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Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#61

Post by john2x »

suresk wrote: post #38
john2x wrote: post #36

I was working on a book social site where users earn badges after reading books. (Basically Foursquare for books. There would be badges for reading the top 10 books of a genre/author, milestones, etc.) Gave up on getting a good book database.

Sounds like an interesting idea - I love reading, and a lot of ideas I've had have been book-related. Just curious - why not utilize Amazon's book database, since that is likely how you'd make your money anyway (via referral fees)?

Thanks. I was relying on book lovers' desire to "show-off" about how well read they (we) are.

I started using Amazon, but when I started thinking about adding badges and it would need the book database to be very specific about authors/genres/titles, (which Amazon's wasn't) I realized it was way out of my league.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#64

Post by jc123 »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #33
hilti wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Your site has great value. Just keep it up and do marketing.

Thanks! The thing is that it got plenty of coverage but nonetheless it brings very few in commissions. I'm currently focused on a SaaS product (profile for info), but who knows, maybe I'll get back to it a bit.

Wondering what is the "conversion" rate? Around how many unique visitors do you get monthly? Your site looks good and something seems off if the coverage is good...

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#66

Post by anil_mamede »

dansingerman wrote: post #63

http://geosay.com Just a side project, that I thought some people would find useful. Judging by the stats, no one finds it useful (or not enough to come back) Still, it's served as a decent tech demo to demonstrate what I can do.

Nice app. It's like iWitness.

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#67

Post by npguy »

pilgrim689 wrote: post #52

A site about ideas, where people share business ideas and discuss them. It would allow you to find other people interested in their development. It would also you to see if your idea has already been implemented (if it were like a database of existing business ideas), and it would show you the progress of the idea's implementation, who's building it, etc. Didn't end up building this since it would be hard to make mon…

Kickstarter?

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#68

Post by bigmickey »

npguy wrote: post #5
cup wrote: post #4

I had an idea that never reached conception, maybe someone can take it and succeed. A while back I had to go into the city and didn't know how many coins I needed for parking. I thought I took enough until I saw it was $4.5 an hour. I considered creating a website/app package where users could see where they're going and the parking details associated i.e. ticket parking, free until 8pm, clearway zone etc. I sadly la…

Parking is a clean opportunity space for such small, useful apps. I remember the app that helps you get back to yor car in large parking areas, for example.

What about an airbnb for parking spaces?

Re: Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas?

#69

Post by simonwatiau »

As a student I built a website to manage rentals in GWT, My goal was basically to make a leaving out of a product I built. Cost: 300€ Gain: 20€ (not so great) State: open-sourced: https://github.com/simon-watiau/simplelocation

- Later I built a Storify client on iPhone. By that time I had no iOS open-sourced project and I was trying to stay in the valley and get hired by Storify (failed). State: open-sourced: https://github.com/simon-watiau/Story-Browser http://simon-watiau.github.com/2011/09/08/side-project-story...

Then I built a dating app based mostly for fun and to learn a bit of Android development. I bet @adrienmagnus still remember this one :D State: open-sourced: https://github.com/simon-watiau/On-the-menu

My latest project was an iPad app to help me clean my Gmail Inbox: state: free on the App-Store http://simon-watiau.github.com/2012/08/21/side-project-inbox...

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