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?
I'd def want to hear more about this.
Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
61–70 of 169 posts
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#62I built http://stalltalk.info/ . Its a toilet based social network. The amount of fun I have had with this far outweighs the profitability.
Love it! Fun idea and no more ridiculous than some of the stuff that gets funding these days. Nice work.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#63I started http://ninjaprice.com/ a compilation of products from free shipping shops. Made about 23$ so far...
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#64We'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…
> I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful.
I agree about "noone", but I don't think the website can be called awful. It's certainly quite pretty.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#65I launched Open Exchange Rates (http://openexchangerates.org) - the Robin Hood of exchange rate (FX) data - which collects exchange rates every hour and distributes them for free via a GitHub repository, in a nice, clean, simple JSON API - with values going back to 1999.
It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people.
Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost.
The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#66This is the coolest fucking thread ever! I'm learning so much!
Is there anything more useful than taking all the bragging out of Hacker News and seeing what didn't quite work, or works but isn't blowing up? These are the great lessons
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#67We'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…
Thanks for the feedback. We really thought of at as an MVP from the beginning and put up a website in one day and spent the rest of the time on the backend. Maybe you're right and that's the reason why we're not seeing any demand.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#68I launched a webapp last week for encrypting message into url entirely on the browser for maximum privacy - https://boxuptext.com/. It's free for all to use. Won't expect it to ever turn a profit, but the fun factor has made up for it.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#69I 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).
That's a good idea. I'll write a postmortem after the fact, but right now I'm busy reverting the site to its former state. Conversions dropped ~75%, so it's beyond the point where its practical to tweak the design in order to get it back to par. The entire goal was to increase conversions. It didn't. Rewind.
Re: Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable?
#70We'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…
I disagree that the site design is awful. But agree that the spelling and grammar could use a little more attention.