I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?
That's pretty interesting. Do you have screenshots we can look at?
Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#52Launched an app to get your congress reps on the phone w/ a single button - http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.
What do you use for location/number info for congresspeople? I'm building a somewhat related app, and I'm not sure where to scrape appropriate info.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#53I launched http://hackershelf.com on Valentine's Day. It stayed on the frontpage for a little more than a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963 . Save for a few Flattrs, haven't made a cent from it, though that was never the plan. I have, however, met a bunch of interesting people because of it, received a job offer, an investment offer and a few advertising inquiries. Learning alot from the experience :…
That looks pretty useful, though I'm confused as to how you could possibly make money on it? I was hoping, and expected, that their would be amazon affiliate links. If I'm going to buy one, it's going to be on Amazon. It makes the site more useful to me, and you could make a little bit of pocket change anyways.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#54I launched http://www.notaplex.com for the iPad: "Nota plex - write notes, lists, and outlines." None of the note-writing apps that were available were what I wanted, so I learned iOS programming and wrote this one. Also I got to use old-school lex & yacc programming for the in-line calculator part.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#55We've launched http://heattest.com/ two months ago. It's an app for heatmap analytics, which was a pretty hardcore to develop. We've spent a lot of time to make the algorithm really good and reliable, but so far we have like 3 sign ups in total, all of them for free trials. The market looked really promising at first.
I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful.
You spell "conversion" incorrectly in two different ways and your grammar is poor ("Why noone...").
If I were you I'd get the site redesigned, preferably by a professional web designer.
Maybe slim the main page down to your banner, a tag-line saying what the product is and a "Try It Now" button. I don't want to sign up for anything; why not let me demo it on your site in real-time?
And where's the initial Wow? There's a heatmap picture on the main page but nothing happens when I click it. Why not have the image work as a heatmap too?
Sorry to be so negative, but maybe you'll get better results if you fix some or all of those things?
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#56I 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 player/sport. Then I monitor how users interact with the stories to formulate trends in his career. Each story presented in the timeline has a link back to the original source so you can read the full article.
I already had all of this data from my main site and thought it would be fun to use it in another way.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#57Launched an HTML5 offline app analytics library - http://discolytics.com. Not profitable, but haven't really tried to market it. Was originally developed for another clients project and figured someone else out there had a similar need.
I regret nothing, great learning experience, the whole thing.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#58I launched http://hackershelf.com on Valentine's Day. It stayed on the frontpage for a little more than a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963 . Save for a few Flattrs, haven't made a cent from it, though that was never the plan. I have, however, met a bunch of interesting people because of it, received a job offer, an investment offer and a few advertising inquiries. Learning alot from the experience :…
That looks pretty useful, though I'm confused as to how you could possibly make money on it? I was hoping, and expected, that their would be amazon affiliate links. If I'm going to buy one, it's going to be on Amazon. It makes the site more useful to me, and you could make a little bit of pocket change anyways.
I thought about that, but aside from bug fixes, I can't really give it much time at the moment because of my classes (final year). I did play with some affiliate links from http://udemy.com for a while but it didn't work out so I dropped them and added Flattr instead. Definitely something to explore again when I have more time. Thanks for the pointers.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#59I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?
If you were to include screenshots and write a blog post on this it could generate a discussion which could get you some useful feedback (and promote your site on HN).
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#60I started Rankique - http://www.rankique.com/ - basically a price tracking app. Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..
Awesome job! I would definitely use this - but I'm getting a 500 error trying to enter my email address with plus character in it.