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Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big?
Any side projects from Show HN went big in terms of users, revenue or open source etc...
- olalonde 10y agoDropBox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- bdcravens 10y agoGood example, though aren't Show HN posts usually non-YCs?
- manuelflara 10y agoI believe the post was prior to Dropbox doing YC.
- odabaxok 10y agoThe title of the post says My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive ...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 10y ago> My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else Heh. I started using Dropbox much later than this tagline and the first thing I did after installing was to stop using USB drives.
- jen729w 10y agoAmazing. This comment must compare to the famous Slashdot takedown of the iPod. "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. " (Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)
- devoply 10y agoThe point being most users are not power users. They just want stuff that they can get to work in 5 mins after a quick download. That's what a lot of geeks that have geeky solutions don't get. No one wants to do anything, they just want their cake for free preferably and they will pay money to eat it.
- noir_lord 10y agoI am a power user and I still want the 5 minutes after a quick download, the two aren't exclusive and there is too much (IMO) pride in the 'this is difficult to use so I'm special for knowing how to use it'. I spend way too much time bashing heads with the rest of the software ecosystem these days.
- skuzye 10y agoHeck I'm an engineer and I wouldn't want to setup a SFTP server to replace my Google Drive account
- erelde 10y agoOn the other hand this comment from the same thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8917
- zerr 10y agoIt's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.
- briandear 10y agoExplain FTP to your mom and see how long it takes them to figure out how to do it. Also how can you FTP from an iPhone? How do you have local copies on multiple device stay in sync? How do you share a link to your file to a third party? I'm talking about normal people and not experienced engineers.
- davisonio 10y ago> 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
- jordanielewski 10y agoWebflow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499 Gitlab: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278
- callmevlad 10y agoYep, I posted about Webflow's submission in a similar thread a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032849
- borski 10y agoDon't know if we count as big yet, but we're doing very very well: https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
- jayfk 10y agoI really don't like the onboarding process so far. - Typed in a URL to get a free scan - Needed to create an account - Needed to confirm my email - Needed to verify my site ownership - Got a mail that my site is "borderline insecure". When I click on the link, I'm redirected to the "create an account view" - Created a new account that opened in a half cropped Iframe displaying some error message I can't read. This is where I finally gave up.
- helb 10y agoIt says that "Your website is BORDERLINE UNSAFE" after a while even if you leave the account form blank and just keep the page opened in a background tab. Better yet, it probably does that for any URL – see c8g's comment about Google, i've tried HN and a few of my own sites, all with the same results. Even tried to give it it's own address, but it "is not permitted". So I thought that maybe it just displays that message after some timeout without doing any actual checks, bit like these sketchy fake antivirus sites. But nope – when i point it to a subdomain with access_log enabled, i see it actually makes a bunch of requests. So maybe they just have such high standards that the entire web is "borderline unsafe" from their point of view.
- marcosdumay 10y agoIt's a company entirely focused on web security. Even with no conflicts of interest at all, it's obvious that they would have higher security standards than anybody else out there.
- borski 10y agoThe scan we run from the homepage is a rudimentary scan that only scans for client-side vulnerabilities, since we can't scan for server-side issues until you've verified ownership. As a result, we can't give you a clean bill of health until you've run a full scan, which is why you see that. If you verify ownership, you'll see any issues we found and be able to run a full scan which can give you a clean bill of health if it doesn't find anything.
- nixy 10y agoCoffeeScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080
- Swizec 10y agoI'm so happy the good bits of CoffeeScript are now part of vanilla JavaScript and we no longer need compilers for frontend work. Oh wait ...
- lucideer 10y agoWe never did and CoffeeScript had no good parts.
- TheCoreh 10y agoDestructuring assignment, arrow functions, shorthand variable syntax in object literals are some examples of good Coffee Script features that made it into ES6
- holydude 10y agoWho is using CoffeeScripts these days apart from github ? I like CoffeeScript but I am sad it did not get the momentum.
- IMTDb 10y agoI am a backend developer working in Ruby. As a senior programmer I sometimes have to help juniors on the frontend side. When I need to write frontend JS, I still often write Coffeescript, compile it and copy paste the resulting JS as "my code". I haven't had the time to look in ES6 and newer JS technologies, but at least I know that the JS I provide follows most good practices.
- holydude 10y agoI'd like to reply to both of you. I like CoffeeScript mainly because it's so similar to Ruby and convenient to use. I have not thought about using the "raw generated js". How does it work for you ? What if you would choose to work with something like React or Ember ?
- adnanh 10y agoDon't know what your definition of 'big' is, but my open source project webhook got some attention after posting Show HN: https://github.com/adnanh/webhook https://github.com/adnanh/webhook Anything >0 is better than 0... :-)
- phelm 10y agoGumroad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614
- ikeboy 10y agoSo you pivoted from link-shortening to actual content, interesting. In my industry (reselling) a lot of people use gumroad to sell information, anything from product leads to guides to bulk lists for scanning (for online arbitrage) to chrome extensions. I did it myself briefly and made around $250, but I'm sure people are making a lot more than that. It's just an incredibly useful tool even for technical people who could set up a store, still saves time. Edit: the SSL cert on https://help.gumroad.com https://help.gumroad.com is expired for 3 months. You should fix that.
- antirez 10y agoI did not put "Show HN" in the title when I posted Redis here, but an HN post was the first announcement I did.
- malux85 10y agoYou probably get this a lot, but I'm going to say it anyway - Thank you for redis, it's an amazing bit of software and I use it in virtually every project. Not only is it useful, but the source code is pure poetry to read. Thank you again
- antirez 10y agoWow I like your POV about things. Ok seriously, thanks a lot, it's great to do something that can be useful. Thanks for using it.
- saosebastiao 10y agoJust to pile on the praise, I've learned more about the C language reading Redis' source code than I've learned from two books, a university course, and dozens of blog posts combined. Keep doing what you're doing, it is an inspiration.
- antirez 10y agoOMG that's awesome. And a bit surprising since Redis internals could be much much better, if we only could care a bit less about memory / CPU / copy-on-write issues, and... a bit more time :-)
- madebysquares 10y agoRedis is awesome, thanks and now seeing all this praise I'm going to have to go and check out the source code!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 10y ago
- bharani_m 10y agoI did a Show HN for Resumonk back in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370 I was in college then and found making a well-formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post and went full time on it after passing out of college. We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our users that make us super happy - https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863
- kevinwang 10y agoNot a show hn, but 2048 went pretty big. I don't know if this was the starting point or not; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566
- honksillet 10y agoObligatory mention that 2048 is just a variation of Threes. http://asherv.com/threes/ http://asherv.com/threes/
- dlhavema 10y agoThat was a really cool game. Thanks!
- smagch 10y agoProduct Hunt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815
- ThomPete 10y agoNot shure about your definition of big but https://www.ghostnoteapp.com https://www.ghostnoteapp.com is doing pretty well. Living in NY with a family being the sole provider it doesent work, but had we moved somewhere less expensive it probably could and i am growing both rev, userbase and product Here is the original Show HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007
- Rezo 10y agoCloudcraft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942 Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago. Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize their AWS environments.
- moqups 10y agoMoqups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992 We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
- donutdan4114 10y agoWe really like using Moqups here. We've architected, wireframed, and sold some big projects because of it. :)
- moqups 10y agoThanks for letting us know! We're happy to hear that. We've changed the product quite a bit in response to the huge projects that our users create on our design platform. Nevertheless, we've also faced quite a few engineering issues in respect to browser performance and real time backend data synchronization.
- siddharthgdas 10y agoIts a wonderful tool! If you could shed some light on the stack used in the editor.
- moqups 10y agoThanks! It's mostly vanilla JS and the Ractive framework for the editor UI.
- john_mac 10y agoVirwire: https://virwire.com https://virwire.com Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the only promotion to date. Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.
- silverlight 10y agoI did a Show HN for Roll20 right after launching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532754 We now have almost 2 million users and a small team working on it full-time. I definitely originally thought it would only be a side project...
- anubisresources 10y agoI love roll20! You've created a phenomenal product
- silverlight 10y agoThanks!
- Gruselbauer 10y agoI just sent that link to a dozen people and am already trying to get my scattered-over-the-globe circle of high school friends to agree to a reunion of our Shadowrun group. Hadn't heard of your site so far. Cannot believe it. Thank you so much!
- virgil_disgr4ce 10y agoAw maaaan... I really hope one day I actually get to play a (pen-and-paper) game of Shadowrun. I can't believe it's been so long and it's still never happened X-)
- Gruselbauer 10y agoMost comic book and games stores have boards where you can search for groups. Craigslist maybe too? It's not such an uncommon hobby and if you find no group to join you could always start your own! Go for it. It's such fun.
- wyldfire 10y agoHey, pretty neat idea. These screenshots look impressive.
- juanre 10y agohttp://greaterskies.com http://greaterskies.com, back in 2011 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066684), personalized high-resolution maps of the sky as seen from a place and at a time. Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.
- capnrefsmmat 10y agoThis isn't exactly a software project, but I posted in a "What are you working on?" thread three years ago about my book, Statistics Done Wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796 Someone posted it on the front page soon after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843 Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been translated into German, Korean, and Chinese: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/ https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/ I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.) Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even more clear to me, and the need even clearer.
- rpeden 10y agoLooks like a great book! I think I'll have to buy a copy. It's interesting that you found the attention the HN post brought helped you focus and finish the book. Lately, I've been trying to pay more attention to the Show HN section of the site, giving upvotes to interesting projects and commenting or asking questions where I can. I think that lots of us here could improve the HN community by giving more attention to Show HN posts, even for projects that seem easy or mundane to those of us who have been developers for a while. The simpler projects might be the ones where encouragement helps the most. Without that kind of encouragement from more experienced developers 7 years ago, I probably wouldn't have a software career right now at all.
- zlagen 10y agoNomadlist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222
- louprado 10y agoSomewhat related, it wasn't Show HN but show YC that turned my side-project into a business. YC's Application has the question "what have you hacked that wasn't a computer". That question compelled me to create a hack that converted a cheap ($10 in some cases) bluetooth headset into a garage door opener compatible with any smartphone. It didn't even require an App. I posted a Youtube video and then submitted my eventually rejected YC application. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo So many people watched that video they started asking me to sell the fully assembled project. Soon a polite C & D -ish letter from Samsung forced me to stop selling until I made my own hardware which I did in November of 2014. 5 years later I still have growth and sales. Next year I hope to make an enterprise version that would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home. I'll be sure to post that on Show HN. Regardless I owe YC a lot of gratitude as just the process of applying changed my life.
- jlgaddis 10y ago> ... would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home. I wouldn't expect them to actually do that. Between the girlfriend and myself, we get a lot of packages. They usually leave them by the garage door because it's easier / closer. We've told them before they can leave them inside the (unlocked) garage but the general response is "we can't".
- louprado 10y agoAgreed. I'll focus on smaller delivery companies and services at first that have a direct relationship with their customers. Long term it isn't clear how to initiate a relationship with the largest shippers. It's possible I'll spend years calling into those accounts with nothing to show for it.
- dpandey 10y agoI've usually found it more effective to go to a tradeshow where they might show up. They're usually in an exploring and deal making mentality at the shows, and usually at least one senior person is present. A lot of deals get started at tradeshows.
- maximp 10y agoCodecademy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156
- chrischen 10y agoInstapainting.com. And I've been showing HN ever since.
- laksmanv 10y agoI launched SideProjectBook.com on HN. It ended up netting ~$15K that month, not sure if that is considered "big."
- npolet 10y agoI do like how SideProjectBook.com uses gumroad.com (which is 3 posts above this one at the time of writing) to sell the book. It's like a family in here.
- gnicholas 10y agoI was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time. We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare, and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4]. I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are (didn't realize how big edu would be). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784 2: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-you-into-an-online-speed-reader http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-yo... 3: http://www.beelinereader.com http://www.beelinereader.com 4: see https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/ https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc [updated to add press and award links]
- criddell 10y agoI wish Amazon would add something like this to the e-ink Kindles.
- gnicholas 10y agoyep, it could be done in grayscale, or they could use color e-ink (which exists but hasn't been adopted because it isn't good enough for image reproduction or fast enough for video). In the meantime, our iPad app [1] and browser plugins [2] integrate with the Kindle Cloud Reader. 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beeline-reader/id938026867?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beeline-reader/id938026867?m... 2: http://www.beelinereader.com/install http://www.beelinereader.com/install
- samstave 10y agoI remember this when it happened - and forgot about it... I just took the challenge and love it. Installed. Thank you
- shanbhag 10y agohttps://bento.io https://bento.io
- leafo 10y agoitch.io: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029 I don't know where the big cutoff is, but it's been going strong for the past 3.5 years. There are just under 50k games on it now https://itch.io https://itch.io
- sashthebash 10y agoIn 2011 I did a Show HN for a project called StorageRoom (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041) and got some interesting feedback. Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful (https://www.contentful.com https://www.contentful.com) has raised a Series B (total funding close to $20m), got ~100 employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, over Nike to Urban Outfitters. It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime soon :)
- pcarmichael 10y agoI posted an Ask HN to review my side project PCPartPicker about six years ago. Got great feedback and things grew from there. I went full-time, had to hire employees, etc. Not big like Dropbox, but we made it over the hump self-funded and without taking investment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123
- netrap 10y agoWow. Use it from time to time. Great site and very useful. I had no idea that it came from here. I think I first saw it linked via reddit. Thanks!!
- hashhar 10y agoPCPartPicker is the a very unique product with a great community and I've benefited quite a lot from it in the past and hope to continue doing so. Thanks a lot for making this.
- rosstex 10y agoThanks for building this fantastic site, I use it all the time! What's your business model?
- pcarmichael 10y agoGlad you like it! We make money through affiliate deals with the retailers we list.
- hrez 10y agoThat's by far the most useful site I could find to compare, choose and find where to buy "bang for the buck" PC parts. Many thanks for the site.
- josephwandile 10y agoFairly certain that Segment (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segment-io#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segment-io#/entity) debuted on HN. The original business was failing, but they decided to give it a last shot and posted their open-sourced code from v1. You can hear Peter talk about it with Aaron Harris here: https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode-39-segment-founder-peter-reinhardt-mattermark-ceo-danielle-morrill https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...
- stevenklein 10y agoStatusPage.io - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470
- marknadal 10y agoYes, we immediately got picked up by an SF accelerator, then I was able to raise a seed round from billionaire investors Tim Draper and Marc Benioff of Salesforce. Then hired a team, got an MVP out to developers and gained a ton of traction, and now we're about to launch our stable/production-ready release! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558 For our Open Source Firebase: http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ !
- gorkemcetin 10y agoCountly started as a hobby like 4 years ago and it was open source (still is, most parts). Now it tracks more than 11K Android apps according to Mobbo.com, which makes Countly #7 the most used mobile analytics platform. Team is still small (<15), bootstrapped and added a lot more features on top till then. Roughly 1900 stars pn Github. Not bad ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254
- nailer 10y agoCertSimple was announced with a 'Show HN' post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908 ) that led to its first paying customer. We did around 12K GBP in revenue last month and have Travis CI, CrowdCube, and Motley Fool as customers.