Ask HN: What are your failed projects / ideas? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by thibaut_barrere » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 10:14 AM UTC

jc123 wrote: post #64

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I collected a few stats here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvUEclt_oCPedHV...

The typical conversion rate (after removing SU visits which are basically bouncers) is at 0.43%.

The earnings is around $5 for 1000 pageviews (without SU) or $3 (with SU included).

Any thoughts on improving this?

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

#72

Post by tetha » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 10:18 AM UTC

A bunch of interpreters for various esoteric languages, together with a framework for interpreter development. In fact, also a bunch of esoteric languages from myself.

I mostly lost interest, because a surprising amount of esoteric languages just doesn't do anything interesting. Uhh, so you are using a stack for values. Oh, and your stack manipulation words a bit different from other stack manipulation words. Big deal. Oh, you are just encoding your program pointer in a weird fashion. Also a big deal.

Those which are actually different then just end up batshit insane, and impossible to capture in one bag. Also this set of esoteric languages is plagued by woeful underspecification, or ambiguous specifications, which make an implementation even more impossible.

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

#73

Post by hu_me » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 10:38 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #48

Shopwisely.org. This was a site that donated affiliate link revenue to charity when you shopped online. Absolutely zero people used this. This site made me lust for anything that at least one person would use. Like.fm, the original version. The MVP was an applescript that published your iTunes play history to a web page. It got users by itself as soon as I put it online. There weren't many users, but greater than the…

socialvest.us is similar to shopwisely and i think has gotten funding so your idea definitely had merit.

good luck with the future of like.fm

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

#74

Post by pilgrim689 » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 10:59 AM UTC

npguy wrote: post #67

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?

No. Kickstarter is to start a project. This is more like a database of ideas. Multiple projects could be attempting to implement an idea.

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

#75

Post by sandeepshetty » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 11:01 AM UTC

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #18

http://www.hackerbooks.com is a direct financial failure. The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even. On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning side of things (ETL, data processing etc).

Based on your stats & the size of your dataset, I'm guessing you could easily host this at AppFog on their free tier: http://appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/

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

#76

Post by thibaut_barrere » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 11:32 AM UTC

sandeepshetty wrote: post #75

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #18

http://www.hackerbooks.com is a direct financial failure. The income does not cover the hosting as is! Early on I expected it would be a small earner (maybe $50/mo) but we're not there even. On the other hand, it had a fairly positive impact on the consulting/learning side of things (ETL, data processing etc).

Based on your stats & the size of your dataset, I'm guessing you could easily host this at AppFog on their free tier: http://appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/

For now I'm happy to leave it where it is and keep my focus on shipping/growing my SaaS product (https://www.wisecashhq.com).

But thanks for the note that said! I have that migration marked in my TODO list :)

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

#77

Post by gghootch » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 11:51 AM UTC

Only one project, my first: http://releasification.frapp.it Sends a weekly digest of new albums by your most listened to artists on Last.FM.

It failed when it comes to user adaptation, conversion, monetization etc but is definitely a success when you only look at churn. 1.75% unsubscribed over the course of about six months.

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

#78

Post by mapster » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 12:36 PM UTC

I created a way to make a cheat sheet of any how-to video, then print it. So I created Vidinotes app in Flex. Some people used it for a while, and the paid version ($1.99) per use did well for the amount of traffic. Site is down but a user did a nice video review of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7JCg5fGho

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

#79

Post by makethetick » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

http://affililink.com Started as a way to earn affiliate commission from a forum I manage after spotting a lot of eBay links appearing, and didn't want to spam the site with ads. Made a hosted version, didn't really gain traction, so I decided to create a self hosted open source version and upload to github. Haven't had much time to get the word out there, but I wouldn't consider it a success just yet.

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

#80

Post by anovikov » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 2:21 PM UTC

agilebyte wrote: post #51

anovikov wrote: post #42

An idea that seemed brilliant but fizzled spectacularly. There are a lot of bookmakers around, like 60 decent ones and hundreds of trashy. I wrote a lot of scrapers collecting prices from them, invented an algorithm for automatic name matching (different bookies spell names of same players differently, like R. Federer is same as Roger Federer, or even Russian or Polish spelling of same name etc), so i can compare pri…

Yup betting is "for fun" unless you use A+ bookies like Pinnacle Sports. Also, some bookies have to have a particular price not because of their knowledge of the market, but because of the people that placed bets with them. In the end what you describe is basically playing an arbitrage (for which there are sites), but these kind of plays get you suspended, which they did. Nice fore trying it out and writing all the p…

Sorry for not clarifying, i used opening lines. Sites - whole point was not arbitrage but picking only one side of arbitrage which is expected to be more profitable. Also, it was a cloud solution which resulted in very low scraping delays.

Anyways, it didn't work, and i learned it the hard way.