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Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

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101–110 of 169 posts

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#101

I wrote whatlanguageis.com (still early beta with just 7 languages and a less than decent identifier) as a test of django abilities. It was fun!

This is a great idea but it returned Dutch for "voy al supermercado", though it was correct for "ik ga naar de supermarkt' and 'je vais au supermarché'. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#102

I wrote whatlanguageis.com (still early beta with just 7 languages and a less than decent identifier) as a test of django abilities. It was fun!

This is a great idea but it returned Dutch for "voy al supermercado", though it was correct for "ik ga naar de supermarkt' and 'je vais au supermarché'. Good luck!

For very short phrases the data corpora are too shallow. I have to improve that, and the identifier logic, and... The most important part was discovering that django is amazingly fun & simple. Thanks for the encouragement :)

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#103
post #43

https://www.blossom.io because we haven't implemented payment yet :D

Few other Twitter Bootstrap sites (or splash pages in general) need horizontal scrolling on my netbook (1024 pixels wide), but Blossom does. I can see ~95% of it.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#105

I created a site based off of the idea of Facebook Timeline, except for a professional player's career. It's called Player Career Timeline. It works for just about any NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL player and the data goes back 5 years. For example, LeBron James' career timeline: http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/ It works by aggregating thousands of stories over the years and assigns them to a specific pl…

Very cool. Some infinite scrolling (like Facebook) would be nice.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#106
post #17

I built http://artistsnclients.com - It was an idea I had back in 2011 but couldn't find time to do. Now I built it, but it doesn't seem to be viable. I had a few people test it and the profit is at about $4 right now. At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.

Get rid of the warning "use at your own risk". That's what the Terms of Service is for, on every site.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#108

I started http://blisscontrol.com and http://notificationcontrol.com which won't be profitable.

Those sites are great! It's a nuisance finding your way around so many social networks and their different settings pages. Bookmarking your sites, thanks for building them!

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#109
I created http://cleverrun.com as a dashboard addition to RunKeeper, built in about a month as a MVP. 2000 people signed up (promoted by RunKeeper), seems to have good user retention rate of about 8%. Didn't enable paid upgrades till April, currently revenue has been $30 (yearly repeating). Intend to make it profitable or try something else.

Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?

#110
I built http://thecostofknowledge.com/

This is a place for research authors to support open access ~= the idea that research should be free to read when the authors want it to be. Specifically, the site is about boycotting one particular academic publisher, Elsevier, by pledging never again to do free labor for them (submitting, reviewing, editing papers). So far over 12,000 people have signed up. I see this as part of a larger movement of academics away from research-behind-paywalls.

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