

Ask HN: who started something in 2012 that didn't or won't become profitable? - sylvinus


======
josscrowcroft
I launched Open Exchange Rates (<http://openexchangerates.org>) - the _Robin
Hood_ of exchange rate (FX) data - which collects exchange rates every hour
and distributes them for free via a GitHub repository, in a nice, clean,
simple JSON API - with values going back to 1999.

It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots
of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects
- big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice
people.

Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm
currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features
for a very small cost.

The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for
are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering
much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at
a _far_ cheaper rate than the current incumbents!

~~~
omarkj_
Are you crawling for this data? Also, since currency is a tricky thing to
price (almost any bank/broker can trade currencies) how do you select the
"most correct" price?

Great project btw!

~~~
josscrowcroft
Yeah, currently collecting from Yahoo! Finance, which has a fairly accurate
but hard-to-use API. Advantage that OXR offers is that it's super easy, and
responses are about 10x faster and 350x smaller.

Pretty soon it'll be collecting from other services too and taking averages,
with a few slightly more complex moving parts, as well as calculations and
statistics - that's where we need to beef up the server and start making some
dough though.

Also very soon we're starting to collect other types of 'freely available'
trade and economics data, and adding value to it in other ways!

------
jontonsoup
I built <http://stalltalk.info/>. Its a toilet based social network. The
amount of fun I have had with this far outweighs the profitability.

~~~
prezjordan
This sounds like an amazing project! I bet you taught/learned quite a bit -
I'm looking to start a couple hackathons at my school (barely any webdevs!)
and I'd love to churn out projects like these.

------
kamens
Launched an app to get your congress reps on the phone w/ a single button -
<http://www.airshipsoftware.com/contact-congress>

Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of
calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.

~~~
teebs
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in--software for civic
engagement.

A few friends and I are working on an app and website that lists corporations'
political contributions. The mobile feature that makes it interesting is that
you can scan barcodes to find out the political contributions from those
products right away--inspired by Boycott SOPA
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsop...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsopa.android&hl=en)

I'd really appreciate it if we could talk some time about publishing an iPhone
app. I'm still in college, so I don't have much experience with iPhone App
publishing and would really appreciate some advice, especially for a non-
profit app dealing with politics.

~~~
kamens
Shoot me an email -- kamens@gmail.com. Limited wisdom here, but who knows :).

------
daeken
A week or two ago I launched <http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/> to enable
WebGL on iOS devices. In theory, it's profitable -- it cost me nothing
(outside of a few hours of dev, which I spent on myself anyway) and has made a
whopping $26 or so -- but it'll never really go above that, and 'sales' have
already stagnated. It was interesting to see the breakdown of downloads versus
payment, and how much people paid. I also wonder how much I would've made if I
put it up for, say, $1 only.

Edit: Also interesting that it got quite a bit of attention on HN and several
hundred (maybe 400?) downloads and not a single sale (from what I could tell).
That surprised me a bit; every sale has been driven by people coming from
tweets that some big names in the jailbreaking scene retweeted.

------
bearwithclaws
Richerd and I built <http://sinkorship.com/> about a month ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899231>. Got on the HN front page for
10+ hours, tons of attention, tweets, press etc.

Except nobody paid.

~~~
vineet
I liked the idea. But perhaps it needs to be tweaked. Getting gaming right is
hard. Maybe:

* offer a $100 credit to start off.

* offer more services than just a tweet if successful - for example a very simple feedback widget that shows up.

* charge only for delaying ship dates, but not for changing what is being shipped, or for minor delays (say within a week).

* don't charge if the person accepts public humiliation with a tweet saying "I sucked and did not ship my planned item.".

------
okal
I launched <http://hackershelf.com> on Valentine's Day. It stayed on the
frontpage for a little more than a day -
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963>. Save for a few Flattrs,
haven't made a cent from it, though that was never the plan. I have, however,
met a bunch of interesting people because of it, received a job offer, an
investment offer and a few advertising inquiries. Learning alot from the
experience :)

~~~
clarky07
That looks pretty useful, though I'm confused as to how you could possibly
make money on it? I was hoping, and expected, that their would be amazon
affiliate links. If I'm going to buy one, it's going to be on Amazon. It makes
the site more useful to me, and you could make a little bit of pocket change
anyways.

~~~
okal
I thought about that, but aside from bug fixes, I can't really give it much
time at the moment because of my classes (final year). I did play with some
affiliate links from <http://udemy.com> for a while but it didn't work out so
I dropped them and added Flattr instead. Definitely something to explore again
when I have more time. Thanks for the pointers.

~~~
clarky07
Yeah I don't know how much traffic you get, but I have just a small page (read
blog post) that does something similar (popular books for a certain niche)
that I wrote a couple years ago that makes several hundred dollars a year.
Traffic to it isn't huge either. The CPM for me is like $40 on that page.

------
nhebb
I updated my circa 2007 website design last week to a more modernized look
based on twitter bootstrap and my sales plummeted. Does that count?

~~~
mikedmiked
If you were to include screenshots and write a blog post on this it could
generate a discussion which could get you some useful feedback (and promote
your site on HN).

~~~
nhebb
That's a good idea. I'll write a postmortem after the fact, but right now I'm
busy reverting the site to its former state. Conversions dropped ~75%, so it's
beyond the point where its practical to tweak the design in order to get it
back to par. The entire goal was to increase conversions. It didn't. Rewind.

~~~
genwin
Please do write that postmortem. I'm very interested in the subject of older
designs that are more popular than the ones using the latest & supposedly
greatest tools.

------
Whitespace
I made <http://tutorials.github.com>. It's a variant of a larger project I'm
working on to make documentation more personalized and more awesome. I hacked
it together during the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in
Philadelphia, and I posted it to HN, but it never made it to the homepage.

I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how
to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was
a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited.

I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even
for an MVP for the high-tech crowd.

Edit: typo and clickable link

------
scottorn
I loved this discussion and I learned a lot from reading the responses. I have
a side project that is not profitable but has been around for almost 4 years.
It's called Ben's Friends (<http://bensfriends.org/>) and we build patient
support groups for people with rare diseases (here is our 60 second video:
<http://youtu.be/YBeRFnJkleU>).

It's almost impossible to monetize a patient support site, especially for rare
diseases, so I've known for a long time we wouldn't make money. However, we've
become one of the largest patient support networks on the Internet. I've put a
lot of my money into it and we've run out of money many time, but something
good always happens and we stay afloat.

Here is some unsolicited advice:

-Keep your side project alive for as long as you enjoy it. You never know how things will change. When we started there was no such thing as crowdfunding. Last year we managed to pay all the bills through an IndieGoGo campaign: [http://www.indiegogo.com/Bens-Friends-Builds-Support-Groups-...](http://www.indiegogo.com/Bens-Friends-Builds-Support-Groups-for-Patients-With-Rare-Diseases) \- we never dreamed Crowdfunding would exist, now it's our lifeblood. Reading through many of the responses below, they are public service projects. It's very likely you could do at least a small crowdfunding to pay the bills if you need it.

-Who cares if you don't make money? You get to do something you love. That makes you incredibly lucky. Also, almost every person here has tons of opportunities so you can make money on something else. Again, that makes you lucky.

-Change the way you measure success. Most people measure success with money. Since we weren't going to make any money on Ben's Friends, we started measuring how many thank you emails we received every day. I get about 25 thank you notes a day - completely unsolicited. Your measurement may be usage, or reach or whether your girlfriend likes your app. Whatever it is, focus on that. It will make you a lot happier than money.

-If you are going to do something that doesn't make a lot of money, do it with a partner. It will be more fun, you'll pick each other up when things are down, and with both of you brainstorming and iterating, there is a much better chance it will get traction and eventually become something. Ben's Friends never would have gone anywhere without my partner, Ben Munoz. Good partnerships turn into great friendships and they are one of the best things about starting something.

Hope this helps. thanks for posting a great question.

------
xpose2000
I created a site based off of the idea of Facebook Timeline, except for a
professional player's career. It's called Player Career Timeline. It works for
just about any NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL player and the data goes back 5 years.

For example, LeBron James' career timeline:
<http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/>

It works by aggregating thousands of stories over the years and assigns them
to a specific player/sport. Then I monitor how users interact with the stories
to formulate trends in his career. Each story presented in the timeline has a
link back to the original source so you can read the full article.

I already had all of this data from my main site and thought it would be fun
to use it in another way.

~~~
Lorin
Is most of the system automated? How much hand holding is actually required
while creating the timeline?

~~~
xpose2000
It's entirely automated.

------
tomasien
This is the coolest fucking thread ever! I'm learning so much!

Is there anything more useful than taking all the bragging out of Hacker News
and seeing what didn't quite work, or works but isn't blowing up? These are
the great lessons

~~~
sylvinus
totally agree ;-)

------
garethsprice
I built <http://www.giftstrong.com/> that pulls the 100 top rated products
from Amazon.

It was built over a weekend to experiment with the Yii PHP framework and
because I wanted to see what the list looked like (wasn't disappointed,
there's some surprising stuff on there - like how Braveheart on DVD is
mankind's greatest accomplishment according to Amazon).

I was considering promoting it as a quick way to find gifts for people and use
it for this purpose myself, but I have more profitable/enjoyable things to be
doing.

~~~
iSloth
Great website, would be even better if it noticed I was from the UK, and then
showed UK Amazon results :)

~~~
garethsprice
Thanks for the suggestion! If it generates profit in the current version I'd
love to expand it to other countries.

------
iSloth
Only project I have done this year (<http://route.im>), makes $xx/pm however
doubt that it would ever cover the server costs, especially when more
locations are added.

Although it was done more for me, than generating revenue, so that's not too
bad.

~~~
zschallz
You could do an Ookla like thing and create a mini version people can host. My
server seems to be in the same place as yours, otherwise I wouldn't have
minded hosting one.

------
iuguy
I wrote a proposal for Tiger Scheme[1] to radically alter the structure of the
scheme and change the general direction, in effect a reboot of the scheme. If
it's accepted, it'll be a shedload of work with no financial reward and a
massive time sink, but it has the potential to really change information
security in the UK and help with the skills shortage in industry so it's
worthwhile.

[1] - <http://www.tigerscheme.org/>

------
n_coats
We've silently launched Photofable. It's a social site aimed at promoting
global culture exchange through photography and descriptions. Can be used as a
travel tool as well. The focus is for each photos description to be
informative or educational about the place it was taken.

<http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php>

~~~
cheatercheater
feedback: those oblong shapes and the square images make your site ugly.
Strongly suggest using a lot of golden ratio on everything. Really love your
idea, I hope you stick to it.

------
daveid
I built <http://artistsnclients.com> \- It was an idea I had back in 2011 but
couldn't find time to do. Now I built it, but it doesn't seem to be viable. I
had a few people test it and the profit is at about $4 right now.

At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to
financial processing.

~~~
genwin
Get rid of the warning "use at your own risk". That's what the Terms of
Service is for, on every site.

~~~
daveid
Yeah.. replaced it with just a Beta message. I feel like it's right to
indicate that it's still in development. Thanks!

I'm quite surprised I got any upvotes.

------
benjlang
I started <http://blisscontrol.com> and <http://notificationcontrol.com> which
won't be profitable.

~~~
michaelmartin
Those sites are great! It's a nuisance finding your way around so many social
networks and their different settings pages. Bookmarking your sites, thanks
for building them!

------
m4xt3r
We've launched <http://heattest.com/> two months ago. It's an app for heatmap
analytics, which was a pretty hardcore to develop. We've spent a lot of time
to make the algorithm really good and reliable, but so far we have like 3 sign
ups in total, all of them for free trials. The market looked really promising
at first.

~~~
phaemon
I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful.

You spell "conversion" incorrectly in two different ways and your grammar is
poor ("Why noone...").

If I were you I'd get the site redesigned, preferably by a professional web
designer.

Maybe slim the main page down to your banner, a tag-line saying what the
product is and a "Try It Now" button. I don't want to sign up for anything;
why not let me demo it on your site in real-time?

And where's the initial Wow? There's a heatmap picture on the main page but
nothing happens when I click it. Why not have the image work as a heatmap too?

Sorry to be so negative, but maybe you'll get better results if you fix some
or all of those things?

~~~
white_devil
> I'm sorry to say this, but your website is awful.

I agree about "noone", but I don't think the website can be called _awful_.
It's certainly quite pretty.

~~~
phaemon
Fair enough, I was talking about the content more than the look. The top half
is certainly nice enough. The lower half is too noisy with an excess of that
"writing" stuff. I didn't get where I am today by reading! I want cool stuff I
can click on! ;)

------
vishnumenon
I built <http://ziposit.com>, for super-simple website hosting. I was going to
add ads when I started getting users, but users never came. Still fun.

------
mzarate06
We started TimePanel (<http://timepanel.net>) this year. I love building apps,
and always wanted a really fast, simple way to track time and invoice.
TimePanel is the result of taking the small, private app I've always used for
that and deciding to build it into a product with speed and simplicity being
primary goals.

Its 3rd beta update was released in May, and we're hoping to launch very soon.
While its technically not profitable, it does have a small # of users, and we
still have the payment system to hook up.

Despite it being very young, building it has been an incredible amount of
work, and one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had.

------
xpressyoo
I've released Gmelius (<http://gmelius.com>) a few months ago, a cross-browser
extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox.

Gmelius made the first page of HN
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153>) and has been featured on
TechCrunch, Lifehacker and other tech related news sites since then.

The idea was and still is to propose some enhancements to the new Gmail UI.
Donations are welcome and are currently just sufficient to pay the coffee/beer
intake necessary to adapt the code to constant Gmail changes and provide some
new features ;)

~~~
xpose2000
Awesome project. I've been using this since that hacker news post. How often
do you find yourself updating the code due to gmail changes?

------
penguinsix
I built an app that shows the air pollution levels in Hong Kong based on
Western standards, primarily because I couldn't understand the local
governments rather lax air quality index. I'll probably never recoup the
development costs or even the server expense, but I didn't think it would be
right to charge for it. In a heavily polluted place, some folks with asthma
and respiratory problems or even young children simply shouldn't go out on
certain days.

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hong-kong-air-
pollution/id504...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hong-kong-air-
pollution/id504536152?ls=1&mt=8)

------
sherbondy
I created <http://www.sherbondy.com>, a website that gives family members free
subdomains @sherbondy.com. Learned Clojure while making it. Wrote the entire
thing in Clojure and ClojureScript. Tons of fun. I've even open-sourced it so
that others can do the same for their families:
<https://github.com/sherbondy/sherbondy.com>

Still need to fix/optimize a bunch of stuff and better document/test, but it
was a nice break from studying for exams. And man am I loving Clojure.

------
tsieling
We launched an open source web app that creates a social network around every
bus stop in our region. It got us lots of press but is offered free to the
region, and to any other municipality with transit info in GTFS format. We
loved working on it and love seeing people posting comments. Details at
<http://denimandsteel.com/work/this-is-our-stop> and repo at
<https://github.com/denimandsteel/thisisourstop>

------
tylerneylon
I built <http://thecostofknowledge.com/>

This is a place for research authors to support open access ~= the idea that
research should be free to read when the authors want it to be. Specifically,
the site is about boycotting one particular academic publisher, Elsevier, by
pledging never again to do free labor for them (submitting, reviewing, editing
papers). So far over 12,000 people have signed up. I see this as part of a
larger movement of academics away from research-behind-paywalls.

------
iisbum
I started tchvlly: <http://tchvlly.com> is a community site for the tech
valley region of new york.

I don't expect it will ever make any money!

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I launched <http://websocket.us/> to tell people about WebSocket. Unlike its
competitor, websocket.org, it's not for profit.

~~~
prezjordan
Been looking for something like this for quite some time! May I donate?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
For what reason? To say thanks?

And, yeah, email me and I can send you my PayPal address.

------
jtolj
I quietly launched/brought out of beta <http://requeue.com> this year. I built
it mainly for myself, since I found myself watching more and more long-format
web video and wanted a better way to organize it.

The terms of the Youtube API pretty much rule out monetizing the site with
advertising, but usage has (sadly?) been low enough that I just eat the cost
of the two Linodes it takes to run.

~~~
cheatercheater
How about this: let a user enter a tag (#awesome, #sxswi) and your app trolls
the tag's search results on twitter for videos. They get sorted by hotness and
presented as a playlist. New things get added to the end.

~~~
jtolj
Thanks for the suggestion. When I initially starting brainstorming on the
idea, I had some Twitter integration included: auto-adding videos from your
timeline (stolen from the Boxee folks) and hashtag "subscriptions"... but it
started getting more convoluted to explain to people, so I thought I'd start
more simply with just allowing folks to subscribe to "shows".

Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (great signup conversion
rates, terrible usage rates), so when I have time I may reboot it as something
more like what you're describing.

I still think there is something to the idea of improving the leanback and
placeshifting experience for all this great long format web content that's out
there (Rev3, This Week In, etc). I'm apparently just not smart enough to
figure it out on my own ;p.

~~~
cheatercheater
I understand what the leanback format is, but what is the placeshifting
experience?

Also: if you want to say thanks, just click the tiny triangle pointing up next
to my name. That's how we give out happiness around here.

~~~
jtolj
This is so old, you may not see this... but placeshifting -> start watching in
one place (laptop/work), close window, pick up where you left off in the video
later (Boxee Box/home).

------
RBerenguel
I wrote whatlanguageis.com (still early beta with just 7 languages and a less
than decent identifier) as a test of django abilities. It was fun!

~~~
marquis
This is a great idea but it returned Dutch for "voy al supermercado", though
it was correct for "ik ga naar de supermarkt' and 'je vais au supermarché'.
Good luck!

~~~
RBerenguel
For very short phrases the data corpora are too shallow. I have to improve
that, and the identifier logic, and... The most important part was discovering
that django is amazingly fun & simple. Thanks for the encouragement :)

~~~
marquis
Right, that makes sense that you need a bigger chunk of data. You could fix
that on the user end by just adding a note 'works best with more input'.

~~~
RBerenguel
Yes, but I also want some kind of enforcement: for short phrases I want to
check for being in corpora, if it is clearly in a language I don't want to say
"write more," but just identify the language and only in dubious cases put the
blame on the user. Ahh, if I had more time and less projects I'd finish this
right now :)

------
guruz
We started to offer hosting for the Quassel IRC client. Not sure if this will
make enough money this year to pay for the server we're running it on.

But at least it is a small start in transitioning to be some kind of product
company instead of just doing consulting/contracting.

<http://woboq.com/quassel.html>

------
hmgauna
This year I built <http://inflooenz.com> It's a tool to explore music
influences. I have around 100 visitors each day, but I'm a bit stacked with
the site as a product. At the beginning I did some PR. I had some ideas for
monetizing, but those are yet to be proved (analytics so far are not showing a
good scenario). I had some really cool feedback for the music community, and a
lot of ideas for features, but I don't want to start adding features without a
clear reason and direction. Right now, I'm working on site engagement, because
I think I'm not taking full profit from my already existent visitors. I wasn't
hoping to be profitable in the short term, but I expected more feedback and
real interest in the product (some to-be-developed features right now allow
people to leave their email if they wish to hear from me, but that didn't
happen often).

PS: Anyways, this was very good as a personal challenge!

------
blueprint
Blueprint - <https://blueprint.io> \- platform for developing native iOS apps
without writing any code (order of magnitude less time spent on development,
rapid iteration by non-developers possible, able to generate any app at
runtime).

Actually interviewed at YC but they declined to fund me cause of competition
from Apple and Google (see Apple's recent patents and Google's forway into
codeless dev - I was actually suspicious if Apple took some of my
innovations). I decided to put it on ice and pursue one of my old EE projects
which is actually more important to me.

Nowadays I'm working with Pair (<http://trypair.com>) and do have a few firms
interested in acquiring blueprint, so might actually be able to pass the torch
and get something out of it to fund my next ventures. For that matter, anyone
interested in learning more can email me at paul@blueprint.io.

------
7402
I launched <http://www.notaplex.com> for the iPad: "Nota plex - write notes,
lists, and outlines." None of the note-writing apps that were available were
what I wanted, so I learned iOS programming and wrote this one. Also I got to
use old-school lex & yacc programming for the in-line calculator part.

~~~
adrinavarro
That reminds me to this app: <http://www.thinkbookapp.com/> (I used comic
zeal, from the same publisher)

I've always wanted to use something like that to take notes quickly, does it
combine well with a bluetooth keyboard?

~~~
7402
Yes. <http://www.notaplex.com/can-app-be-used-external-keyboard>

------
adjwilli
The iPad needed animated GIF creation, but nobody wants to pay for one.
<http://gifpl.us>

------
pre
I built an AWS image for launching a bunch of machines and using them as a
Blender Render farm. It'd need work to make it secure enough for public use,
and I have too many other things on to get around to that. It does what I need
though, and I like the feeling of power of clicking a button and knowing so
many large computers start calculating for me :)

~~~
mariocesar
You have to know, if you release it. I will buy it!

------
Jacob4u2
Launched an HTML5 offline app analytics library - <http://discolytics.com>.
Not profitable, but haven't really tried to market it. Was originally
developed for another clients project and figured someone else out there had a
similar need.

I regret nothing, great learning experience, the whole thing.

------
peteretep
We launched <http://www.placesteal.com/> \- an app for pushing postal
addresses from the browser to your phone - and no-one really cared :-) Trying
to find the time to open-source the JS part for extracting addresses from
DOMs...

------
waxjar
I launched a simple app that puts new music releases in your iCal / Google
Calendar or on a RSS Feed. It didn't really catch on, I've sort of given up.
The UI kinda sucks too, I realised.

<http://nearupon.herokuapp.com/>

------
ngcoders
Locux - Low cost linux , we are trying to create open source very low cost
linux platform ... it wont be profitable :) .

<http://www.ngcoders.com/category/projects/locux-projects>

------
nrp
I'm building open source motion tracking hardware.
<http://adjacentreality.org>

While I do plan on manufacturing and selling the things this year, I'm going
to price it as close as possible to break even.

------
typpo
I made a site that computes and ranks the mining value of 580,000 asteroids in
our solar system (<http://asterank.com>). It has grown in popularity, but
obviously does not lend itself well to monetization.

~~~
cheatercheater
Until you start a bond market around it.

------
fmstephe
I am writing a location service to allow people to add 'local interaction'
easily to an application. There is a demo of a multiplayer tankwars clone
using it at

battlewith.me.uk

The initial idea was that when I was young I played games on a single computer
with a shared computer, things like Tankwars, Worms and Mortal Kombat. That
was a lot more fun for me than fragging strangers over the internet.

After the web-demo I would like to look at mobile apps. Actually about to post
a Show HN of it very soon.

Source @ <https://github.com/fmstephe/location_server>

------
leothom
Although not really a tech company, I started <http://www.thoughtthreads.org/>
with a few university friends. We don't expect it to be profitable since it's
a non-profit. :)

~~~
schrijver
Cool; I’d have put a dash in there thought-threads.org, kind of hard to read
like this

------
corentino
I launched <http://www.jaimelesstartups.fr> with a friend in mid february.

Goal is to make french startup famous ... in France. No ads ! No business
model ! (cost us zero since it's hosted on my server I use for my projets) We
started with 3 visitors/day now we are at 200. Got a partnership with the
French techcrunch Got contacts with famous french entrepreneurs to interview

We are happy and we continue to work hard (I work all day long) Actually, I'm
working on the design (which is not that easy for an engineer...)

Any feedback are more than welcome

------
sushidev
I've created <http://pazler.com>, and it isn't making any profits :) Built
using Clojure, Postgresql, StringTemplate, hosted at Hetzner. Learned quite a
lot of things in the process..

~~~
iSloth
Looks a bit like <http://pinterest.com/> ;)

~~~
sushidev
Any self respecting programmer must create a Pinterest clone these days.. lol

------
ComNik
I started Rankique - <http://www.rankique.com/> \- basically a price tracking
app.

Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..

~~~
jtolj
Awesome job! I would definitely use this - but I'm getting a 500 error trying
to enter my email address with plus character in it.

~~~
ComNik
Oh so you are the lonely, malformed entry in my db... I'll fix that, sorry!

------
softwarerero
I launched a Spanish site <http://agrupados.biz> which is a search engine for
clasified ads in Paraguay. I learned Scala und Apache Lucene this way, now I'm
hoping to get it at least covering its hosting costs. The site is up aprox. 3
month now and I had almost no visitors before paying Google.

2 days ago I started a Google AdWords campaign so people may find the site, I
spend $2.62 so far and got 95 visitors and even won $0.10 with AdSense. Today
I added a PayPal donate button.

~~~
hmgauna
Right now I'm trying to use it and I'm getting a lot of errors. As far as I
can see, you need to work on the SEO side: there's a lot that needs to be done
on that front. Change your title tags structure, create unique descriptions
for each page, build friendly urls, make it easy to be crawled, use a sitemap,
add to your links the 'title' attribute. For a site like yours, you should not
spend on adwords. You will lose money. I hope it helps!

------
harrigan
We started <http://www.fantasy5live.com> – a real-time fantasy sports game for
GAA, rugby and soccer. It's early days though.

~~~
chussad
One suggestion: Can you add the player details. May be on hover or on click.
Also, I think site needs a bit more help in terms of what a user can do once
he reaches the play page. May be a small tutorial or a help page might work.
Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the events? Do you have a live feed
that you parse for certain phrases?

~~~
harrigan
Yes, we are recording the performances for each player and we want to show
those when users are making their selections.

We are also adding a small tutorial as you suggest -- a number of users were
asking "what do I do next" ;-)

The events are recorded manually at the moment and pushed to the users using
Pusher.com. There are automated feeds but they are expensive.

------
j21
Made <http://www.clipchoose.com> in May.

Never intended it to be profitable, more of a learning experience (first
webapp).

------
ScottBurson
I launched <https://bountyoss.com/> two weeks ago. It's a crowdfunding site
designed specifically for Open Source Software projects. It's more like
Cofundos than Kickstarter, but it differs from both in emphasizing continued
development of existing projects rather than new projects. I'm also trying
very hard to attract contributions from businesses, which I think is a huge
untapped market.

------
xjki
Started and recently published DrinkControl for Android
<http://drinkcontrolapp.com> Taking into account that iOS version brings just
about $50/month, no illusions about becoming profitable ever. Still was worth
it for understanding Android as development platform and its ecosystem
(biggest surprise so far - beeing in Samsung app store is more important than
beeing in Google Play).

------
rythie
I created <http://cleverrun.com> as a dashboard addition to RunKeeper, built
in about a month as a MVP. 2000 people signed up (promoted by RunKeeper),
seems to have good user retention rate of about 8%. Didn't enable paid
upgrades till April, currently revenue has been $30 (yearly repeating). Intend
to make it profitable or try something else.

------
samrat
Made <http://omgyoutube.herokuapp.com>. Had no intentions of making a profit,
though.

------
SethMurphy
I started a Brooklyn based website listing (<http://brooklyncoded.com>) and
meetup (<http://meetup.brooklyncoded.com>) for coders. It's more about the
meetup now. I am currently accepting applications to be listed on the site.
When there are enough I will publish the list.

------
radagaisus
First real attempt at open source <https://github.com/Radagaisus/Orpheus>

------
ecaradec
I launched Qatapult, a quicksilver like inspired launcher for windows
<http://emmanuelcaradec.com/qatapult> . It still needs polish and it still
needs more users, but it's already my favorite launcher for windows. (change
the default skin if you try, I set the default to the wrong one )

------
tosh
<https://www.blossom.io>

because we haven't implemented payment yet :D

~~~
genwin
Few other Twitter Bootstrap sites (or splash pages in general) need horizontal
scrolling on my netbook (1024 pixels wide), but Blossom does. I can see ~95%
of it.

------
ww520
I launched a webapp last week for encrypting message into url entirely on the
browser for maximum privacy - <https://boxuptext.com/>. It's free for all to
use. Won't expect it to ever turn a profit, but the fun factor has made up for
it.

------
davidlains
I wrote an iPhone app for rare book collectors called Titlz.
<http://davidlains.com/titlz> The market for this kind of app is tiny but I
still had fun building it and learned a lot. It has made about $20 in two
months.

------
simplegeek
Hi guys, I started selling an ebook and haven't earned a single $ yet. Though
I've been making constant improvements.

Slightly taking advantage of this thread: is there anyone who has successfully
sold ebooks on Internet? I definitely need some help. Thanks in advance.

~~~
patio11
Drop me an email, I know a few things about a few things.

------
reaktivo
I built a site for getting notified when the border wait time on the US/MX
border gets to a certain point. <http://garitas-tijuana.com>

------
mateo999
I started www.sunscanner.co.uk last year. Thought it was a novel and useful
way to search for vacations.

And I think it made all of £7 in commissions since then :-(

------
fasouto
I started <http://ninjaprice.com/> a compilation of products from free
shipping shops. Made about 23$ so far...

------
stephengillie
TemplatArr, an internal template generating program, made to streamline a
workflow. Pairtris, to impress a woman (didn't work). oh And the scribd fruit
bot.

------
macca321
<https://www.squarelater.com/> \- a bill splitting application with SMS input.

------
hyuuu
<http://picocrew.com/presents/picocrew> ....:(

------
sparknlaunch
Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits
it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without
success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar
interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making
any traction, let alone profit from the blog.

<http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/>

~~~
hmgauna
It's hard to diagnose, but as other says (and your stats point out), there is
something giving a little amateur feel. From a blog point of view, you should
definitely show your authors, to make a genuine, personal impression to
readers. The part of the name of the blog that says 'Biz Startup Tech Blog',
it may sound too generic, but also a bit pretentious, and it lacks originality
(even if it works from a SEO point of view?). I'll also work on the tagline,
to describe better what the blog is about. You could try things like "Personal
insights of an entrepreneurial journey", maybe also A/B test it... Tell your
visitors you are for real, before they leave. And last, but not the least, I
think the images are not helping. Usually images help make everything a little
more attractive, but here, it's not the case. They are giving an amateurish,
cheap feel. Try something else on that front. You could avoid the images
unless they really illustrate your point with some personal sources: a
screenshot from your project, stats, etc. And please, tell us the results of
the experiment!

------
mrose
I made Image Overflow <http://imageoverflow.com>

My core focus, which is to keep the UI free of extra text and needless
"social" features, has led to a user adoption rate that is less than
desirable, to say the least.

