Alternatives
Products that do what I'm a non-hacker "idea guy" and my weekend project took 1,670 + days does
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…
- 1HN
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
- 22G
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
- 3MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com
- 4BI
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
- 5IM
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
- 6SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 7IM
Inspired by a good friend who did Unstick.me, as well as the recent MVP for 1k project, I've decided to give consulting a shot by offering my services as a developer and product guy to non-technical folks and early-stage web startups who are looking to brainstorm on both the technology and product side, and possibly looking to have an MVP built based on their idea. I started accepting requests the other day solely with a Wufoo form, and just launched a proper one-page site here: http://youshouldworkwith.me/ Curious to hear feedback on the offer and idea in general. It's the first time I've…
2011
- 8IV
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
- 9MW
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
- 10FP
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
- 11IP
Hey hackers, Like many of you, I'm always trying to optimize my productivity, and I have tried a lot of apps out there to do so. I didn't find the exact one that I could use, so I built one for myself. Check it out and let me know if you have any thoughts!
2024 · focusmax.io
- 12IL
Sysadmin is my bread and butter, but I taught myself PHP and have been coding on and off for the past 6 years. I've worked on numerous freelance gigs, but mainly internal apps that I use for my real job. I worked on this project (on and off) for the past year and I'm happy to finally release it to the public. Even if it doesn't succeed, I'm happy that I was able to "scratch an itch" I've had for the past couple of years. I wanted to make something and prove to myself that I can program. I'm not the greatest, but I'm proud of what I've achieved. http://www.ikeepm.com
2011
- 13MW
I created https://foundermeals.com as a weekend project, and as part of an internal competition we do at http://www.freshform.com I love the concept, and I'll be ecstatic if the project is funded and can move forward. But I'm curious if I'm focusing too much on my own insane hunt to find the simplest way to cook, or if that appeals to others. Most people I've told about this respond with, "You're kinda analytical, huh?" or "You think people would pay for that?" or even "...." The thing is, I'm not trying to sell recipes, I'm trying to sell convenience, and I'm not sure I've communicated that…
2012
- 14
I built a tool (https://1mil.app/hn) to help me test my intuition about various weird business ideas that were on my mind. Initially, I wanted to create a database with 1 million business ideas (hence the name - "1 million opportunities"). But turned out to be a dumb idea already. So instead I built this tool that returns only 10 ideas. It's all based on your input, market + your background. The first release scored on demand only and it gave false confidence. So I rebuilt the the scoring around "winnability": can a solo founder with a specific background "win" against what…
7d ago · 1mil.app
- 15MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk
- 16IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 17IC
After 6 months looking for an idea, procrastinating and over analyzing what I should build. I built a tool that allows people to find problems using custom plugins built with Grok and Claude.
2025 · gotaprob.com
- 18IW
I'm an ML engineer. I know how AI works, the limitations, the hype. And I was still drowning. Couldn't stick to goals. Couldn't stay consistent. Productivity apps became digital clutter. Therapy waitlists were 3 months out. Friends were tired of my complaints. So at 2am I started building: zropi.com What shocked me was it actually worked. It felt human. Last week I mentioned a tough client call. Didn't set a reminder. Two days later it voice messaged me: "Hey, how'd that call go? You seemed stressed." When does technology ever do that? What makes it feel alive: It doesn't reply instantly.…
Jan 2026
- 19HP
Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with collaborative learning and active learning for a while (I launched Coderoulette a couple of months ago) and I'm launching something new today that I'm really excited about. Online learning is pretty passive (video lectures) and lonely, and I think we could create an online learning experience much engaging and effective than that. Only 5% of people who start a Coursera course finish it. My hypothesis is that we can increase that number significantly by matching learners online in teams of 2-3 and giving them a real project to build together. On top…
2016
- 20IS
Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 21MF
Here is the link: http://www.wikihowtodo.com I know a lot of geeks share the same dream -- build the next kick-ass todo-list/project management system. So do I. However, as I was quite positive that my web development skill is worse than 99% of developers' in this community, I decided to build something simple, useless but unique. So I built this. Basically it's a Wikihow scraper, nothing more. It gives you a place to store interesting Wikihow articles and yes, they are converted into todo lists. I know this site is not that good, but I still need your guys' feedback. For example, as I am a…
2010
- 221R
I wanted to find a product idea to build. "Build things people want," right? So I thought, why not literally find people saying what they want? I wrote a script to collect thousands of Reddit posts where people are looking for a solution or complaining about a problem. Then I used GPT to filter out the noise and score each one based on how viable the idea seemed. Threw together a simple search interface so anyone can explore them. I was planning to build a more advanced paid version of this, but figured I'd share the raw version first to see if it's actually useful to anyone.
Nov 2025 · search.reddit-business-ideas.workers.dev
- 23IA
Ever wanted to create a startup but couldn't think of an idea? I'm doing a test launch for part of my MVP and would really appreciate any feedback, or if you could join my discord server: https://discord.gg/s9GtVNx7hf I'm a 16 year old entrepreneur with the goal of making startups easier to make for others.
2024 · innovatize.xyz
- 24IM
Hello NH! Three months ago, after finishing university, I started a project called Cyclips. I started it both to help my brother with his content creation and to challenge myself in new ways. Initially, I thought I could finish it in one month, but it ended up taking three. Those three months were among the most intense of my life; I spent 16-hour days working solo as an indie hacker. Along the way, I faced discouragement from people around me who suggested I should quit and that my efforts were in vain. But I didn’t give up, and I’m grateful for pushing through and persevering. Cyclips is a…
2024 · cyclips.com
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