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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to Finally opening signup on my education for business startup, Learndot

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…

Learndot is an education platform for business startups, built with a freemium model. The web-based application helps entrepreneurs learn and develop skills relevant to starting and running businesses. The service is… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Finally opening signup on my education for business startup, Learndot launched in 2013; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!

    2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →

  2. 2LS

    LinkedIn feels more like Facebook every day — noisy feeds, fake engagement, and everyone shouting into the void. Thats why I used to built a personal microsite on Squarespace and uploaded a video resume to YouTube to stand out - it helped me land interviews and get into Big Tech. But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that? So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities. We’ve already…

    2025 · heyopenspot.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3WU

    hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this. anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)

    2022 · joinmaasive.com · its alternatives →

  4. 42G

    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,…

    2012 · knowitapp.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5FP

    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 · its alternatives →

  6. 6WS

    Hi HN, We are building a search engine to help founders, investors, and early adopters to easily discover startups from all over the world. Discovering startups - whether it is a potential competitor, to validate an idea or as part of a DD process - is a difficult and time-consuming process. We believe that many existing platforms require expensive subscriptions and general-purpose search engines often do not give a complete enough picture. To solve this problem, we are releasing a free-to-use search engine (with a relatively generous daily limit on search volume). No sign-up is required. We…

    2023 · symonda.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7GA

    I am announcing the private beta of my first web app (http://getfounder.com). The beta will launch in just one city, which will be determined by the number of entries on the location-aware sign up page. As this is my first public release, I'm looking to the HN community to offer me feedback on what I should/shouldn't be displaying on the homepage. I'd be grateful for any advice you had to offer. Thanks, and I hope to see some of you in the private beta! Colin

    2011 · getfounder.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8IC

    I saw this app youlearn.ai on YC and thought of building it. They are claiming to have 1M+ users with just one feature which is to convert your learning material into summaries, quizzes etc. I gave this a shot and cloned almost most of the features in just 9+ hours of continous vibe coding (with 20% manual though). Now I'm selling this on mvp marketplace. Might probably open source it in future or give it free.

    2025 · ai-tutor.mvpwrappers.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9JL

    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 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Built this to solve the cold start problem for side projects. You browse/support posts from other creators across platforms (LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, etc.), earn 1 credit to promote yours. Free, no ads budget needed. Just launched today – curious what HN thinks about the model.

    Nov 2025 · upvote.team · its alternatives →

  11. 11WW

    Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community

    2016 · its alternatives →

  12. 12LC

    So after 18months of working on my startup Leadngin.com we're finally ready to launch. Our first user was in fact Swombat with GrantTree who is still with us today. Many more HN users have since scaled their sales process with us! Let me know if you have any questions and be sure to point out anything we're doing wrong.

    2014 · its alternatives →

  13. 13UO

    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 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I made a post a few days ago asking if any software companies/start ups needed technical video tutorial writers and I had a few very interested and serious respondents email me. I've been looking for something to do with this domain hence I give myself a Christmas present.

    2013 · helpknow.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15IM

    orignally shared this on startup school... i thought id' share it here. i'm using a `nocode communication tool` (a web-based interface... a single browser tab!) for all of these things: 1. landing page — the landing page is the product and i wanted for folks to feel "transported" right into the app without having to walk through a shitty b2b marketing-style content. this is akin to my experience back in the `BBS` days of the mid-90's where you were immediately into the app, community, and tool. no terms of service, no privacy policy. just pure, immediate value. 2. building community — we…

    2021 · its alternatives →

  16. 16IV

    Hi HN, I’ve launched the website for my upcoming side business - a little Windows desktop application that I developed to scratch a personal itch. This is a significant milestone for me as it's both my first ever website and side business. The website itself is built using Tailwind CSS with plain JavaScript and some PHP scripts to handle the sign-up forms. I used a lot of ChatGPT for all of it. It's hosted on the the Hetzner level 1 webhosting plan costing EUR 1.90 per month and put behind Cloudflare. I am actually quite curious how this setting will hold up against the traffic from this…

    2024 · iconpainter.io · its alternatives →

  17. 17IA

    I was working on validating some of my own project ideas. While trying to find how to validate my idea, I realized the process itself could be turned into a tool. A few late nights later, I had something that takes any startup idea, fetches discussions, summarizes sentiment, and gives a quick “validation score.” It’s very rough, but it works, and it’s already making me rethink a few of my own ideas. It's still a work in progress. I don't actually know what I'm doing, but I know it's worth it. Honest feedback welcomed! Live demo here: https://validationly.com/

    2025 · validationly.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18IT

    I created http://devtest.net as a weekend project, and I'm pretty proud of it from a technical and UI standpoint. The problem is, I've built this by myself in a bit of a vacuum, to "scratch my own itch", and I don't know if this is useful to anyone other than me. I'm also not so hot on the business side and don't really know what I'm doing. Basically, I'm looking for some advice, now that I've actually launched, what now? One thing that this has shown me is that I'm capable of putting together a pretty decent web application on my own in my spare time. Should I stick with this idea, or…

    2012 · devtest.net · its alternatives →

  19. 19IV

    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 · its alternatives →

  20. 20AG

    Almost a year ago, we got hundreds of feedback here from the HN community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732752 After months of hard work here we are with our new version. https://sievehq.com/ Sieve is a complete platform for running your freelance business without paying a percentage of your earnings. We’ve built every tool you need to run a freelancing business faster and more efficiently — Client on-boarding, Requirement collection, NDAs, Estimations, Agreements, Invoicing and Payments. This time, we did close to 300 signups with 12% adding their…

    2018 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN, I started a small newsletter to document what I’m learning while building projects — the decisions, mistakes, and experiments that usually stay behind the scenes. It’s not a growth hack or a polished media thing. Just short write-ups about what worked, what didn’t, and how I’m thinking through problems as I go. I’ve only published a couple of posts so far, but it’s grown to 1,000+ readers, which surprised me. Sharing here in case it’s useful to others who enjoy building in public or learning from real-world attempts rather than theory. Happy to hear feedback or ideas on what would be…

    Jan 2026 · chiefletter.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…

    2024 · dorik.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23LS

    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 · its alternatives →

  24. 24PF

    Would love to hear the community's feedback on initial prototype of our online learning app - what would you like to see and NOT see in the full version! :)

    2013 · skilldom.org · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →