Brainly. App I hacked while you watched the Facebook IPO

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!

Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…

I've been working on an app in my spare time for about the past 6 months in between my day job and taking care of my 10 month old daughter. I'm launching a beta today and would love to get the communities feedback. It's called Pagify and it's an app that allows you to build custom Facebook tabs using their new iframe method. I'm quite proud of the fact that I actually got this out the door. This past year my life has been quite hectic. Let me know your thoughts and give me a "Like" if so inclined :). Thanks View the app at http://pagifyapp.com Skip the Marketing stuff and go straight to the…

I'm a solo dev. A few years ago, I got addicted to Reddit. Spent months in that loop. Being a programmer, I thought I'd be clever. Redirected Reddit's domain to nowhere in my DNS file. Worked great until I'd just... open the file and undo it 20 minutes later. So I made it irreversible. Locked the DNS file so it can't be edited unless I boot my Mac in safe mode. And if I do that, there's a script that instantly locks it again. Haven't used Reddit since last year. Problem solved, right? Wrong. I just replaced Reddit with Twitch and YouTube. Started keeping streams running in the background…

Hey HN, As someone who geeks out on both investment data and privacy tech, I built Capitally to scratch my own itch. It's encrypted on-device so that once I can afford to hire a second engineer, he cannot peek into my own data! I wanted a way to monitor ALL my investments (stocks, crypto, real estate, angel investments, etc.) in one place and really dig into the data - but without compromising my privacy. Here's how Capitally makes that possible: On the data side: Import data from CSVs, spreadsheets, or any other source via a flexible no-code editor Map any data format into a standardized…

I was just browsing through the "Who got hired?" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36160198) and it caused me to think about all of the things that happened in my real life due to HN. In 2012 I was hired from a post in the "Who's Hiring" thread that turned out to be a complete life and career transformation. It was at a very famous company that everyone here has heard of and used. They were pre-IPO and I got to be a "part" of that IPO. It exposed me to people smarter than I had ever met, and allowed me to learn from them. It allowed me a path into "big tech" that I…