Alternatives
Products that do what A living Vancouver. Connor is walking dogs at the SPCA this morning does
I've spent most of my career in marketing, which for the last few years has meant building consumer personas for campaigns. I wanted to see if I could make these real, living in real neighborhoods, had real weather, real budgets, real Saturday lunches. I always wanted to build a world, not a segment. This is that. 140 people so far, split across Vancouver (100), San Francisco (20), and Tokyo (20). Each one is about 1,000 lines of profile — family, finances, daily schedule, health, worldview, media diet, the channels you'd actually reach them through and the ones that will explicitly never…
- 1AW
For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions: - Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about? - Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about? Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places. I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a…
2025 · theretowhere.com
- 2AW
Hi everyone, I am organizing a crowdfunding campaign to give blankets/food/books/glasses and new year's postcards to 1000 homeless people in San Francisco. Since we as the residents already spend a lot of money on the homelessness issue in SF via government(200MM+/year), I thought some of us would be willing to take a more active role in fixing this issue by donating to campaigns like this one(and to more sustainable ones). So, I am thinking of turning this campaign into a crowdfunding platform for activists and organizations that want to work on homelessness related…
2014
- 3
I've been building a bunch of US geography tools/games/visualizations and thought folks on HN might like this one. There are also drive-time and bike-time tools available on the same page. For folks interested, all of the data comes from OpenStreetMap and the US Census at the moment - OSM for routing and points interest and the US Census for population data. Anonymous users can use it 5x/day. I put up a waitlist page to gauge interest in a paid version but there's no way for the public to make an account - feel free to bypass the limits in an incognito tab. The site is US-only…
Jul 2026 · blockatlas.com
- 4LC
We've just launched the alpha of a 10-month bootstrapped project at http://www.LifeSnapper.com While I'm going to guess that HN is perhaps not our target audience, I wanted to show you guys what we've built because I've done a lot of helpful reading here over the past two years. I shared some really key links found on HN to our coder, Katherine, and our Sugar Daddy, John while we were laying our team foundations out and that stood us in good stead. We do of course eat our own dogfood, and have made a simple LifeSnap of our company story so far: http://www.lifesnapper.com/LifeSnapper We've…
2011
- 5TP
Two years ago, I turned 50. After a successful career as an entrepreneur, a business angel and a novelist, I set out to start a philanthropic venture under the following constraints: - it had to be global. - it had to be beautiful (in my eyes, at least). - it had to be technology and stats driven. I decided I would try to list the full name and date of birth of all humans alive. While some may find the concept pointless, I immediately knew I had struck gold: - it was global and incredibly hard. - it had an almost artistic quality to it, like an ever-changing installation. - as a libertarian,…
2023 · thepopulationproject.org
- 6MPMy Passion▲11
Hey HN, My site http://RealtyPerks.com, just went live a few days ago and I have always sifted through HN admiring and gaining advice from everyone out there, so I thought I would show my start up, and would love any feedback from the HN community. It's far from done but it gets the message across. We have been establishing relationships with Realtors on the northeast and are gearing up to start Rewarding some new homeowners. Real Estate isn't sexy, and is hardly ever attacked my entrepreneurs, even though its a 60 Billion dollar market. Although recently sites like 42floors have come up and…
2012
- 7MN
Hey guys! Im so happy to announce the launch of my new startup, Kiveve. Kiveve is a traffic exchange network created to help quality content bloggers and webmasters increase their traffic and therefore their revenue. We are at our very early stages and we are now open for website application to join our network I'd love to know what you think about it!
2011 · kiveve.com
- 8IB
I love culture + travel, and one of my favorite pastimes is dropping into random streets on Google Street View. I just LOVE getting a tiny snippet into how people live, the architecture, and discovering hidden corners of places I'll probably never visit. I'm kinda weird like that. When AI came along, I started asking it to explain what I was looking at - and I learned a ton. I couldn't stop using this combo. So I built Streetwhip. It's kinda like reverse Geoguessr - instead of guessing where you are, you get educated about places as if you had a smart local guide with you. What used to be…
2025 · streetwhip.com
- 9SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
- 10AW
I've built this as a side project last month. I know there are a few similar sites out there, but I've found them cumbersome to navigate with ads that slow down the experience. So I decided to take a stab at it and build my own version, with a minimalist UI (+ I implemented a custom right-click menu to enable navigation even when the UI is hidden), ad-free, just for fun. There are over 130+ cities that you can explore right now, but I'm constantly adding new ones.
2025 · citywalki.com
- 11CS
Hi HN, over the years of using the social media (Instagram, Pinterest, etc..), I’m quite weary of the trend that people tend to polish their content so well and post the perfect aspect of their lives. I feel like that I’m not one of them, and anything I post will be either not so polished to fit the “magazine” style of the community or so insignificant for anyone else to care about. Scrolling in those apps more and more and seeing more and more perfect lives, I feel like I was abused by those platforms and made me anxious about myself. I want an online space that can give my voice back,…
2023
- 12NA
Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle. It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them. It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city. Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!
2025 · needle.news
- 13BA
Been in the AI image gen space since 2023, before even GPT image gen was a thing, and after spending ~9K on Facebook ads for my own projects (made a video about that actually) I realized the thing I kept getting stuck on was the creatives themselves. I'm horrible at making reels-type video ads and Canva even with templates is surprisingly complicated for ad-specific stuff, plus everything ends up looking the same as everyone else using the same templates. Made a video going into detail about the full FB ads journey if anyone's interested:…
Mar 2026 · admakeai.com
- 14II
Hi HN! I’m working on Agora, an AI search engine for e-commerce products. Excited to launch the Agora API that helps other developers embed shopping experiences into their app. We provide endpoints to search, purchase, and track products sold on 25,000 different Shopify and WooCommerce stores. Early customers are building social shopping apps, marketplaces, and AI shopping assistants. I’d love your feedback!
2025 · developer.searchagora.com
- 15IM
One week ago, I launched a new directory, which is a curated list of useful and cool Mac apps and tools that are not available on the app store. Initially, I wasn't sure if it was a good idea, but I managed to create it in just one day. I started promoting it on Twitter and some communities, and although I got some views, I didn't make any sales. Then the next day, I wrote a post on a subreddit related to Mac apps about the directory I launched. People loved it so much, and I got 39k views on that post, leading to around 2.5k visitors on my site. Thanks to this exposure, I made my first 4…
2024 · mactools.pro
- 16IM
Hey everyone I wanted to share something I made: vcdir.com - a global, 100% free directory of 1300+ venture capital firms. Most VC databases I found were either outdated, overly complex, or hidden behind a paywall. So I decided to make one that’s: It’s 100% free to browse, no signup or paywall required. It lists 1,300+ VC firms from around the world (and the number keeps growing). Lets you filter by country, continent, investment phase, and market focus Each firm’s page includes basic informations like short description portfolio links, website, contact info, investment focus. Includes…
Oct 2025 · vcdir.com
- 17IM
I'm documenting everything about my process. From learning to code, to building the app, and all the way to my outreach efforts. I'm learning as I go and sharing it with everyone who's not a programer, and is daunted to build a software on their own. Trust me. If I can do it, anyone can! You can find my updates on: https://Claritask.com ...as well as video updates on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmqmifW4kIcPclXigay1dQ Would love to hear your feedback on my progress and if you have any suggestions on what I can do better. There's so many task managers out…
2017
- 18CA
Hey HN I’ve been thinking a lot about barriers to civic participation. Most people don’t show up to town halls. They don’t respond to traditional surveys. And a lot of online political spaces feel loud, adversarial, or exhausting. So I started wondering what happens if you make participation radically lightweight. That’s where Civie comes in. Each day you answer one to three short civic questions. It takes under a minute. Responses are anonymous. Results are shown only in aggregate. Over time, those responses accumulate into an open dataset anyone can explore. This isn’t scientific polling,…
Feb 2026 · civie.org
- 19RT
Hey HN! Why I built this: Over the last 10 years I relied heavily on Twitter as my primary source of information. I could get a wide range of information in one place, and each information nugget came in a small format of about 280 characters which was good for summarizing. But recently due to algorithmic changes and the AI frenzy, Twitter has become very noisy and hard to keep up with. So I built GoldenScoop. It takes personalized information requests and runs a swarm of agents in the background. Our swarm reads multiple news sources every day and provides customized information based on…
2025 · goldenscoop.live
- 20PP
Hello! I just wanted to drop in to let you know about a new platform I’m developing that I think could benefit you. I was finding that the mediums I was searching to find freelance work (Twitter, freelance job sites, etc) weren’t really providing me with projects that matched my interests or skill set AND it is a lot of work to find projects through these mediums. My vision is to create a freelance job market that will make it easy for freelancers and people looking for some freelance work to find the perfect partnership by adding a human element to the process (that isn’t you combing…
2016
- 21SA
Interviewing people who have made big jumps in their lives, to a new location, career, or community. It's been the joy of my life to make substantial moves that actually fit my dreams, and I'm hoping to share stories of other people's moves. Find it at: https://podcast.coreygarvey.com/ I'd love to hear feedback, ideas for finding new guests, and tips for growing my audience.
2020
- 22WW
I have done it. I quit my job and started a company. And I have to say it was the best decision I’ve ever made. http://talk-about-jack.com Since I’m a tech guy and starting a company is about more than just having an app, I asked two friends of mine - which happen to be pros on their respective fields: business and marketing - if they would join me. They liked my idea and both said yes and quit their jobs. So, it can’t be that bad of an idea, right? The first thing we hear every time we tell someone about Talk About Jack is: “But webchats do already exist? Why another one?”. We aim…
2015
- 23IB
I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…
Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz
- 24IC
This project started with me wanting to find a nice place to live with my partner. I'm a data scientist by day so I thought I'd approach it systematically. When I showed it to my friends, many said they wanted to try it too, so I made it into an app and put it online. (-> MIT licensed) The app is German, but it's translator friendly :) Instead of a single "best place" ranking, it scores ~0.5 km2 hexes across Germany based on user preferences on a dozen or so liveability layers like rent, commute time, recreational potential, noise level, and many more. User preferences are reflected on the…
Jul 2026 · wohnortatlas.de
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