I launched a simple app that puts new music releases in your iCal / Google Calendar or on a RSS Feed. It didn't really catch on, I've sort of given up. The UI kinda sucks too, I realised.
Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
31–40 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#32I quietly launched/brought out of beta http://requeue.com this year. I built it mainly for myself, since I found myself watching more and more long-format web video and wanted a better way to organize it.
The terms of the Youtube API pretty much rule out monetizing the site with advertising, but usage has (sadly?) been low enough that I just eat the cost of the two Linodes it takes to run.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#33I started Rankique - http://www.rankique.com/ - basically a price tracking app. Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..
Would be neat to see the items in a category which have had the sharpest price drop recently.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#34We launched http://www.placesteal.com/ - an app for pushing postal addresses from the browser to your phone - and no-one really cared :-) Trying to find the time to open-source the JS part for extracting addresses from DOMs...
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#35We started http://www.fantasy5live.com – a real-time fantasy sports game for GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#36First real attempt at open source https://github.com/Radagaisus/Orpheus
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#37Launched an app to get your congress reps on the phone w/ a single button - http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.
This looks cool. What's the in-app purchase?
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#38Richerd and I built http://sinkorship.com/ about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899231 . Got on the HN front page for 10+ hours, tons of attention, tweets, press etc. Except nobody paid.
I think it made a lot of people smile when they saw the concept. Perhaps its time spin it into http://shipandsink.com/ ;-)
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#39I made http://tutorials.github.com. It's a variant of a larger project I'm working on to make documentation more personalized and more awesome. I hacked it together during the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia, and I posted it to HN, but it never made it to the homepage.
I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited.
I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even for an MVP for the high-tech crowd.
Edit: typo and clickable link
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#40I've created http://pazler.com , and it isn't making any profits :) Built using Clojure, Postgresql, StringTemplate, hosted at Hetzner. Learned quite a lot of things in the process..
yeah.... who didn't have that idea, creating a pinterest clone full of amazon affiliate links - would've been too easy if that actually worked ;) on a sidenote: good job on the design, looks solid!