and family to play games together. I even designed a logo, registered it for an EU trademark, and made t-shirts. But when Steam Remote Play Together was announced, I decided that there wasn't a market for it anymore, so instea…

That sounds very cool! Maybe a similar project could take off: sharing console instances. Flat community of 50 apartments would buy 5 consoles and share them with each other (you keep them all in a storage room and just connect with TV via ethernet). One major problem is that console manufacturers would probably need to be a part of this and I think they would rather sell 10 consoles individually than 5 for sharing.

> One major problem is that console manufacturers would probably need to be a part of this and I think they would rather sell 10 consoles individually than 5 for sharing.

It would certainly work better with manufacturer involvement, but you could use HDMI capture to source the video, and USB to provide the inputs, so the console doesn't know any better. There's some licensing rigamorole and content management as well. You could probably do a forced log out between users and rely on cloud saves, but that's kind of ugh... Would work better if you can trust the people you share the console(s) with.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#73

Post by aaronbrethorst »

I built a web app to help me track the Apple Fitness+ workouts I've done, including notes and whether or not I liked the workout, plus a Shortcut to help save the workouts after I do them.

I certainly haven't abandoned it, but I haven't bothered promoting it in any meaningful way because I derive value from it whether or not others are using it.

There's an invite system in place to help prevent spammers from overrunning the place, but I'm quite responsive to requests.

You can find it here: https://myworkouts.xyz

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#74

Post by mushishi »

Lyyri, in which you can split a Youtube video into parts and add lyrics to it: https://egaga.github.io/Lyyri/

Mainly made for myself, so that I can easily sing only parts of the song with lyrics.

Then Spotify added lyrics back and kinda lost interest in this, even though could be used for other purposes as well like teaching purposes: giving link to students to watch only some of the video with added commentary by teacher. Though, currently the actual video is shown only really small so doesn't suite for that.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#75

Post by Jaruzel »

I built a tool to populate an empty Active Directory instance with fake user identity data, including office addresses, departments, organisational linkages, security and distribution groups, and of course all the actual user data.

It could fill an AD with upto 50,000 identities and associated data, which could then be used for testing. The engineer could tweak every aspect before it got created.

Beyond fully writing it and getting it to a version 1.0 state, I never marketed it as I had a sudden crisis of faith and thought no-one would actually want it.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#77

Post by als0 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #7

I built my own GeForce Now / Google Stadia clone for up to 8 gamepads to connect to the same instance. It's GPU-accelerated, UDP-based and all C++. It works well and I still use it with friends and family to play games together. I even designed a logo, registered it for an EU trademark, and made t-shirts. But when Steam Remote Play Together was announced, I decided that there wasn't a market for it anymore, so instea…

How much does it cost for a GPU accelerated VM in the cloud? It would be great if there was an automated way to spin up a VM, install your software and then destroy the VM when you're done. After all, GeForce Now and Google Play don't let you play your full Steam library.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#78

Post by andy99 »

I worked on (wouldn't say I completed) a testing framework for ML models, where you can specify a series of tests for a model to pass. The unique part is emphasizing support from the training data for the inferences you expect the model to make, i.e. checking that similar training data exists for some test cases and is influential in predicting them. It's pretty niche, and I don't explain it very well, but I remain convinced that with the right framing it represents a more rigorous way of making sure machine learning models are built and used "responsibly".

https://github.com/rbitr/pytkml

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#79

Post by ehnto »

Keeping in mind these were a while ago, times have changed:

* A scraper and search engine that aggregated digital agencies by the technologies they were known to work with.

* A store locator, I had been seeing the request a lot on eCommerce stores and thought it would make a great SaaS. I was right about that, but unfortunately it wasn't mine that was succesful.

* An API dashboard tool that let you pick and display arbitrary data from any API endpoints you had access to. They were fetched and updated from the client's browser in real time, using a few different auth methods configurable by the user. It used an interface backed by JSON Path to let you select any part of the API's return value to display. I had hoped to go really far with the display UI, and allow for piping and manipulation of data before displaying it. But it didn't take off as an MVP.

* A page creator that used the concept of configurable blocks to build the page, this was way before Gutenberg and I feel like my approach to the UI was pretty novel even today. It was used almost exclusively for religious spam and I took it down because my country has no safe harbour laws, so I was potentially responsible for anything put up.

A bunch of others that never actually launched as well, including a management tool for mechanic workshops, a motorsport app to help manage a small DIY motorsport program, even a budgeting tool for long term travellers/nomads.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

#80

Post by brk »

rsync wrote: post #38

"Oh By".[1] It's a "universal shortener".[2] You can take any block of text and condense it to a simple code that you can chalk up anywhere. It's the same idea as a QR code but you can just quickly write it out with a pencil or chalk it on the street ... or verbally state it. I'm convinced there is some use-case that this elegantly solves and would be genuinely valuable to people ... but beyond mentioning it here on…

I love the idea of this. It seems like your major hurdle is just getting enough traction for the "Ox" prefix to become as well understood as "@" or "#".
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