Alternatives
Products that do what My low-tech, 1997-style site helped me adopt thousands of subscribers does
I run a weekly humorous newsletter about the tech industry/tech jobs called TechLoaf (https://www.techloaf.io/). After experimenting, A/B/C/D/E testing, etc I found that using the lowest, simplest landing page possible actually led me to gain thousands more followers and a much higher conversion. I don't even post content on the site - the content is only accessible through the newsletter itself (or links or search, but nobody does that). Part of me wonders how much of modern UI/UX is oversell, especially when explaining value proposition to an…
- 1IB
An honest to god, non-algorithmic reverse chrono list of tech news that passes my signal-to-noise tests, updated hourly. A lightweight a page design as I've been able to keep; simple, clean, fast. No commercial features or aspirations - this is a passion project, something I've been fooling around with on and off for decades. There's a "Top" view too with an LLM edited front page & summary, and categorized views for a large number of topics - see the Directory. A few more buried features to explore, but the fundamental use case is pop in, scan, exit - fast and concise. Your feedback would be…
Oct 2025 · deadstack.net
- 2OS
We built this as a bit of fun but it's been getting some great responses on Twitter
2012 · workfu.com
- 3IM
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a tool I built to help you quickly find potential customers across social media for your product. It's a really simple concept: you simply paste in your landing page URL, and it shows you highly relevant posts across Reddit (Working to integrate few more) from people who likely need your product or service. For example, if you have a minimal to-do list app, it will show you posts like "Anyone know of a minimal to-do list app?" or "Really starting to dislike how complex Notion is." These posts are from the last 48 hours, updated in real-time, and uniquely…
2024
- 4SL
[1/2] Thursday evening (Mar 26) we made a soft launch for https://uidesigndaily.com (a UI website that I built for my wife) The goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs and get about 30-40 subscribers in the mailing list, to see how the newsletter performs. The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive. Below are some numbers for those interested. I posted it to 4 channels, IH, HN, Reddit and Twitter. It was best received on HN with 203 points, it made it in the top 10, and it stayed on the front page for a good while. Reddit also surprised me, I…
2020
- 5RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021
- 6MF
I recently finished the Front-End Web Development program at General Assembly in San Francisco. My final project turned out being a quick, easy, and free way to convert a Tweet into various properly formatted citations. Inspired by a Hacker News post a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3751295
2013 · tweet2cite.com
- 7GA
hi, TLDR: I’m a programmer/solopreneur who got into online marketing, built a marketplace website, and just finished a book about online marketing that’ll appeal to programmers and other technical types. Now I want to recruit early readers to review it (good or bad–as your please) on Amazon. Any takers (non-binding, of course), contact me here: https://www.jackkinsella.ie/customer_support_requests/new Long Version: Six years ago, I programmed a web app, but it didn’t get much traffic, so I started researching everything on online marketing. I thought the best way to…
2016
- 8ML
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
- 9IM
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
- 10IB
Hey HN, I've just begun my solopreneur journey. I've been a "serial starter" - often starting projects and never seeing them through, and I have finally finished my first project! Maybe this sentiment resonants with some of you, let me know in the comments below I built this tool as a simple no-risk method for turning more visitors into customers by A/B testing your sale promotions and automatically displaying the promotion with the highest conversion rate. Did you know that increasing your conversion rate by just half a percent can have a dramatic impact on your sales without needing…
2024 · smartsalebanner.com
- 11QU
So I just did my semi-annual "log in to Twitter to see if it's any good yet", and found that in my absence I had followed a few thousand new spam accounts. Sweet. That explains why they emailed me and forced me to change my password last year. Being Awesome, Twitter doesn't have any way to simply toss out all your followers and start from scratch. And none of the spammy apps claiming to do so actually will (even seemingly after charging you money to try). So instead, I just pulled open the Dev console and did this:…
2014
- 12SO
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
- 13IM
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
- 14IM
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
- 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
- 16IB
Hey HN,I'm Arthur, solo founder here. After struggling to get consistent traffic for my own startup, I realized I was spending more time guessing how to market than actually building. So I made something small but useful. MediaFast is a simple tool that gives you daily marketing roadmaps for Reddit, X, and LinkedIn. No fluff, just concrete tasks that help you get seen. It covers: – Where and how to post on Reddit without getting banned – What to tweet to get engagement as a SaaS founder – How to grow LinkedIn with cold DMs and soft content Since launching, I’ve gotten 15k+ visitors and $5.7k…
2025 · mediafa.st
- 17IB
Do you want to monetize a private group/ channel/ community? Use Subjoin to create a personal membership page in minutes. It's easy to use and free to try out. No need to integrate Stripe if membership is free. - - - - I have never built something this fast, what a thrill! I saw there was no easy way to create a simple subscription page. Big platforms are confusing and expensive for simple needs. - - - - What are you building? Would love to connect with like-minded people on X: @tjmakingof
2024 · subjoin.me
- 18MS
linkrdr (www.linkrdr.com), a personal link aggregator, was directly inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555923 I read while browsing on HN. It's still a bit rough, but the concept is an interesting one and people have already shown interest. Let me know what you think. Also, if anyone knows a good UX designer, email me :)
2012
- 19IB
This site was born out necessity. I needed a break from the internet we know today: clickbait, politics, low quality content, breaking news, AI summaries Such a breadth of information but so little depth Now I spend (too much of) my time here, going deep. Just when I need to scratch that itch. But I keep coming back because it actually makes me a better engineer. Oh, and I made the site. Right. Anyways, I hope you enjoy crawling the blogs as much as I have. Enjoy! And PLZ reply with any feedback. I am here to make this site better. It will always be free.
2025 · codecrawl.co
- 20AF
As a product manager I've used different feedback tools and almost never liked the design and experience of the widget. And pricing of some existing tools is just way too high, at least for indie makers or small businesses ($35 for 100 responses...). That's why I've launched Freddy Feedback (today!). You can find it on www.freddyfeedback.com. Curious to hear your feedback (very meta ;-)).
2020
- 21BA
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
- 22DR
This isn't your fancy new javascript gizmo, but funny guy with a funny story to promote his toddler app. I'm sure you'll agree. Humor me. 1st let me tell you how I came upon hacker news, and why I read it everyday.<p>I'm not a programmer, and only half-decent designer. I'm much more of a 'project manager' type of person. I wrote a blog post 2 years ago on how to do a fancy trick with css3 with box shadows. It was clever, and has been expanded and implemented all over the web. One day (while sitting in church) my phone kept buzzing every couple of seconds with comments on that blog…
2012
- 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
- 24IB
Hello all, I built about 2 years ago a coding website for kids, teens and adults: https://codeguppy.com Despite my efforts to promote the website it is still not well know. I post almost daily about it on Twitter at https://twitter.com/codeguppy ... but even there I don't have views. The website is fun... although I still have a ton of things to add. I appreciate if you take a look and suggest improvements and most importantly help me with spreading the news about this website. I really need a boost! Thanks all!
2021
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