Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

#31

I've been working on http://www.postalcandy.co.uk - it was an MVP test for two weeks. It has been an idea I kept coming back to for a while now. I really want to sell a fun product. While it's just basic technically, I've learned a lot about A/B testing & driving traffic. Have taken the first few orders which is proof of concept! Currently working on the next version, integrating more product images & branding too. A…

That looks very cool! Could you share some intel with me about gross margins and how you calculated the prices for postalcand.co.uk? Foundcamera is awesome too :D I'll check for a lost camera tomorrow in Amsterdam, you might just want to add the feature of sharing your lost camera but maybe I overlooked it (says already enough) and a reward program would probably finish it up. Good luck!

Thanks! I've been putting the candy packs together for quite a while, for family & as gifts for friends in the US.

Offering flat pricing including shipping seemed to make sense for this type of purchase. I checked the prices of similar food subscription packages and kept that in mind - they seem to range from $17 to $33 typically.

I put together several candy packs at different weights and settled on 250g, 500g and 1kg - I priced them up and worked out a per gram price point so when I'm looking at new products I can work out if it's good value. Eg. x pence per gram of candy.

I put together a chart of shipping prices. Listing 3 different world zones (EU, US/CAN, AUS/NZ) and delivery speeds (surface/airmail/48hour). That enabled me to put a flat price on shipping. So for example I use the AUS/NZ price as standard, if people order from other locations then I save on postage.

I'll probably make some pricing adjustments over time, as orders grow I should be able to improve margin by buying larger packs, once I get around 10 orders per day that brings down shipping costs too, I can pass that value on to the customers. I'm looking forward to getting the new site launched! Thanks for your feedback!

Re: Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

#32
Just launched subtleshade.com to help my learn about all this cool new HTML/CSS stuff I keep hearing about! Design and cross-browser support is sketchy at the moment, but it's a v1.0.

EDIT: Should probably provide some more information. It's a easy way to add colors to the patterns provided on subtlepatterns.com without having to dive into Photoshop.

Re: Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

#36

My pet project at the moment is programmatic battleships. Write your own client - play against other users running automatic games and see how we'll your client fairs up in the leaderboard

Similar to mine. I'm working on an online ant colony sandbox where people can write AIs to compete for resources, etc.

Re: Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

#38
post #14

I made a tool ( http://complex-area-calculator.appspot.com ) for calculating areas of polygons. Initially, it was really just cobbled together and there are a lot of problems with the code. I'm currently in the process of a re-write, but by blog ( http://foodconstrued.com ) also takes up a lot of my time.

The area calculator is really interesting, good job!

Re: Ask HN: what projects are you working on?

#39
three projects: Homenet a closed source home networking system, multimedia, it's own TV stack. Currently re-writing as i thought the networking was a bit weak, and the android remote control/EPG was UGLY!

Also playing with some vimscripts https://github.com/PAntoine/vimgitlog, and https://github.com/PAntoine/timekeeper.

also, just starting a project planner vimscript, ms project style, with project diagramming.

Post reply on HN