Alternatives
Products that do what 2 guys -- Learned to code in 3 months and built this does
4 months ago sucked. Our technical co-founder quit after 6 months and we still had no product. My co-founder and I had been 'working' on our startup for 8 months. I say 'working' because as the "business people" - there wasn't a whole lot we could do except philosophize. We had gotten really awesome intros to some of the top VCs and entrepreneurs, but had nothing to show. And now we felt stranded. Had we wasted 8 months of our lives? Identity crisis? Check. So we did what any rational person would do - we ran to the mountains. Literally. In Boone, NC - we talked about why we started Knowit,…
- 1IL
Please check it out. I spent all of 2012 learning to code to launch what would eventually become Uncover. I'm super excited to announce that we're finally live. Here's a blog post I wrote on how we got there and a little story behind the startup: http://spencerfry.com/introducing-uncover
2013 · uncover.com
- 2
- 3FP
A little background. For the last 1.5 years I lost what could be considered an embarrassing amount of money hiring other people to work on a project that I thought had potential, I got some important people involved, had some great coders, but couldn't launch. The failure was depressing, rejection by YC didn't help.. I had to take a job, I didn't enjoy and I had a girlfriend who stood by me despite going into debt. But bouncing back over the last 45 days I've taught myself Rails some Jquery, and Javascript and built this www.hangout.io. It's empowering to build something myself because I'm…
2011
- 4IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012
- 5MF
I quit my job a month ago and have been heads down working on my startup. It's my first time working with Ruby or web development at all. I launched on the 7th - http://www.onefatpig.com Now I'm done with the easy part (code) and working on the substantially harder part (getting users). Any advice?
2011
- 6IV
Hey my name is Ivo and I'm a developer and a startup entusiast. My girlfriend was out of the coutry for the weekend and I decided to do something cool like building a startup. I've done a few startups over the years but that's the first I actually released, I would love to hear your feedback on it.
2024 · craftlynow.com
- 7KO
My co-founder and I saved up enough money to quit our jobs 6 months ago and go full-time. We began working on, while bootstrapping, a photo sharing startup. Unfortunately, after many iterations, it wasn't working well enough and we decided to kill it. However, through that process, we conducted a lot of user tests and interviews, and realized that finding users to test is a pretty hard problem. That's why we made Gemba, Japanese for "the real place", which is a service that connects companies to testers on demand for in-person interviews. URL: http://gemba.me Would love your…
2013
- 8OS
We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
- 9
I’m done. I’m bowing out of the startup rat race.
2017
- 10FO
HN, I've been mostly lurking, semi-active on HN for over 4 years. For most of that time, I've been working on my startup, Learndot. I have always wanted to do a "Show HN" post, but I never thought it was ready. We've now finally launched web signup and using a freemium business model. I feel I can now post and offer something to the community (a new app to try out) and hopefully get good quality feedback. Here's the site: http://www.learndot.com Would appreciate any or all thoughts: From pricing/positioning, to design/performance. The app is written in Sproutcore and backed by an API written…
2013
- 11BI
I’m a non-technical idea guy and a business guy that has been successful in my work for other startups. As someone who has been a founding employee at more than one startup, I’ve gotten to a point where I am sitting on ideas I think are brilliant and would love to build. I’ve noticed how difficult it is to find a technical co-founder, let alone convince them to come on board with an idea. That turned into a project for me, learn to build something myself. So I built a site that is meant to help idea/marketing guys connect with technical co-founders and vice versa.…
2011
- 12TF
http://lookingbackaretrospective.posterous.com I've posted this before while it was still in progress, but the final chapter has been added, and so I wanted to submit it one final time, for people to be able to read the work in it's entirety. This is the true story of one developers life while he worked for a start-up that never got more than a few feet off of the ground before a pitiful crash and burn. It spans nearly 4 years, and focuses mainly on the people and events that helped to define the work. It's very much a personal memoir, and not at all a dive into what kind of role our stack…
2011
- 13JL
Hello everyone, I just launched my bootstrapped (no funding) online learning startup, after 3 years of solo development part-time (2 to 3 days a week) - https://onlinecoursehost.com I would love for you guys to go through the landing page and give me your feedback on the page itself, the idea, the pricing model, any feedback would be much appreciated. About the product, it's an online course hosting platform. Online instructors upload their video courses, integrate with Stripe, set a price, create a course landing page and website home page (there is a website builder component to…
2021
- 14UO
When I see what some HN members have done in a weekend on their projects, it makes it hard to confess that it has taken us 1 year to get to this stage. I kept trying to make things perfect, but finally I have seen the light - it will never be perfect and even in its current state, I see so much we need to improve, but it's something. Instead of delaying even more, I thought I would release it to the best critics out there - HN say hello to MyProperty.com Hope to hear your feedback, criticism, thoughts.
2011
- 15WD
Hey everyone! We spent the major part of the year preparing an idea we had for the YC application. At last minute, we decided not to go through with YC. I mean, we've had our fair shares of failed startups and this was one of those make it or break it scenarios. We took everything we've ever learned and strived to make an app that we were proud of. We spent so much effort into making this app that we couldn't bear stopping short and applying to Y Combinator. (Mind you, there's nothing wrong with YC.) We didn't want to apply to Y Combinator at the last minute because if we had really gone…
2012
- 16HN
Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…
2011
- 17SC
URL: startitup.co Hey guys, we've built a startup guide with a focus on growth hacking and lean startup methodology. We'd love to get some feedback on what you guys think about the platform and the content. Thanks!
2013
- 18RO
I wrote up a retrospective on my time working as a founder at DirectAI (https://directai.io). We learned a lot and I wanted to share some things I wish I had known ~18 months ago.
2024 · brooks.team
- 19MP
Hi I'm the developer of UX-App if you have any questions then fire away :) Just thought I'd give you all some background. I'm a high school teacher by day and developer by night. I was bitten by the start-up bug a few years ago and UX-App is my first product launch. In between a full time job and a 5 month old at home it has taken about 3.5 years to complete the project. I'd like to think its a unique product that holds its own against the existing competition and even has some features that no other tool has. My favorite aspect is the visual code builder which allows designers to easily…
2015
- 20MS
A little history first. Back in Jan 2011 I quit my day job after saving up my $ for a year and began my first startup, a hardware + SaaS business. It was exciting and at the end of 14 months I had a handful of customers but not enough incoming to keep me going so I went back into the workforce full time, running it on the side. Naturally my time is pretty limited. Users kept signing up and I had to constantly print and post them unique welcome forms, direct debit forms, post out monthly invoices etc, the list goes on. The paperwork alone took me hours. I'd have just coded up each form into a…
2013
- 21M2
Hello Dear HN Folks. I would like to share with you my journey from testing to software engineer in test, then build engineer, DevOps engineer, cloud engineer, and software engineer today. It took me from 2004 to 2024 today. It was quite the ride and I tried to write down my experience during this journey. I still have doubts, fears and everything. I wanted to inspire those who also wished to embark on this journey that it's not impossible. It is hard though. Not gonna lie. And I had some luck along the way for sure. But with passion and stubbornness and determination one can go to places.…
2024 · skarlso.github.io
- 22MW
Primary link: http://hackerscoffee.org I thought Coder’s Coffee (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010355) was a great idea but disagreed with a few aspects of its execution (registration solely via linkedin, iOS app only, manual approval process, brittle: crashed every time I used it on my phone). I noticed the app had stopped working entirely last week, and went to the site (http://www.coderscoffee.com) to discover that the project seems to be no more. I re-implemented the concept, minus my grievances, in about 20 free hours I had last week (and also took the opportunity to make a…
2013
- 23IM
Hey HN, I'm Aydin, a 13-year-old developer and indie maker looking to improve the world with my small startups. Recently, I built 2 micro SaaS projects. I spent days & weeks coding features, always telling myself that after coding one more feature I was for sure to get traction. This never happened. The reason: I never launched. With IndieReq, you can launch your startup fast and get real user feedback so you know exactly what features to ship and improve. All you have to do is sign up for free, create a feedback board, and share the public link with your users. It's that easy! If you've…
2025 · indiereq.com
- 24LS
We built this using investor tools. I really wanted to know which startups to work for. Are we on the right track? PS - there's a paywall but if you want to explore more, just DM me your email and I'll give you free access in our db!
2023 · usemassive.com
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