Commerce · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Killed our 6-month old photo startup, and this came out of it
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…
Gemba is a service that connects companies with testers for on-demand in-person user interviews. It was created by founders who discovered during their photo startup work that recruiting users for testing was a… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Killed our 6-month old photo startup, and this came out of it launched in 2013; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video…
2025 · pimosa.app · its alternatives →
- 2
PixelApps▲238As a founder, I've always had the hardest time building landing pages. You either buy a template and spend hours editing, or scream at Cursor to "make it beautiful". It's exhausting and waste of our time as founders. We simply need AI to generate beautiful landing pages that we can ship. I'd been working on this problem statement for a while and was able to get great results when I provided AI with a detailed design system to follow. So I ended up building a collection where I've curated 100s of design systems for AI tools to use. Now, after launch of Nano-Banana, I updated our flow to first…
2025 · pixelapps.io · its alternatives →
- 3
SprintZen▲48Hey HN, we're launching SprintZen – an AI-powered test case management platform that helps teams write, organize, and sync tests without the mess. It generates test cases from user stories or PRs, integrates with Jira, Linear, and Monday, and auto-reports bugs. We built this after working with 15+ startups (YC-backed and others) and seeing how painful test maintenance can get. Would love your feedback. To try this out you can create your account here - https://on.sprintzen.app/login
2025 · sprintzen.app · its alternatives →
- 4
Since January, we've accomplished quite a bit. We've successfully launched two productivity tools that people seem to love. The vast majority of ratings are 5/5. Our userbase is growing steadily by about 2,000 people a day. And we haven't done any marketing yet. I wanted to write abou
2011 · qbix.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Rapidly testing startup ideas
2016 · its alternatives →
- 6MI
As you can tell, it's heavily influenced by Mark Bao's threewords.me. The concept is simple, upload three pics and let your friends vote on them. In fact, I think I may have ripped the concept off a post about threewords.me. Anyways... Basically, I just wanted to build something stripped down to a core functionality and a little different from my usual projects. I've spent a lot of time polishing the flow and trying to make sharing an inherent part of the app. It's built on Ruby/Padrino/Sinatra, Postgres and uses S3 for image hosting. This is actually my first Ruby project coming from a pure…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 7WU
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 →
- 8PT
I made this for people like myself who keep a list of ideas for apps / startups. I also made it for people who are curious to see what projects others have "in their drawer"... and who may want to have a say in which idea should see the light of day. https://ideas.dynamate.io/ The site allows creators to anonymously showcase their idea: Title. Description text. Maybe some mockups... I've tried to make it so that it's quick and easy to just dump an idea in there that's been sitting on some list of yours for months - and hopefully get some feedback on it. If someone else on…
2022 · ideas.dynamate.io · its alternatives →
- 9LS
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 →
- 10MF
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 · onefatpig.com · its alternatives →
- 11IA
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 →
- 12
Roceet▲16Another news on Roceet. Last time I posted I mentioned Roceet (now Roceet Share), a file sharing platform as a solution to transferring data between devices. It was motivated by seeing my fiancee struggling to transfer data between her phone/laptop. I found another pain point: she’s a wannabe model, and the process of feedback and selecting photos is a mess. Big folders, endless emails, no good feedback tools. So I built Roceet Review. Upload photos/videos/whatever, share a review link, clients can approve pics, comment, even draw on the photos if they want to be specific. Its…
2025 · roceet.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 · its alternatives →
- 14HI
I’ll put the tl;dr up front: I built my first web app with HN’s news.arc: http://hubski.com The long version (I can be verbose): Recently, I was in a startup that sputtered out. It was my seed idea, but my contribution was on the design/UI end. We applied to YC fall 2010, and were rejected (rightfully so, in retrospect). My previous coding experience entails a bit of Fortran from undergrad research, and building a couple of simple websites (Frontpage even. o-O). Anyway, I had tons of energy for the project, but lamented not being able to contribute to coding, where it was badly needed. After…
2011 · hubski.com · its alternatives →
- 15MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 16
Upvote.Team▲12Built 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 →
- 17
- 18IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey HN, I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last 3 startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience. Recently I started with cold outreach (its a struggle, since I dont have much experience with marketing). I am finding leads mainly using exa.ai websets (web vector search, extremelly good for multiple use cases, recommend checking them out) and then sending them through smartlead. I ran the campaign for the past 30 days and 12-15% emails always bounced. This wasted my email credits & chances of reaching…
2025 · verifyemailai.com · its alternatives →
- 20WP
I've been working some software to make capturing feedback cheap and easy. I think it can be much less expensive if we put our friends and family to use.
2012 · moustach.io · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey HN, I’m one of two people working on Hyperscreen AI, an AI that does mock technical interviews with you so you can pass more tech screens. I shut my YC startup down a year ago and had to look for a job afterward. Even though I had interned at and landed multiple FAANG offers out of college, I spent almost 6 months looking for a job after my company failed. I was fortunate enough to get technical screens due to my network, but I failed many of them because I didn’t have anybody to practice with. All of my friends either already had jobs and weren’t looking, or were still working on their…
2025 · hyperscreen.ai · its alternatives →
- 22IM
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 →
- 23
Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…
2025 · visionboardsai.com · its alternatives →
- 24MS
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 · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →