
Ask HN: Have any side projects from Show HN gone big? - farm_code
Any side projects from Show HN went big in terms of users, revenue or open source etc...
======
antirez
I did not put "Show HN" in the title when I posted Redis here, but an HN post
was the first announcement I did.

~~~
malux85
You probably get this a lot, but I'm going to say it anyway - Thank you for
redis, it's an amazing bit of software and I use it in virtually every
project.

Not only is it useful, but the source code is pure poetry to read.

Thank you again

~~~
antirez
Wow I like your POV about things. Ok seriously, thanks a lot, it's great to do
something that can be useful. Thanks for using it.

~~~
saosebastiao
Just to pile on the praise, I've learned more about the C language reading
Redis' source code than I've learned from two books, a university course, and
dozens of blog posts combined. Keep doing what you're doing, it is an
inspiration.

~~~
antirez
OMG that's awesome. And a bit surprising since Redis internals could be much
much better, if we only could care a bit less about memory / CPU / copy-on-
write issues, and... a bit more time :-)

------
gnicholas
I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going
to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over
12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20
different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my
day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time.

We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed
products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare,
and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as
various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4].

I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me
understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are
(didn't realize how big edu would be).

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784)

2: [http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-
yo...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-you-into-an-
online-speed-reader)

3: [http://www.beelinereader.com](http://www.beelinereader.com)

4: see [https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-
reader/](https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/) and
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc)

[updated to add press and award links]

~~~
hussfelt
1\. Took the test. 2. Was impressed 3. Thought to test for a while 4.
Installed Chrome plugin 5. Opened facebook for some random reason 6. Page
flickering!? Facebook bug? 7. Scrolled 2 times 8. Got smashed in the face by a
full-page ad from Beelinereader 9. Removed plugin and will probably never
install again

You really caught me. This is something I could pay for after trying out for a
while. Do yourself a favour for christmas and investigate if there is any
other way than smashing just recently onboarded users with an ad to raise the
awareness of the fact that this is not free.

Thanks though, really, impressive tech.

~~~
gnicholas
We're in the middle of completely replacing our UI/UX. Last month we finally
got our preferences in the right place (within the B icon instead of in a gear
that floats on top of every page), and we're re-doing the onboarding. Now that
we've figured out how to get things popping down from the B icon, we won't be
taking up the full page anymore.

And just FYI, we don't bombard users with messages all the time—you saw the
instructions and upgrade option, and there is only one other message we show
this way, which is after the 30-day free trial expires. We know our UI sucks
on this, which is why we don't use it to send messages or upsell all the time.
Appreciate the feedback, and hope you'll try us again on Chrome, iOS, or
Android (which is free, BTW).

------
olalonde
DropBox:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

~~~
jen729w
Amazing. This comment must compare to the famous Slashdot takedown of the
iPod.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite
trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and
then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. "

(Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)

~~~
zerr
It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use
dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and
creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.

~~~
laumars
I get that many techies can live without Dropbox and it's ilk (myself
included), but _NOBODY_ should ever be advocating FTP. It's insure (no
encryption - unless you're talking about FTP(E)S, but that introduces it's own
issues), it's broken by design (no clear client/server relationship which can
cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS),
output specs depend on the host OS (eg directory listings), no automatic way
of differentiating between text and binary data so modern FTP clients have to
guess from file extensions (picking the wrong mode will break your files)).
?FTP is outdated - from a bygone era we no longer compute in and thus by
modern standard it's become horrible in every conceivable way.

Thankfully we have SFTP which natively supports chroot (not all FTP servers
do), key-based logins (more secure) as well as passwords, compression, and no
fuzzy callback ports like in FTP. Also sshfs is pretty handy too.

If one needs "anonymous FTP" then you can also throw HTTPS into the list of
better solutions: TLS encryption, compression, smarter handling of MIME types,
and again no stupid fuzzy callback ports.

I don't often say things this strongly, but _FTP should die_.

~~~
gumby
FTP needs no defending -- it was really useful in 1979, but times have changed
(e.g. I suspect every machine on the Internet uses an 8-bit byte). One point
you wrote surprised me though:

> no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and
> filewalls (particularly if running with TLS)

Really, crocks like NAT and stateful firewalls should die. Layers 4 and below
are inherently peer-peer -- the net should not treat endpoints differently
(i.e. should not privilege some over others). That simply encourages a
"client" or "consumer" mentality in both the technical and social senses.

~~~
martinald
The thing is while NAT is horrible for what you're saying, it probably did
more to improve security than anything else, which wasn't it's primary goal.

I remember what the internet was like when ADSL/cable models first came along.
Everyone was getting pwned none stop. Any RCE could easily be applied by
scanning a consumers DSL/cable IP pool and you'd be able to hit a very high
%age of them.

NAT totally stopped this.

~~~
laumars
It was the firewalling that stopped those attacks. Granted you could argue
that the firewalls only came popular in households because routers were
shipped to address a need for NATing but pragmatically we really should have
been installing firewalls on our PCs in the pre-router days of the internet.

------
louprado
Somewhat related, it wasn't Show HN but _show YC_ that turned my side-project
into a business. YC's Application has the question "what have you hacked that
wasn't a computer". That question compelled me to create a hack that converted
a cheap ($10 in some cases) bluetooth headset into a garage door opener
compatible with any smartphone. It didn't even require an App. I posted a
Youtube video and then submitted my eventually rejected YC application.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo)

So many people watched that video they started asking me to sell the fully
assembled project. Soon a polite C & D -ish letter from Samsung forced me to
stop selling until I made my own hardware which I did in November of 2014.

5 years later I still have growth and sales. Next year I hope to make an
enterprise version that would allow shipping companies to leave packages in
your garage when you aren't home. I'll be sure to post that on Show HN.
Regardless I owe YC a lot of gratitude as just the process of applying changed
my life.

~~~
jlgaddis
> _... would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when
> you aren 't home._

I wouldn't expect them to actually do that. Between the girlfriend and myself,
we get a lot of packages. They usually leave them by the garage door because
it's easier / closer. We've told them before they can leave them inside the
(unlocked) garage but the general response is "we can't".

~~~
louprado
Agreed. I'll focus on smaller delivery companies and services at first that
have a direct relationship with their customers.

Long term it isn't clear how to initiate a relationship with the largest
shippers. It's possible I'll spend years calling into those accounts with
nothing to show for it.

~~~
dpandey
I've usually found it more effective to go to a tradeshow where they might
show up. They're usually in an exploring and deal making mentality at the
shows, and usually at least one senior person is present. A lot of deals get
started at tradeshows.

------
capnrefsmmat
This isn't exactly a software project, but I posted in a "What are you working
on?" thread three years ago about my book, _Statistics Done Wrong_ :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796)

Someone posted it on the front page soon after:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843)

Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been
translated into German, Korean, and Chinese:
[https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/](https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/)

I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention
to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention
without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended
up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.)

Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if
there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing
actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even
more clear to me, and the need even clearer.

~~~
rpeden
Looks like a great book! I think I'll have to buy a copy.

It's interesting that you found the attention the HN post brought helped you
focus and finish the book.

Lately, I've been trying to pay more attention to the Show HN section of the
site, giving upvotes to interesting projects and commenting or asking
questions where I can.

I think that lots of us here could improve the HN community by giving more
attention to Show HN posts, even for projects that seem easy or mundane to
those of us who have been developers for a while.

The simpler projects might be the ones where encouragement helps the most.
Without that kind of encouragement from more experienced developers 7 years
ago, I probably wouldn't have a software career right now at all.

------
bharani_m
I did a Show HN for Resumonk back in 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370)

I was in college then and found making a well-formatted resume a huge pain
when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that
particular post and went full time on it after passing out of college.

We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that
qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our
users that make us super happy -
[https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials](https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials)

Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863)

------
silverlight
I did a Show HN for Roll20 right after launching:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532754)

We now have almost 2 million users and a small team working on it full-time. I
definitely originally thought it would only be a side project...

~~~
Gruselbauer
I just sent that link to a dozen people and am already trying to get my
scattered-over-the-globe circle of high school friends to agree to a reunion
of our Shadowrun group.

Hadn't heard of your site so far. Cannot believe it. Thank you so much!

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
Aw maaaan... I really hope one day I actually get to play a (pen-and-paper)
game of Shadowrun. I can't believe it's been so long and it's still never
happened X-)

~~~
Gruselbauer
Most comic book and games stores have boards where you can search for groups.
Craigslist maybe too? It's not such an uncommon hobby and if you find no group
to join you could always start your own!

Go for it. It's such fun.

------
moqups
Moqups:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992)

We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the
founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The
feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go
from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That
day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.

~~~
donutdan4114
We really like using Moqups here. We've architected, wireframed, and sold some
big projects because of it. :)

~~~
moqups
Thanks for letting us know! We're happy to hear that.

We've changed the product quite a bit in response to the huge projects that
our users create on our design platform. Nevertheless, we've also faced quite
a few engineering issues in respect to browser performance and real time
backend data synchronization.

------
nixy
CoffeeScript:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080)

~~~
Swizec
I'm so happy the good bits of CoffeeScript are now part of vanilla JavaScript
and we no longer need compilers for frontend work.

Oh wait ...

~~~
lucideer
We never did and CoffeeScript had no good parts.

~~~
TheCoreh
Destructuring assignment, arrow functions, shorthand variable syntax in object
literals are some examples of good Coffee Script features that made it into
ES6

~~~
holydude
Who is using CoffeeScripts these days apart from github ? I like CoffeeScript
but I am sad it did not get the momentum.

~~~
IMTDb
I am a backend developer working in Ruby. As a senior programmer I sometimes
have to help juniors on the frontend side. When I need to write frontend JS, I
still often write Coffeescript, compile it and copy paste the resulting JS as
"my code". I haven't had the time to look in ES6 and newer JS technologies,
but at least I know that the JS I provide follows most good practices.

~~~
holydude
I'd like to reply to both of you. I like CoffeeScript mainly because it's so
similar to Ruby and convenient to use. I have not thought about using the "raw
generated js". How does it work for you ?

What if you would choose to work with something like React or Ember ?

------
ThomPete
Not shure about your definition of big but
[https://www.ghostnoteapp.com](https://www.ghostnoteapp.com) is doing pretty
well. Living in NY with a family being the sole provider it doesent work, but
had we moved somewhere less expensive it probably could and i am growing both
rev, userbase and product

Here is the original Show HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007)

------
pcarmichael
I posted an Ask HN to review my side project PCPartPicker about six years ago.
Got great feedback and things grew from there. I went full-time, had to hire
employees, etc. Not big like Dropbox, but we made it over the hump self-funded
and without taking investment.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123)

~~~
rosstex
Thanks for building this fantastic site, I use it all the time! What's your
business model?

~~~
pcarmichael
Glad you like it! We make money through affiliate deals with the retailers we
list.

------
jordanielewski
Webflow:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499)
Gitlab:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278)

~~~
callmevlad
Yep, I posted about Webflow's submission in a similar thread a while back:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032849)

------
kevinwang
Not a show hn, but 2048 went pretty big. I don't know if this was the starting
point or not;
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566)

~~~
honksillet
Obligatory mention that 2048 is just a variation of Threes.
[http://asherv.com/threes/](http://asherv.com/threes/)

------
smagch
Product Hunt:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7144815)

------
phelm
Gumroad:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614)

~~~
ikeboy
So you pivoted from link-shortening to actual content, interesting.

In my industry (reselling) a lot of people use gumroad to sell information,
anything from product leads to guides to bulk lists for scanning (for online
arbitrage) to chrome extensions. I did it myself briefly and made around $250,
but I'm sure people are making a lot more than that.

It's just an incredibly useful tool even for technical people who could set up
a store, still saves time.

Edit: the SSL cert on [https://help.gumroad.com](https://help.gumroad.com) is
expired for 3 months. You should fix that.

------
juanre
[http://greaterskies.com](http://greaterskies.com), back in 2011
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066684)),
personalized high-resolution maps of the sky as seen from a place and at a
time.

Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it
is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now
many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and
it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.

------
maximp
Codecademy:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156)

------
josephwandile
Fairly certain that Segment ([https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segment-
io#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segment-io#/entity))
debuted on HN. The original business was failing, but they decided to give it
a last shot and posted their open-sourced code from v1.

You can hear Peter talk about it with Aaron Harris here:
[https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-
episode...](https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-
episode-39-segment-founder-peter-reinhardt-mattermark-ceo-danielle-morrill)

------
sashthebash
In 2011 I did a Show HN for a project called StorageRoom
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041))
and got some interesting feedback.

Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful
([https://www.contentful.com](https://www.contentful.com)) has raised a Series
B (total funding close to $20m), got ~100 employees and customers ranging from
Jack in the Box, over Nike to Urban Outfitters.

It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime
soon :)

------
zlagen
Nomadlist:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222)

------
Rezo
Cloudcraft:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942)

Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago.
Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize
their AWS environments.

------
adnanh
Don't know what your definition of 'big' is, but my open source project
webhook got some attention after posting Show HN:
[https://github.com/adnanh/webhook](https://github.com/adnanh/webhook)

Anything >0 is better than 0... :-)

------
gorkemcetin
Countly started as a hobby like 4 years ago and it was open source (still is,
most parts). Now it tracks more than 11K Android apps according to Mobbo.com,
which makes Countly #7 the most used mobile analytics platform. Team is still
small (<15), bootstrapped and added a lot more features on top till then.
Roughly 1900 stars pn Github. Not bad ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254)

------
chrischen
Instapainting.com. And I've been showing HN ever since.

------
laksmanv
I launched SideProjectBook.com on HN. It ended up netting ~$15K that month,
not sure if that is considered "big."

~~~
npolet
I do like how SideProjectBook.com uses gumroad.com (which is 3 posts above
this one at the time of writing) to sell the book. It's like a family in here.

------
borski
Don't know if we count as big yet, but we're doing very very well:
[https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com)

~~~
jayfk
I really don't like the onboarding process so far.

\- Typed in a URL to get a free scan

\- Needed to create an account

\- Needed to confirm my email

\- Needed to verify my site ownership

\- Got a mail that my site is "borderline insecure". When I click on the link,
I'm redirected to the "create an account view"

\- Created a new account that opened in a half cropped Iframe displaying some
error message I can't read.

This is where I finally gave up.

~~~
helb
It says that "Your website is BORDERLINE UNSAFE" after a while even if you
leave the account form blank and just keep the page opened in a background
tab.

Better yet, it probably does that for any URL – see c8g's comment about
Google, i've tried HN and a few of my own sites, all with the same results.
Even tried to give it it's own address, but it "is not permitted".

So I thought that maybe it just displays that message after some timeout
without doing any actual checks, bit like these sketchy fake antivirus sites.
But nope – when i point it to a subdomain with access_log enabled, i see it
actually makes a bunch of requests. So maybe they just have such high
standards that the entire web is "borderline unsafe" from their point of view.

~~~
borski
The scan we run from the homepage is a rudimentary scan that only scans for
client-side vulnerabilities, since we can't scan for server-side issues until
you've verified ownership. As a result, we can't give you a clean bill of
health until you've run a full scan, which is why you see that. If you verify
ownership, you'll see any issues we found and be able to run a full scan which
can give you a clean bill of health if it doesn't find anything.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'm not using your app but I assume it's not as clear as your comment based on
upthread posts. You might want to modify the app to show both client and
server side results with server saying "unknown: must verify ownership first."
That would eliminate the confusion.

~~~
borski
This is good feedback. Thanks.

------
nailer
CertSimple was announced with a 'Show HN' post (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908)
) that led to its first paying customer. We did around 12K GBP in revenue last
month and have Travis CI, CrowdCube, and Motley Fool as customers.

------
john_mac
Virwire: [https://virwire.com](https://virwire.com)

Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still
got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the
only promotion to date.

Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.

------
stevenklein
StatusPage.io -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470)

------
leafo
itch.io:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029)

I don't know where the big cutoff is, but it's been going strong for the past
3.5 years. There are just under 50k games on it now
[https://itch.io](https://itch.io)

------
shanbhag
[https://bento.io](https://bento.io)

------
marknadal
Yes, we immediately got picked up by an SF accelerator, then I was able to
raise a seed round from billionaire investors Tim Draper and Marc Benioff of
Salesforce. Then hired a team, got an MVP out to developers and gained a ton
of traction, and now we're about to launch our stable/production-ready
release!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558)
For our Open Source Firebase: [http://gun.js.org/](http://gun.js.org/) !

