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Why I am building a product with a tiny market

debuggex.com

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Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#91

Post by girvo »

habosa wrote: post #50
jdnier wrote: post #40

I fed it a favorite regex... Bravo. Unfortunately, the permalinking fails with this particular regex, or I'd include it here. The visualization is so large, it more than fills my large screen. Still, pretty cool to see it render instantaneously and to watch it match example text. The regex is described here: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so…

Wow. How the hell do you (OP) get it to render so fast? That was instantaneous as far as I could tell. I've seen websites take 5x as long to add a to a ... I'm really amazed.

Even on my AMD E-450 netbook, that was pretty much instant. Lagged a lot afterwards (to be expected, running FF on elementary Luna), but way better than I thought it would! Well done OP, seriously well done.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#92

Post by lsc »

downandout wrote: post #77
frakkingcylons wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true only if a site strictly uses a contextual advertising system. Most high-traffic sites sell specific ad space and time (AKA an ad campaign) to the highest bidder in order to supplement their normal advertising network. Even if Wikipedia used the most unobtrusive, low-key advertising system possible, people would still react negatively because Wikipedia is known for having no advertising whatsoever.

Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.

>Contextual alone would completely eliminate their need for panhandling, and would also enable drastic improvements to their infrastructure. Better for users, better for everyone.

maybe? but compare wikipedia's uptime to, say, twitter or reddit. Advertising dollars do not always make for reasonable Engineering decisions. (I'm not saying that advertising causes twitter or reddit to go down often; but they both get dramatically more revenue per user. I mean, dramatically more revenue per user, and they both have terrible uptime vs. wikipedia.)

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#93

Post by ewbuoi »

littleidea wrote: post #88
marcamillion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't argue that a superior strategy is to maximize returns against efforts - not minimize potential for competition. I wasn't making the argument that small markets offer the best returns for effort. Clearly that can't be true either - just by its definition. The notion that there are an abundance of large markets, many of which are underserved is quite a simplistic argument. There must be a reason that they are b…

If the constraints must allow for traction to start with 'a single web developer anywhere in the world', then I agree that significantly reduces the markets available. Energy, computer hardware, medical, pharmaceutical, telcom, these are big markets with big stakes, and these are difficult to enter, even for well funded endeavors. That being said, the internet is still relatively young and acts as a force multiplier…

"In 2011, the US GNP was 15,097,083 million USD."

That should be 15 trillion (definitely not ~15,000,000,000,000 :p )

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#94

Post by buro9 »

I would love to see support for Re2: https://code.google.com/p/re2/wiki/Syntax

I mainly use Go and am used to Go Playground http://play.golang.org/ for testing very small snippets and sharing them with others in IRC for education/debugging.

Debuggex is already part of my workflow when I write regular expressions, I was using it just yesterday to test some pre-processing of Markdown.

The value to me is already there, but right now it's something I could also do without... but if the regexp engine on Debuggex is the one that is in use in the language in which I wish to implement the regexp, then that does change everything. The value then becomes very high to me.

Debuggex can get you the first 95% of the way, but that last 5% of working out why something is not quite as you expect is where most of the pain is.

I generally find that the last 5% is implementation specific features and syntax (I have only settled on Go recently and tended to work in several languages at a time for the past 5 years, so most of my regexp pain comes from context switching languages and libraries).

Being able to select the exact implementation is the tipping point for me to reach into my pocket and pay.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#95

Post by uokyas »

polymatter wrote: post #57
uokyas wrote: post #23

i can not say the same about my product http://onetimepost.com/ ... but it only took me a Saturday morning so ... it wasn't like something huge was lost xD

well, how did you market it? looks pretty neat to me.

shared the link on some few powerful websites like this .... truth is, very few people has an immediate need for that.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#96

Post by makomk »

downandout wrote: post #58
icebraining wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. As far as I know, Wikipedia fundraising efforts have been very successful. They got $25 million dollars just last year. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...

Yes, and as the fifth most popular site in the world, that is a pittance. They could be making billions with unobtrusive advertising. Given their traffic, the fact that they only raised $25 million last year means that nearly all of their users ignored their pleas for help. Further, when they do their begging, it is very obtrusive and disruptive to the user experience. Where alternative revenue models are available,…

Perhaps they could, but what could they do with those billions that actually furthers their goals? They're having enough trouble handling the income they already have.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#97

Post by kernel_sanders »

asimjalis wrote: post #44

Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas: 1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working. 2. You could license your debugging code/technology. 3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes mig…

This kind of valuable feedback is why I like HN so much. It's kind of you to take the time to organize and share your thoughts, asimjalis.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#99

Post by tsergiu »

Gmo wrote: post #98

Hi tsergiu, May I ask you what you used for doing the layout ? All coded by hand ? Good work anyway !

Thank you! Yup, it's currently coded by hand. I'll find a more scalable way as more pages need to be added to the site. You can see that e.g. the blog post is just a page with a unique link.

Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market

#100

Post by Gmo »

tsergiu wrote: post #99
Gmo wrote: post #98

Hi tsergiu, May I ask you what you used for doing the layout ? All coded by hand ? Good work anyway !

Thank you! Yup, it's currently coded by hand. I'll find a more scalable way as more pages need to be added to the site. You can see that e.g. the blog post is just a page with a unique link.

I meant more, the layout of the regex diagrams :) (but I guess it's also "by hand")
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