
Ask HN: What did your 'Show HN' project turn into? - chezmo
This weekend I waded through a couple of old projects and I thought about all the stuff I built over the years. I posted a couple of &quot;Show HN&quot; projects a couple of years ago and it was funny reading those posts again.<p>Basically all of the projects went on &#x27;auto-pilot&#x27; right away, meaning that I didn&#x27;t touch them since I posted them. However, my latest &#x27;Show-HN&#x27; turned into a real business and three years later we are a three people remote team and we are growing quite fast (the project is called mailparser.io).<p>I was wondering what your &#x27;Show HN&#x27; turned into? Any stories you want to share?
======
callmevlad
A little over 3 years ago, my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499)),
which was just a proof-of-concept / experiment.

At the time, we had been working on Webflow day and night for 6 months with no
other income coming in, we had gotten rejected from YC a few months before, I
was over $50K in credit (and medical) debt, and the Show HN was our last-ditch
effort to get some traction before going back to our jobs.

The post did really well - we had the #1 position for most of the day, got
over 500 upvotes, and in the resulting days over 25,000 people signed up for
our beta list. This gave us the confidence to keep going and helped us get
into YC for the next batch.

Since then, Webflow ([https://webflow.com/](https://webflow.com/)) has grown
into a profitable business with 400K+ users all over the world, billions of
website requests served, and 25 employees (also all over the world). I'm not
sure any of this would have happened if the Show HN would not have taken off
the way it did.

TLDR: A+, would post again ;)

~~~
sideproject
Webflow is.... absolutely amazing. I'd love to hear about how you guys built
it - e.g. tech stack? challenges? :) Great work!

~~~
callmevlad
Thank you, that truly means a lot!

At first (in late 2012), we tried every single frontend framework available -
including Backbone, Angular, Spine, and SproutCore (which ended up becoming
Ember) - but they were all too slow for what we were doing. React wasn't yet a
thing, and the only library that we found that worked fast enough was
Knockout.js, so we went with that in the early days.

Since then, we've refactored 90%+ of the app (which is now approaching a
million lines of code) to React/Flux/Immutable.js, with the remaining 10% not
far behind.

The rest of the stack is nearly 99.9% JavaScript - including
Node/Express/Mongo/Mongoose/Redis/nginx+more on the backend side of things.

We're hoping to post a lot more about our full stack in the future, especially
since we're rolling out our dynamic website hosting stack worldwide (there's a
lot of interesting S3/Lambda/CloudFront/Fastly goodies in there).

The biggest challenge is probably dealing with the huge array of different
sites that people build, which range from small one-page marketing sites to
huge 1000+ page dynamic web apps. Since Webflow is not template-based (like
Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, etc) but rather allows designers to build up a site
from scratch (including defining their own DOM nodes and CSS classes), we have
to create JSON-based abstractions that need to work in a backwards-compatible
way even as we add new features to Webflow.

~~~
fratlas
Amazing. I can't even imagine what a ride the whole journey must have been.
React must seem like a god-send.

------
sytse
In 2012 I did a show HN for GitLab.com
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278)
It didn't trend so I started baking pancakes. When I checked my phone I saw
that it got on the HN homepage and comments were flooding in. I asked my then
girlfriend (now wife) to take over the baking and started responding. I ended
up eating the pancakes behind my computer :) Hundreds of people signed up for
the beta.

In 2013 the author of GitLab, Dmitriy, tweeted "I want to work on GitLab full
time" and I hired him. A year later we incorporated and applied for YC.

In March of 2015 we graduated from YC with 9 people on our team. Now we are 93
people in 28 countries
[https://about.gitlab.com/team/](https://about.gitlab.com/team/) with more
than 100,000 organizations running GitLab. Over 1200 people contributed to the
project [http://contributors.gitlab.com/](http://contributors.gitlab.com/)

I owe the greatest adventure in my life to Hacker News and its users, thanks
everyone!

~~~
fencepost
I assume you're talking about gitlab.io, which I suspect as part of your
incorporation, hiring of Dmitriy, etc. is now gitlab.com.

Nice job!

~~~
sytse
Indeed, it started as GitLab.io and I later aquired the .com and .org domain
names. In the beginning we ran GitLab.org for the open source project and
GitLab.com for the company and the SaaS. We later consolidated everything
under GitLab.org

~~~
erlend_sh
Could you expand a bit on why you opted to consolidate the two? We have to
make the exact same decision for discourse.org

~~~
sytse
Of course, I would love to elaborate. We found that there was a lot of
duplication between .com and .org. Same news (tweets, blog posts), overlapping
email lists, overlapping members, etc. That duplication lead to duplicate
effort, confusion, people missing news or comments on news, and bad SEO.

The reason for having two sites in the first place was to separate the open
source project from the commercial organization. In practise the same people
controlled both sides. It felt like a Potemkin village
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village)

We realized that it doesn't help to present yourself as an independent project
when you are not. What matters is that the commercial organization is a good
steward of the open source project. So we detailed how we want to do that
[https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship](https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship)
and instituted a core team [https://about.gitlab.com/core-
team/](https://about.gitlab.com/core-team/)

At times situations will come up that will allow you to show your true colors.
For us it was the VLC people asking to open source a feature on HN and our
competitor Perforce adopting GitLab. How you handle those situations is far
more important than having multiple domain names.

I recommend that you consolidate everything under one website but you open up
your company. See
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/) for
inspiration.

~~~
e12e
> It felt like a Potemkin village
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village)

Haha, you just made me realize that "The City and the City" by China
Miéville[1] could be used as a metaphor for such artificially divided
organizations like the one you had (and many have - for better or worse
reasons).

[1] [http://amzn.to/29MWd3v](http://amzn.to/29MWd3v) [amazon affiliate link -
just an experiment]

[https://www.amazon.com/City-China-Mi-ville-
ebook/dp/B003E2UQ...](https://www.amazon.com/City-China-Mi-ville-
ebook/dp/B003E2UQLO/) [Non-affilate link - to be a little more courteous ;-) ]

------
bemmu
Almost exactly 5 years ago I posted about a Japanese candy subscription
service ([https://www.candyjapan.com/](https://www.candyjapan.com/)), and it
is now doing roughly ~$200k in yearly revenue.

Lately I've been toying with the idea of selling the business, as it seems
like half a decade is plenty enough to spend on a single project and I'm
curious to see what else I might be able to do. But I periodically get into
this mood and might soon come to my senses again :-)

~~~
lucaspottersky
wow... 5 years already... i remember this! and so far i haven't done anything
with my life hahahaha :sad:

~~~
enraged_camel
>>wow... 5 years already...

Hah, my thoughts exactly! Time flies...

------
pcarmichael
A bit over five years ago I posted an 'Ask HN'
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123))
for my side project PCPartPicker
([http://pcpartpicker.com](http://pcpartpicker.com)). I received great advice
and many feature requests that would later get implemented.

A few years after that post I left my job to work on PCPartPicker full-time.
Then a year later I hired my first employee. Now we're a larger team working
toward expansion.

The feedback I got from the original post was extremely helpful.

~~~
chipperyman573
Out of curiosity, how does PCPP make enough money to hire two full-time devs?
Is the ad revenue really enough?

~~~
pcarmichael
Our revenue is primarily through affiliate deals with retailers that we
partner with. (We don't run any ads.)

~~~
chipperyman573
So when I check the "Use amazon smile" option, you guys don't get any money?

~~~
pcarmichael
Amazon smile actually still generates affiliate revenue. (Amazon doesn't take
the charity cut out of the affiliate side.)

------
karim79
In 2013 we show HN'd Kraken.io Image Optimizer:
[https://kraken.io](https://kraken.io) while still working at our day jobs.
Three years on and gazillions of iterations later, we're in profit, have
received significant funding, and are serving thousands of paying customers
and tens of thousands more free customers. We have since comfortably left our
day jobs, and have built a technology stack we can be proud of. I expect we
will still be hacking at this for years to come.

~~~
Exuma
That's quite cool. Would you mind explaining something to me? Where do you
find customers?

I've always wondered how apps like yours (single isolated feature done well,
available many other places for free) get customers. I've only built things
which are niche-based so it's easier to find customers, but with your type of
project it feels to me like gaining traction would be quite difficult. I
always want to learn from people who have taken something so simple (not
downplaying your efforts, just the 'concept'), and made it stick.

~~~
karim79
That's a good question, and as I'm replying from my phone, I'll try to be
concise and to the point.

1) It started out as just an image optimization API (so it was a little bit of
a niche product back in 2013).

2) Our API covered all major image formats, and supported both lossy and
lossless optimization modes, which again, was pretty rare at the time.

3) Listen to customers, fix things, and add sensible features such as image
resizing. Always listen to customers and try to understand what they want even
if they don't know how to explain it themselves.

4) With enough people using our platform to essentially replace the
development work, R&D and infrastructural requirements needed for a decent
imaging workflow, the app will essentially market itself.

5) Develop a stack which can be rapidly scaled up and simultaneously allows
for costs to be kept as low as possible. Pass on the value to customers at
every available opportunity.

6) I'll edit this post and add more detail once I get to a real computer.

------
harvestmoon
I designed a new name generation software called namebird:
[http://shobia.com/namebird](http://shobia.com/namebird)

It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup
brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .*
a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces)

It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have
spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return whatsoever. I keep it up
because it is incredibly powerful software and I hope it is helping at least
some people.

~~~
Drdrdrq
That's cool, thanks for providing this - will surely use it for future
projects. Sidenote: it doesn't look like the sort of app which would be heavy
on hosting - why large amount spent?

~~~
harvestmoon
The hosting isn't too bad, but I'm paying for a somewhat powerful server as I
am a bit of a perfectionist and only want to run the software at maximum
capacity, so to speak. It's not much, but over the years, it adds up.

------
typpo
AdDetector ([http://www.ianww.com/ad-detector/](http://www.ianww.com/ad-
detector/)) - Browser extension that flags news articles with corporate
sponsors. My best Show HN with 200+ upvotes. About 16,000 installs. Asked by
my company to discontinue it a few days later, so I stopped working on it.

Crowdsourced asteroid discovery
([http://www.asterank.com/discover](http://www.asterank.com/discover)) - only
5 upvotes on HN, but nearly half a million survey images reviewed, with 17,000
potential asteroids marked. Not really working on it anymore.

Free outgoing SMS API ([http://textbelt.com/](http://textbelt.com/)) - not
much interest on HN, but about 3M texts sent over the past few years, almost
1000 stars on Github. Requires an hour or two a month for maintenance,
responding to issues, etc.

Call Congress (1-884-USA-0234) - single phone number that dials all your
representatives one after another. 8 upvotes on HN, but did very well on
Reddit and sent over 300 hours of phone calls to Congress in a few days after
the Orlando shooting.

Conspiracy theory generator
([http://www.verifiedfacts.org/](http://www.verifiedfacts.org/)) - Did well on
HN with 181 points. About 1M conspiracies generated. On autopilot but still
gets organic traffic for ridiculous queries like "snooki illuminati".

Dream logs ([http://keepdream.me](http://keepdream.me)) - posted 4 years ago
but it's a niche tool. 62 subscribers, 2.5k dreams recorded, on autopilot.

Asterank ([http://www.asterank.com/](http://www.asterank.com/)) - I submitted
parts of this site to Show HN as I added new features. Sold it to Planetary
Resources, the asteroid mining company for a small amount.

Meteor showers visualization ([http://www.ianww.com/meteor-
showers/](http://www.ianww.com/meteor-showers/)) - did well on HN, finalist in
some Popular Science viz contest.

Dinosaur Pictures database
([http://dinosaurpictures.org/](http://dinosaurpictures.org/)) - a few upvotes
on HN, about 8k uniques/mo a year later mostly from SEO. This is one of my
favorite projects to spend time on.

~~~
Smudge
Curious about the first one -- was there some kind of conflict of interest? As
far as I can tell all you were doing was taking public information already
available on the page and disclosing it with a much more visible banner. Was
your employer heavily involved in Native Advertising campaigns or something?

~~~
erlehmann_
OP is an engineer at Google: [http://www.ianww.com/](http://www.ianww.com/)

~~~
bbcbasic
Talk about biting the hand that feeds ;-)

~~~
Trundle
Imo it'd actually help google if anything. As far as I know, they're not in
the sponsored content game. If hypothetically, OPs thingo blew up and
sponsored content articles became useless, that's more advertising budget
freed up to go in to Googles pocket.

~~~
webtechgal
That could cut both ways -

The sponsors whose content articles get blown up might get pissed with Google
and take their ad spend elsewhere...

------
gabemart
3 years ago I did a Show HN [1] for
[http://asoftmurmur.com](http://asoftmurmur.com) \- it got 3 points, 0
comments

2.5 years ago I posted it again with some more features [2], got 190 points
and 80 comments, and some positive feedback. Was encouraged to keep up
development.

Since then:

* > 5 million sessions

* A native Android version written in Java with > 100k installs

* Native iOS version in the works

* I now work full time as a software developer

It's a small, simple application - almost a toy - and there are now lots of
similar services, but it has genuinely changed my life.

    
    
      [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6205451
    
      [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975538

~~~
dahart
This is awesome!! I'd resorted simplynoise in two tabs to combine brown noise
with rain/thunder. Any chance of adding brown noise down the road? I find
white noise a bit harsh to listen to for long periods, but the constant noise
component is a must for masking people talking nearby. I love your other
sounds! Rain & thunder works, but I've had too much and want some variety,
this is great!

------
xando
Nearly a year ago I've posted "whoishiring.it" [0] as a visualisation for HN's
"Who is hiring" thread with all the positions on the map. And it was received
pretty damn well. Way better than I've expected.

Originally the idea was just to add better search mechanism for "Who is
hiring" thread, but i've decided to go beyond that. I've added every big job
board that I could find. Right now it aggregates 15956 jobs for IT from 12
different sources [1]. The website didn't make a dollar yet. Although I
received few investment propositions to make something bigger out of it.

The current domain is whoishiring.io (google didn't like .it much)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838955)

[1] [https://whoishiring.io/stats/](https://whoishiring.io/stats/)

~~~
biztos
Did Google dislike the .it domain because it wasn't obviously connected to
Italy, or was there something else?

Nice project by the way, I saw it for the first time on the last "Who's
Hiring" thread.

~~~
citricsquid
Most ccTLDs are heavily weighted by Google in favour of their locale, in
practice this means if you use a ccTLD you can expect to suffer from a ranking
penalty outside of the ccTLDs locale. If you use a .it domain you can expect
to rank well in Italy but to rank poorly in the United States.

The exception to this rule are "generic" ccTLDs, Google has a number of
generic ccTLDs, these are ccTLDs that they will treat as if they're not
ccTLDs. This includes .io, .me and .tv[1].

I used to run a site from httpstatus.es, last year I switched the site from
.es (Spain) to generic (.com) and have seen a significant increase in search
engine traffic. Here is a 3 year traffic chart, red box is the switch from .es
to .com: [http://i.imgur.com/60RXFjP.png](http://i.imgur.com/60RXFjP.png)

I am confident from my own experience that there is a big penalty associated
with using a non-generic ccTLD and businesses should be very careful when
choosing a ccTLD if search engine traffic is meaningful to their business.

[1]
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en)
(scroll down to "More about domain determination")

~~~
pdappollonio
Dot me and dot TV are actually local domains, not ccTLD. The first one is from
Montenegro and the second one is from the Island of Tuvalu. Although common
sense has made a lot to make them look global, they're fairly local because
they're not too much used for their intended purpose.

------
josscrowcroft
I posted Open Exchange Rates[0] as a Show HN 1,534 days ago. It had just moved
away from publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository, to its own
website. In fact, they had just asked me politely to take it down due to the
high traffic.

Open Exchange Rates was initially a portfolio piece (a labour of love that I
hoped would land me a job at Stripe!) I launched it as an adjunct to
money.js[1], a minimal JavaScript currency conversion library. The latter is
still popular, but Open Exchange Rates has since organically grown on its own
merits into a community of over 50,000 developers, with hundreds of tutorials
and open source integrations. It's my full-time job, and there are seven of us
on board.

We've since grown to be the industry-leader in our niche, loved and relied
upon by Booking.com, SkyScanner, Etsy, KickStarter, WordPress.com, BrainTree,
Coursera, Fab.com, Wego, Lonely Planet, Stripe, SoundHound, Vice.com - and
thousands more of the world's most trafficked websites and brands.

This week, over four years later, I've just returned to Hong Kong - the
project's birthplace - to work with our team here. We're about to switch on a
platform that will open up true real-time data for our clients in high-risk
financial environments, and allow us to scale to the next 500,000 clients and
beyond.

I never liked where the industry is heading - towards competitive, closed,
stingy business - so we've chosen to move further towards transparency,
sharing and collaboration. The next steps in our journey are where we open
more and more to our community and marketplace, meanwhile tailoring our
higher-ticket service to those who need it.

(Thanks for posting this Ask HN!)

[0] [https://openexchangerates.org](https://openexchangerates.org)

[1]
[https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js](https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js)

~~~
robinhood
This is very inspiring. Thanks a lot for sharing. Purely out of curiosity, how
much time did it take you to build the first version?

~~~
josscrowcroft
Thanks! If I remember correctly, the initial version of the API took about a
week, fitting around my job at the time.

------
endymi0n
514 days ago we launched JustWatch -
[https://www.justwatch.com](https://www.justwatch.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9005641)

By now, we're the largest streaming search engine in the world, having
surpassed both canistream.it and instantwatcher.com - and the hybrid app is
nearing one million Android downloads now while still being featured on the
Cordova and Ionic showcases. All this with zero marketing dollars invested and
no venture capital on board. Fun ride so far :)

~~~
artursapek
Making decent money on Amazon referrals and the like?

~~~
endymi0n
Let's say they pay our office space :)

Seriously, the main reason we're outgrowing our competitors so fast is that
audience marketing is a much more lucrative business than affiliate marketing.

That way the site stays clean, the content relevant and our users only
occasionally see trailers on Youtube and Facebook from movies they'd actually
want to see in cinema!

Win, win.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
What's audience marketing?

~~~
endymi0n
The 50,000ft overview: Because you're surfing on the site, we can infer your
movie taste. Now we're distilling that down anonymized on a user level and
with the help of modern ad technology (the one where the shoe you already
bought follows you mercilessly through the internet for weeks), we'll show you
trailers before your Youtube videos or in your Facebook timeline - of upcoming
movies you'd actually want to see (instead of the shoe you don't). That way,
movie studios can get people interested in new releases far cheaper and
measurably more effective than before.

If you're asking if you can do that to monetize your website: Probably not
(but you're welcome to try, it's fun). We've got a team of 15 people just
dedicated to that part.

~~~
biot
Does that mean you're running your own ad network that movie studios bid on,
and when someone watches a YouTube/Facebook video they are playing your ad?

------
johnwheeler
It hasn't been very long, but I've making solid progress since I posted Flask-
Ask a month ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11871554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11871554)

I've created and put up 6 tutorials at

[https://alexatutorial.com](https://alexatutorial.com)

Worked with Amazon on a guest blog post:

[https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx14R0IYY...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx14R0IYYGH3SKT/Flask-
Ask-A-New-Python-Framework-for-Rapid-Alexa-Skills-Kit-Development)

Flask-Ask and AlexaTutorial have been featured on

[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/4qdy73/learn_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/4qdy73/learn_to_program_the_amazon_echo_with_python/)

and

[https://www.producthunt.com/tech/alexatutorial-
com](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/alexatutorial-com)

280 github stars

[https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-
ask](https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

Having a blast!

~~~
sourc3
Actually used it this past weekend to create a long island railroad time table
app. Submitted to Amazon for review just now. Wanted to drop a line and say
thank you.

~~~
johnwheeler
That's fantastic. What are your thoughts on it? Is there anything you didn't
like?

------
Rezo
I posted [https://cloudcraft.co](https://cloudcraft.co) (a service to
visualize your cloud architecture) to Show HN around 7 months ago [1] (it
feels like only yesterday!)

Since then many of the great suggestions that I received from here have been
completed, including AWS inventory import, teams, unlimited canvas etc. I've
added paid Pro subscriptions that are working out very well, but also kept and
expanded on the free usage tier.

HN got me my first users and was very motivating, but after that initial spike
I've kept steadily growing and have added many tens of thousands of new users
organically with essentially zero marketing so far. About 50% of my traffic
comes from other sites and blogs directly linking, including AWS itself [2]
these days, the other 50% is people Googling for AWS diagrams/architectures.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942)
[2]
[https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/](https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/)

------
jfoster
I did a ShowHN for [http://bulkresizephotos.com](http://bulkresizephotos.com)
about a year ago. Arguably, a bit too early. It's a web-based image resizer
that doesn't involve transmitting your images to a server. Since it runs
locally, it also ends up being surprisingly fast. It may not look pretty, but
it does what it says, so most people who need it seem to love it.

I think the Product Hunt attention helped more than HN, but I've learnt that
it's the longer term sources you don't expect that help the most. For example,
it got into in an ArchDaily.com article that they re-publish every so often.
That's easily been the most valuable source.

It's been growing pretty consistently for quite a while. About 5% every week.

~~~
kup0
This looks great. I have my own workflows on my PC set-up for bulk resizing,
but I love that there's a web-app to easily do this, and that it runs client-
side (nice for Chromebooks/etc. too)

To me the site looks fine, not ugly by any means. It's spartan/simple and
utilitarian, as it probably should be. Will definitely be trying this out the
next time I need a bulk-resize.

Is there any particular method you plan to use to turn a profit from this?
Premium plans/etc.?

~~~
jfoster
Really glad that you like it!

I feel that it's a difficult site to monetize. Part of the appeal is that it
can be more convenient than having a resizing application on your computer. I
think adding sign in (a dependency for premium plans) would undermine that a
bit.

At the moment, it's still growing quickly, doesn't take up much of my time and
costs barely anything to run. Given those circumstances, I don't feel I need
to rush into monetizing. I'd rather wait and see.

Probably the best thing that could happen in the meantime is widespread
adoption of a very low friction micropayments platform. I think PayPal or
bitcoin are best positioned for that, but I haven't seen any signs of that
ideal scenario coming to fruition any time soon.

~~~
conductr
You may also consider using this tool to drive traffic to another
product/service. It's advertising but you would benefit more than slapping on
some Adwords. I think micropayment is a bad strategy, adding any
payment/signup friction to a service like this and users are going to bounce

~~~
jfoster
I pretty much agree on all counts. Let me elaborate a bit, though.

Drive traffic to something else: That's my current thinking.

Adwords: I think Adwords would make the site seem slower and ruin it a bit.
I'd consider a single, short text snippet Amazon link, though. Eg. "Check out
the latest Nikon DSLR on Amazon"

Micropayments I would only consider if a service emerged that was as simple as
embedding a one-click button and took sufficient market share that it wouldn't
be a barrier. I can see that the likelihood of this in the near future is
small, though.

------
dhawalhs
1679[1] days ago I launched Class Central[2] via a comment on HN. It was
something that I built over the Thanksgiving weekend and received over 300
visits from that comment.

Two years later I got into Imagine K12. Now we are doing around $100k ARR,
~250+k monthly uniques, and have been used by almost 5 million people.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289393)
[2] [https://www.class-central.com/](https://www.class-central.com/)

------
sideproject
About 2 years ago, I posted my side project HelloBox
([http://hellobox.co](http://hellobox.co)).

Back then, I started as a tool that lets you create your own HackerNews clone.
I did this, because every now and then, I was seeing Show HN posts that went
like "HackerNews for XYZ". So I thought, I'll create a tool that lets you
build your own HN quickly!.

Two years later, I'm still going and it's now grown into a community tool.
Still not at the level that I want, but slowly getting there and hopefully
monetize it soon.

~~~
jaflo
Looks pretty cool! Did you launch with the feature set you have right now or
did it grow as you gained users?

~~~
sideproject
Oh no. The launched version was... very basic. Originally it was "create your
own HN" tool, then I realised I was essentially building a community building
tool - surprise, surprise - and that's when various ideas for the features
came about. Still long way to go! But we are eating our own dog food by using
HelloBox ourselves! This is our Q&A page, built on HelloBox itself -
[http://self.hellobox.co](http://self.hellobox.co)

------
stevekemp
I posted a simple Dynamic DNS service, [http://dhcp.io](http://dhcp.io), based
upon Amazon Route53. I received about 5,000 users in the first month, most of
whom were using their dynamic hostnames in SPAM mail.

I gradually started killing more and more accounts. The admin overhead was a
pain, so I polled a few users and said "Hey this is crippling, would you pay?"
Many said yes. I knocked up stripe integration and received zero paying
clients.

Closed registrations to new users, and setup a git-based DNS host instead,
[https://dns-api.com](https://dns-api.com) . Users pay for that from the first
week, and it slowly ticks over. I've been using the service myself for all my
new domain registrations and I'm constantly impressed at how smooth it is.

------
dshankar
The original "Show HN" turned out OK
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

(that was nearly 10 years ago!)

~~~
downandout
Just goes to show that with Show HN posts you may very well be witnessing
history in the making. 111 points on that original post...valuation is now
something like $100M per point :) .

------
bhouston
Did a Show HN on [https://clara.io](https://clara.io) ~1000 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6025427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6025427)

We didn't get the biggest reception on HN, but we now have 200,000+ users,
500,000+ scenes, profitable and have strong growth. Still self-funding the
project.

~~~
corysama
Awesome piece of work. Your front page seems very movie-focused. Do you get a
significant percentage of users in games?

------
jsingleton
Over 3 years ago I posted
[https://shutdownscanner.com](https://shutdownscanner.com). Ironically, I'm
considering shutting it down. Perhaps to relaunch as an open source project,
maybe rewritten in ASP.NET Core. Anyone have advice in opening up a project
when decommissioning? I think it may still be useful to people so don't just
want to turn the servers off.

I also posted [https://unop.uk/tube](https://unop.uk/tube) (I built the
original over 5 years ago) and I still use it pretty regularly, as the TfL
site is so bloated for mobile use.

------
robmcvey
I showed you the Copify WordPress plugin [0] a couple of years back. It allows
companies to outsource monthly blog content to Copify's team of freelance
writers. The blog posts are peer reviewed, then automatically published with a
Creative Commons image to your WordPress site. The link is then (optionally)
auto-shared via Twitter.

$60k RR last month.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988299)

~~~
Drdrdrq
$60k? On 100+ active installs?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That makes it $50 per article, seems about right to me.

------
phoboslab
Almost 6 years ago I posted my HTML5 Game "Biolab Disaster"[1] and my
JavaScript Game Engine "Impact"[2] here.

I have sold about 6000 licenses of the Game Engine since.

Impact was my bachelor thesis and I wanted to release it as open source
initially. However, after I finished university I poured a whole lot of time
into polishing and documenting it, so I thought "what the hell, I'm going to
try to sell it". Surprisingly it worked. Impact pretty much financed all the
other projects I've been working on since.

I believe I was at the right place at the right time. Apple just announced
that they won't support Flash on iOS and Impact was one of the very few
solutions to make (substantial) games in HTML5.

Impact has only received minor updates since its launch. I tried to start with
a fresh new version a number of times, but always stopped short - I felt like
I couldn't deliver anything worthy of the high expectations people had. Sales
have died down slowly over the last two years, partly because Impact is
somewhat outdated now and makes some things more complicated than neccessary
and partly because there are now very strong Open and Closed Source
alternatives in this space.

At the beginning of this year, I finally found some new perspective on what a
"Impact 2.0" should deliver and most importantly, the motivation to implement
it. It's currently my favorite project to work on. It's a complete rewrite.
Simplifying everything with the insights I gathered over the past few years is
humbling, but I love it.

My plan is to have 2.0 ready at the end of the year. I'll probably publish
Impact 1.0 under GPL then.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686572)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779632)

~~~
WA
Thanks for sharing. I always wanted to ask you: do you also work a _normal_
job or is Impact your main source of income?

Also, I'm excited for Impact 2.0

~~~
phoboslab
I'm self employed. Some of my projects (mostly Ejecta[1] and jsmpeg[2])
spawned a lot of contract and consulting work lately. I'm also selling
licenses for my games[3] so other gaming sites can host them and the AdSense
banner on ZType[4] provided an impressively stable ~$500/mo for the past few
years.

[1] [https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta](https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta)

[2] [https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg](https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg)

[3] [http://phoboslab.org/#games](http://phoboslab.org/#games)

[4] [http://zty.pe/](http://zty.pe/)

~~~
tekni5
Xibalba was fun, just beat it at 3 am.

------
dom96
This isn't really a traditional 'Show HN' but perhaps someone will find it
interesting. Around 5 months ago I posted about Nim in Action[1], the book
that I have been writing for nearly a year now. It's been an interesting
experience, but certainly not an easy one. Right now the book is very close to
completion and I cannot wait until it's finalised so that I can get back to
working on some fun little programming projects :)

1 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10987975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10987975)

------
BrunoJo
I launched [https://www.pexels.com/](https://www.pexels.com/) two year ago - a
website to find free high-quality photos. It started as a side project. Now we
have hundred thousands of visitors each month and three people are working on
it.

~~~
vitd
Interesting! Is this a full-time job for 3 people? Does your business run
solely on donations or is there another source of income? (It wasn't obvious
from what I saw on the site.)

~~~
BrunoJo
Two people work half-time and one guy works full-time on the project. In
addition we have 2-3 freelancers who add photos. We make money through
donations, ads and referral links to Shutterstock.

------
arcatek
I made an emulation platform called Start9
([http://start9.io](http://start9.io)), but it didn't got a lot of traction,
my "cofounder" lost motivation, and I haven't yet found how to actually make
money with it (I only have a handful of daily users).

That being said, I'm still extremely proud of it, at least from a technical
standpoint, and will probably keep it running for a long time.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Seems nice, did try it out now.. But had trouble finding all the controls (
arrows, enter and ?)

~~~
arcatek
A & B are mapped on respectively A/Q and W/Z/B, space and backspace are
Select, and enter is Start.

------
s_kilk
[Show HN: Nightchamber, a slow-web social site: nightchamber.com]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881622)

It's still running today, though the user-base has stabilised around a
dedicated core of users, and not seeing much/any growth.

EDIT: holy shit, I just checked the stats, 7k unique users over the last two
months. It's doing better than I remember.

~~~
curiousgal
I love Nightchamber!

~~~
s_kilk
Thanks! :D

Feel free to point more people towards the site! We could do with some new
blood.

------
_query
In january I've launched Project Log
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963097)
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mpscholten.tim...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mpscholten.timetracker)),
a simple material-designed timesheet app for android.

Quickly after launch, I discovered that many people could not install the app
because they were running an older android version. Since then I've improved
support for older android devices, added several smaller features and did some
smaller UI improvements. I've also built a small website
([http://timesheetapp.xyz/](http://timesheetapp.xyz/)), so you can find the
app when looking for "timesheet app" at google.

The app is currently downloaded at ~100 devices, but not really growing.
However the existing users are all very happy with the app. I'm very happy
with it aswell as it's solving the problem I have very well (built it primary
to solve my own problem of time tracking).

If you have any idea on how to better promote the app, let me know :)

------
jbrooksuk
I shared Cachet [0] 551 days ago, it's an open source alternative to the likes
of StatusPage.io and Status.io. It's now used around the world by hundreds if
not thousands of companies and I'm always seeing comments on others such as "I
wish you could do X like Cachet." which is really cool.

I've made money only by selling an installation service, which is about £1k. I
have further plans, but nothing more to add.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8819701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8819701)

~~~
cyberferret
Hey - I use Cachet for one of my web apps. Great product, and I love it.
Thanks for building!

~~~
jbrooksuk
Thank you :)

------
gtheme_io
Few years ago I posted HN for my site project and now turn into ramen
profitable side project[0].

I stop working on the project for 1+ years and now I plan to put more time to
improve it (i.e. HTTPS) in the next few months.

Traffic to the side is dropping and I plan to post some contents to generate
traffic as well.

[0]: [http://www.gtheme.io/](http://www.gtheme.io/)

------
encoderer
We launched Cronitor.io 745 days ago.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7917587)

We launched after about 6 weekends of work. It took a month or so until we saw
our first paying subscriber. The ramp up was slow at first but by January 2015
growth had accelerated and today we draw a healthy and growing income from the
business. As we've built out the product we've raised prices slowly and have
had he joy of seeing companies we admire use the product.

~~~
mherrmann
I used to love cronitor.io but now I prefer the free and open source
healthchecks.io (also from a Show HN).

~~~
encoderer
We like healthchecks. The guy who runs it actually uses Cronitor to monitor
it.

------
smithgeek
I posted my project[0] to try and help people find jobs where they would be
happier writing software, just a few days ago and didn't get much traffic or
any comments. I guess that means it wasn't a great idea or I'm really bad at
marketing.

[0] - [https://www.devjuncture.com](https://www.devjuncture.com) -

------
Sir_Cmpwn
1059 days ago, my buddy posted our project (Show HN: An open-source media
hosting service that's anonymous and fast
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397)).
It's been dead over a year now, we got to the point where we had to pay for
server upgrades and realized that donations hadn't improved, ad revenue was
shit, and we couldn't justify paying more out of our own pockets to maintain
it.

322 days ago, I posted my tiling window manager for wayland:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224608).
It's still going very well, I have thousands of users and just today was
providing support in the IRC channel and talking with some contributors about
features they want to implement.

~~~
lanceloth
Man, I'm a huge fan of your work.

I'm using sr.ht a lot ; used Knight OS and saw your TrueCraft repo somewhere a
while ago.

What a great job man. Thanks for your code. :)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Thanks!

------
tomkinstinch
These are side projects of mine. All had well-received Show HN threads (thank
you), but none have really gone anywhere:

[https://www.takeitapart.com](https://www.takeitapart.com) TakeItApart is
coasting, and not really supporting itself. We had high hopes that our easy
guide creation wizard would lead to new content, but sadly it has not.

[http://artfulmac.com](http://artfulmac.com) Artful pays for itself and a
little more (an extra meal or two a month), but it is in need of an update to
better support El Capitan. Sadly the shift to Swift 2 broke much of the code
and with my day job I haven't yet had an opportunity to dig in and fix it.

MadBlocker, my ad blocker for iOS 8 based on a hack of the VPN subsystem,
worked well as a proof of concept but was completely superseded by much better
as blockers made possible by iOS 9.

------
afro88
Since posting a month or so ago,
[https://trainspottr.fm](https://trainspottr.fm) has been in the daily Product
Hunt top 10, is running smooth and provides a good service for a bunch of
people who use it regularly.

It's not making me any money, got no funding or anything like that, but as my
first full stack personal side project that I actually finished and shipped,
I'm really happy that it's worked out and has real users that find it useful.

------
jasonkester
I actually first found HN in my weblogs nine years ago, when this guy called
"pg" posted a link to a post-mortem I wrote up of Twiddla's accidental launch:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389)

I actually spent today working on a new document viewer for Twiddla. It has
been relatively successful, with tons of happy users, but still isn't bringing
in the same sort of revenue as my other bill-paying product.

Edit: Here's the "last week" link that somebody mentioned on that thread. That
must have actually been the one I found in my logs (since I responded to it):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872)

~~~
nojvek
When this guy called "pg". When I first joined HN, I always wondered, who is
this "pg". Then I read hackers and painters. O_O when I made the connection.

------
lowglow
We show HN'd Baqqer [https://baqqer.com/](https://baqqer.com/) \- Community
sharing, making, and crowdfunding. We're generating revenue, just have
partnered with some great companies to provide more resources for
inventors/makers/developers, and we're surely becoming the destination for
smart makers to share their future-forward work.

~~~
nathantross
This is really a great platform. I'm adding my projects now. Keep building
guys!

------
Exuma
An empty wasteland of spam. Idea was amazing, had over 10,000 user-submitted
items. But years later I have no interest in maintaining it. Oops :/

~~~
theGREENsuit
What was it?

------
chuhnk
535 days ago I posted "Show HN: Go-micro"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8895794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8895794).

Go-Micro turned into Micro - a microservice ecosystem
[https://micro.mu](https://micro.mu). It's primarily open source software for
microservices geared at simplifying the process of building distributed
systems. I'm working on it full time, have a sponsor and will be speaking at
the Golang UK conference next month. Still a long road ahead but things seem
to be going well so far.

------
netheril96
I wrote a filesystem in userspace (FUSE) with authenticated authentication for
self use
([https://github.com/netheril96/securefs](https://github.com/netheril96/securefs)).

It got a modest number of stars now, but few from HN (mostly from Reddit,
judging by how upvoted the post is).

------
mburst
About 2 years ago I created
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.li...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.livedota)
and shared it to HN and Reddit. 2 years and 300k+ downloads later it is
continuously growing and just had it's largest month yet. It doesn't make
enough money to quit my day job or anything but it is a fun project to work on
and is something I use on a daily basis anyway. Pretty cool for my first ever
Android app.

~~~
penetrarthur
Based on screenshots, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

------
vyrotek
6 years ago I posted here that I was leaving my full-time job to work on my
startup full-time.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347464)

A few pivots (and a lot of lessons learned) later and we're still kickin!
We've grown to a good sized team of full-time employees now.

[http://iactionable.com](http://iactionable.com) now focuses on real-time _'
employee engagement'_ by leveraging gamification concepts.

------
docsapp_io
Recently I launched my side project[0] via HN. However seem like not much
interest on the project.

Merely 2-3 people sign up and no activity after sign up. I dont know what to
do with it and now I am not motivated to improve it. :(

[0]: [https://www.docsapp.io/](https://www.docsapp.io/)

~~~
jordanwallwork
It might be an idea to add that there's a free tier to the Plans & Pricing
section, rather than just in the FAQ. That might give an indication of what to
expect from the free trial as that isn't clear.

I think you could make better use of the demo too by scrapping the placeholder
text and instead using it as a 'how to' guide for the platform itself - not
only would this be useful in itself for your customers, but it'd help show off
what it can do. I tend to prefer demos that show the product in a real-life
situation as it helps me more in understanding how I might be able to get
value from it.

Also I actually find the "No Credit Card Required" a bit scary (although that
could just be me) - perhaps something more like "Get Started For Free"?

------
mck-
We launched Routific's first beta landing page 2.5 years ago:
[https://routific.com](https://routific.com)

It gave us a boost of initial interest and feedback, which was awesome – the
effects of which I summarized here [1]

Two years after Show HN we went through Techstars. Now we are a 10-person
team. Thanks HN!

[1] [https://medium.com/routific/what-61-points-on-hn-did-for-
my-...](https://medium.com/routific/what-61-points-on-hn-did-for-my-
startup-81bd75a39425#.h4bhq6g6d)

------
highl
~4 months ago announced [http://pdf-highlighter.com/](http://pdf-
highlighter.com/)

It's a server side solution for highlighting search terms in PDF documents.
Can show highlights in a web based PDF viewer (customization of PDF.js) or
burn them to PDF. Supports navigation between hits. So far, most customers
used it with search solutions based on Solr and dtSearch but it could be
easily integrated with any search engine.

Didn't get any comments on HN but it's a profitable project otherwise.

~~~
kgc
What was the motivation to create this?

~~~
highl
End users love it when they can open found PDF document on a page where search
terms occur and when they can easily jump between matches. Very useful feature
when documents have thousands of pages although some clients use it even with
single page document archives.

Earlier versions of Acrobat Reader had support for term highlighting using
“PDF Highlight File Format” which is XML-like file specifying word offsets in
page. There are search solutions that relied on this feature but Adobe
deprecated it with Acrobat Reader X.

Anyway, my solution re-enables search term highlighting in PDF and does not
require any special viewer – web based viewer [1] works on both desktop and
mobile web browsers. It's easy to integrate with existing search solutions and
can use either Adobe's PDF highlights file as input or highlight for a search
query.

[1] [http://pdf-highlighter.com/docs/Highlighting_PDF_Viewer.html](http://pdf-
highlighter.com/docs/Highlighting_PDF_Viewer.html)

------
jondubois
I did a "Show HN" for my open source project SocketCluster
[http://socketcluster.io/](http://socketcluster.io/) almost 2 and a half years
ago and it got front page - Since then, I (and some cofounders) created a
realtime service on top of SocketCluster
[https://baasil.io/](https://baasil.io/). The plan is now to turn it into a
scalable deployment service for realtime single-page apps.

SocketCluster itself gets between 6K and 10K downloads per month - Almost all
of these are direct downloads. Some big soccer/football leagues websites use
SC to broadcast results of matches in realtime, also, some education startups
and some bitcoin/trading startups are using it too.

A lot has changed but I've stuck to the core mission and the project just
keeps evolving to adapt to changing technologies. In terms of monetization,
finding a market fit has been a slow process; ironically because underlying
technologies have been moving so quickly that I didn't want to commit to the
wrong tech. Recently, we have been really excited about Docker, Kubernetes and
other container/orchestration software and are doing cool stuff with them.

For a while I was worried that technology would evolve in ways which would
make SC irrelevant (and it looked like this for a while) but over the past
couple of months it seems that the opposite is starting to happen and it looks
like all the pieces are actually starting to fit together.

------
moron4hire
I eventually got what amounts to essentially a "sponsorship" to continue
building my project as I see fit. It didn't come out of Show HN (I don't think
I've ever gotten anything directly out of an HN contact), but it was certainly
encouraging enough to get me to drive forward on the project and eventually
make it what gets me the local attention I receive for it today.

My mode has changed, though. I've learned a lot in that time, and I no longer
think of advertising and distribution online as a viable method for most
projects. I've had far more success getting real engaged eyes on my projects
by engaging people in person.

There is an adage in sales, "go to your customers." It is meant literally. Go
physically to where people will not only be interested in your project, but
they're also in the mood to "buy" (whatever that might mean for your project.
Installing and incorporating into my daily routine a free app on a smartphone
is a cost I frequently choose to avoid).

For my wife, that means the vast majority of her sci-fi novel sales have been
through three book fairs in the last two years, not the 24/7 Amazon. It's
mostly just a hobby for her, and it would take a lot of work to replace her
current income, so we haven't done more, but there is definitely s direct
correlation between effort in, sales out, which is noticeably absent online.
It makes it a lot easier to continue making that effort.

For me, that means presenting at JavaScript and designer meetups.

------
senko
A few years ago I posted a link to my collaborative whiteboard web app
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886353))
and got encouraging feedback.

Some five year laters, it's still very active, with some 100k monthly (free)
users, and paying customers, with the (modest) revenue being poured back into
development.

I had a few (5 or 6) more Show HNs over time, but those projects failed to
gather outside (or keep my) interest.

------
cableshaft
Just wanted to thank everyone for posting their stories. I had no idea that
Show HN could have that strong of a impact on people's side projects.

I'm working on something right now, but was fully expecting it to not get any
attention and just be something fun for me to work on. Now I'm thinking it
could probably use a bit more polish, because maybe there is a way for it to
gain visibility.

------
elwell
I posted about Purple Services (On-demand Gas Delivery) about a year ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9535989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9535989)

Users + revenue has been growing quite well month over month since we
launched. Our biggest hurdle now is optimizing for profit.

[http://purpleapp.com](http://purpleapp.com)

------
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. It has helped us
learn how to go about building a profitable business. Also, we have come a
long way from that first iteration of the product. I was a rookie at that
point and didn't have much of a clue about the software development best
practices and how to write maintainable code. The learning that I got by
sticking to one project has been immense.

More importantly, it is comments like these that make us super happy -
[https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials](https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials)

Thank you HN, you helped us build a profitable business!

------
aparadja
Quitting my day job.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886337)

I originally built Radio Silence as a Cocoa practice project. This spring, I
rewrote it from scratch with all the lessons learned along the way. Now it
generates enough income that I was able to quit my day job a month ago. Cool
beans.

------
kaymakam
I posted the following side projects, but didn't get enough attention:

\- Turkish Poncho (The first Turkish messenger bot for weather forecasts)
story:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913204)
link: [http://havadurumu.herokuapp.com/](http://havadurumu.herokuapp.com/)
comment: I wasn't expecting any new users anyway. This is only for Turkish
facebook users.

\- Pour – Simple and secure Azure diagnostics for C# and Node.js story:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021606)
link: [http://www.trypour.com/](http://www.trypour.com/) comment: Similar to
previous project, this has a limited audience as well (Azure) I think.

I guess I need to think for bigger audiences.

------
nceruchalu
In June we showed Volleyy ([https://volleyy.com](https://volleyy.com)), a tool
for responsive newsletters. Got us to the front page of product hunt, and a
sizeable boost in our active user base. We are still working on growing :-)

------
gingerlime
I've posted Alephbet[0] - an open-source A/B testing framework for developers,
about a year ago. A few months later, I added Gimel[1] - a redis/AWS Lambda
backend for Alephbet.

I'm using it regularly to power lots of A/B tests so it's fulfilling its role,
and saves us a few thousands $'s a month, so can't complain.

I would love to find collaborators and improve it, so it's a viable (open)
alternative to Optimizely and VWO. But no plans other than as a side project.

[0]
[https://github.com/Alephbet/alephbet](https://github.com/Alephbet/alephbet)

[1] [https://github.com/Alephbet/gimel](https://github.com/Alephbet/gimel)

------
jonathanbull
A year ago I posted my side project for cheap email marketing, EmailOctopus
([https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com))

Thousands of customers later and I'll going full time on it. Good times ahead!

------
cgallello
In 2014, I posted a chrome extension called UX Check
([http://uxcheck.co](http://uxcheck.co)) as a Show HN. It didn't get any
traction, but a month later, somebody reposted it and it hit the front page. I
received an amazing amount of encouragement and support, with tons of great
feedback. I rolled a lot of that feedback into an update a month or two later,
and within 6 months, I had decided to leave my job to work full time on
building a related product. Still working on that product and not ready to
share it yet, but thank you to everyone!

------
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, got 70+ employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, Nike to Urban
Outfitters.

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

------
geerlingguy
Server Check.in was posted about 4 years ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350))
and is still running a profit (about 1 hour of my time per month maybe, and it
gets around $2k ARR, $1k profit), though it never took off in a major way.

I'm working on a detailed 4-year summary post, which I'll post on HN soon. One
of the offshoots of my work on the project, Ansible for DevOps, did (and
continues to do) much better, revenue-wise!

------
secfirstmd
It's used by a couple of thousand NGO workers, travellers and journalists to
manage their physical and digital security ont he move (and it's free, open
source).

Umbrella's lessons give you simple, practical advice on what to do and what
tools to do it with – covering everything from sending a secure email to
dealing with a kidnapping or conducting physical counter-surveillance. Users
can mark, customise and share simple checklists for quick reminders. It also
has a series of security information feeds from places like the UN and Centers
for Disease Control to keep you updated on the move.

You can download Umbrella here -Google Play:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella)
-or Amazon App Store: [https://www.amazon.com/Security-First-Umbrella-made-
easy/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Security-First-Umbrella-made-
easy/dp/B01AKN9M1Y) -or F-Droid Repo:
[https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo](https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo)
(Fingerprint:
39EB57052F8D684514176819D1645F6A0A7BD943DBC31AB101949006AC0BC228) -Our code:
[https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android](https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android)
-Our code audit:
[https://secfirst.org/blog.html](https://secfirst.org/blog.html)

~~~
e12e
Doesn't seem like it gained much traction on Show HN, unless I'm not finding
the right submission?:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10295319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10295319)

------
jaflo
I posted a link to Deciso ([https://deciso.audio/](https://deciso.audio/))
here 10 days ago. Didn't receive many comments, but saw a spike in visitor
count on that day. HN visitors were interested in clicking the link, but it
would have been nice to receive more feedback (good and bad).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11969466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11969466)

~~~
TheArcane
Nice idea. I'm surprised there aren't more services that offer this.

~~~
elwell
napster used to do this

------
shortstuffsushi
I built a developer tool to help users validate Universal Link configuration
on iOS [1]. At the time, Apple didn't have a tool to do so, so it was
difficult to figure out why it wasn't working if it wasn't. They've since
created one, so that's great for the community [2].

I still get consistent traffic of a few thousand hits per week, and my work
has been forked by my former employer, Branch, to create their own version of
the tool for iOS [3] and Android [4]. My goal wasn't really to take it
anywhere, it was just something I wanted to build for the community since I
spent a lot of time struggling with the set up, and saw a lot of similar
struggle in the beta forums. I'm satisfied with how it turned out, and how
many people used it (for instance, the several of the Cocoapods team members
linked it, it's all over the forums, etc).

So, no story about how much money it made or anything, but personal
satisfaction at least :)

[1] [https://limitless-sierra-4673.herokuapp.com](https://limitless-
sierra-4673.herokuapp.com) [2] [https://search.developer.apple.com/appsearch-
validation-tool](https://search.developer.apple.com/appsearch-validation-tool)
[3] [https://branch.io/resources/universal-
links/](https://branch.io/resources/universal-links/) [4]
[https://branch.io/resources/app-indexing/](https://branch.io/resources/app-
indexing/)

------
edelans
I posted [http://www.scoragora.com](http://www.scoragora.com) 2 years ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7873348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7873348)),
a platform free and ad-free you can use to organize prediction contests for
major sporting events (rugby and football). We launched it for the football
worldcup in 2014, and we also covered the rugby worldcup last year and
EURO2016 and a few smaller events (champions league, champions cup... ).

I work on it as a side project with a remote friend. We have added a lot of
things (automation, architecture redesign to an API-centric mode, introduction
of angular, lots of devops...). We use the project as a lab to experiment new
trends and it's really rewarding for that (approx 10k users for big events,
with surges of 1200+ simultaneous users which is quite challenging).

We managed to charge some companies who use it for internal constests, and it
provides the money needed to cover the expenses but not much more. Still we
are happy with it, lots of kind feedback from our users, and lots of learning,
which is why we made it in the first place.

------
rgbrgb
Shitty Listings helped us find a lot of great repeat investor buyers. We
actually (probably because of the gimmicky name) got more traffic from Shitty
Listings than the launch of Open Listings proper and ended up tying it into
our main product -- you can now get a Shitty Feed (tm;) on openlistings.com to
see only fixers.

[http://www.shittylistings.com/](http://www.shittylistings.com/)

------
highsea
About 6 months ago posted a Show HN for WhenToExchange
[http://whentoexchange.com](http://whentoexchange.com) it shows currency
exchange rates and keeps track of large price moves that make it favourable to
exchange one currency for another.

Didn't receive much feedback, but still use it personally when shopping online
and booking travel.

~~~
nitemice
Just found this and I love it. Going to be using it a lot from now on.

------
BinaryIdiot
A few years ago I showcased my little messaging library
([http://msngrjs.com/](http://msngrjs.com/)). Since then I've used it in
almost all of my projects, reworked the API multiple times, significantly
increased performance and added many APIs (net functions that can do restful
calls in node and browser, a merge cache and various validation helpers). It's
up to 700 downloads a month on npm.

So it's gained traction and I constantly improve it since I wrote it for me a
long time ago. I'm working on version 5 as we speak which is another API
change but one that's going to make it far more approachable. Once version 5
is out it will become the LTS version and still stick around for a very long
time.

I never get much feedback on it except for the folks at Immuta who used it
quite a bit. I wish I got really any feedback but since it's written by me and
for me it ultimately doesn't matter much (though I would love to improve it
for others).

------
sandaru1
I posted about our small medical app about 6 years ago. So far we've been,

1\. Started a company around the medical apps
([http://www.medicaljoyworks.com](http://www.medicaljoyworks.com))

2\. Managed to create a revenue stream and released more than 12 apps in the
medical education field (Some completely new apps and some sub specialty apps
of the original app idea)

3\. Employed several full time people through out the years - in four
different countries.

4\. Our apps have been downloaded more than ~4 million times and been in the
top ten medical apps around the world continuously.

5\. Have been featured in many prominent blogs and medical college study
guides (Also few research papers on medical education using gamification and
pilot programs from universities)

6\. Released more than 600 case studies in English and Spanish. (We are on the
process of translating everything into French, Italian and Portuguese).

7\. Doing quite good on revenue/profit and about ~200 content creators are
working for us on contract basis right now.

------
westoncb
About 3 years ago I posted regarding a new style of text editor better suited
for motion sensors/multi-touch (called 'Tiled Text').

Unfortunately, I posted it before I really wanted to because I got Type I
diabetes and had increased medical expenses and couldn't afford to get by
working at a grocery store anymore. So, the posting served as a pretty
effective way of getting a sort of resume out. It ended up on the front page
for a good while, and was generally well received, and has landed me a couple
of good jobs—but I do regret that I haven't returned to it since (though I do
now have another project of a similar nature).

Project page (with video):
[http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext](http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext)

HN posting:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155)

------
manlio
I hit the front page with "Where is who is hiring hiring?" [0]

I got my current job through it and from time to time I still get "thank you"
emails from random people telling me it helped them get a job too - a really
good feeling (:

[0] [http://whereis-whoishiring-hiring.me](http://whereis-whoishiring-
hiring.me)

------
siavosh
Almost exactly a year ago, I posted my side-project Faqt
([https://www.faqt.co](https://www.faqt.co)) and I’m happy to say that it’s
still going strong to this day. In fact, we not only have users, but we are
doing our biggest ever release in a few weeks.

Originally, I posted Faqt as a personal knowledge base and it spent most of
the day on the front page and led us to currently having a couple thousand
users and a few well-known startups beta testing our team accounts. In a few
weeks, we are re-launching Faqt as a team knowledge base. If anyone wants to
get notified when we do our big release, feel free to email me at
hello@faqt.co and we’ll make sure to get you guys in. We’re really excited for
what’s coming next and a lot of that is due to the Hacker News community and
the fantastic feedback we've been getting throughout the last year. Thanks
guys - you’ve been awesome!

------
mijustin
I submitted my book [http://devmarketing.xyz](http://devmarketing.xyz) 237
days ago. ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538970)

I just checked the stats: it's sold 2,442 copies, and earned over $60,000 in
revenue.

------
kyledrake
I launched [https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org) about three years
ago on HN. It's still going strong. I strongly believe the site would not have
taken off without going viral on HN. That initial boost put things in the
right trajectory for orbit.

Seriously, thank you. It was really helpful.

~~~
e12e
So glad the project is still going strong! Still waiting eagerly for more
transparency reports like: [http://blog.neocities.org/open-company-progress-
report-2014....](http://blog.neocities.org/open-company-progress-
report-2014.html)

(Apart from keeping the free and open html+css web of old alive, I think this
part is the most interesting thing about the whole project. A large reason for
why I've donated in the past - and I'd be surprised if that doesn't go for
some other donors as well).

Keep up the good work!

------
kowdermeister
I had a NULL result :)

400+ upvotes, 50k+ traffic and lots of comments. Tool posted:
[http://gradient.quasi.ink/](http://gradient.quasi.ink/)

Zero freelancing request, few twitter followers and many adrenalin rushes :)
At least I can cross out the 'get to front page of HN' from my bucket list.

------
jgome
I posted my webapp ( [http://nask.co](http://nask.co) ) twice:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nask.co](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nask.co)
, received only 1 comment. I also posted it to reddit, but didn't have many
comments.

While people find it interesting, I don't have any users, only bots visit it,
until I post something here or there. Guess the webapp is not useful, the
UX/UI is not good, the voices are not good, the domain name is terrible... I
don't really know. I lost interest/motivation and just left it running.

Finally, I open sourced the Go library used by my project:
[https://github.com/pqyptixa/tts2media](https://github.com/pqyptixa/tts2media)
. AFAIK, no one uses it.

~~~
kevinsimper
Do use it yourself? :) I tried it and it worked but I didn't know what I
should use it for.

~~~
jgome
Well, I made the project for fun and to learn, so yeah, I do use it.

I've thought of some uses:

\- to share voice messages, as a sort of "anonymous vocaroo"

\- since you can add voices to videos or images, could be used to add a
description to an image, or even make "voice memes", for example

and a few other uses that I can't remember right now.

------
kgabis
1345 days ago I posted about a C JSON library I wrote [0]. Since then I've
added lots of features (serialization), fixed even more bugs (often found by
someone else) and learned to say no to pull requests. It became surprisingly
popular and I'm still maintaining it, adding features and fixing bugs from
time to time. It feels great to know that people are using a tool you wrote
and I've learned a lot about writing robust code and designing APIs thanks to
it. It also helped me get my current job, so I've also benefited financially
from it.

Here's a direct link to github:
[https://github.com/kgabis/parson](https://github.com/kgabis/parson)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709169)

------
rileyt
I have posted both Standard Resume [0] and Amplitude [1]. Neither received
much feedback or traffic from Hacker News, but Standard Resume was added to
Product Hunt [2] by someone else and got substantial traffic and signups.

Standard Resume now has over 15k users and is still growing with only minor
updates and fixes based on feedback. It doesn't make any money.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9513076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9513076)
[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846574)
[2] [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/standard-
resume](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/standard-resume)

------
_ao789
I somewhat launched [https://logvoo.com](https://logvoo.com) from a post on HN
a while back and it's growth has been pretty steady so far. My other projects
are still bootstrapping it at this stage but so far am seeing about 40% growth
per week.

------
lebinh
I showed ngxtop [0] about 2 years ago as a top inspired tool to quickly check
the status of my nginx servers, something I created for my need. I expected
some people would find it useful and shared, turned out _a lot_ of people need
something to monitor their nginx servers and it got 3k stars in a day or two.
So I built a much better tool to help monitor nginx and sell it as a product,
Luameter [1]. It didn't take off like the other but now making a couple
hundreds a month and being used by some high-profile users, i.e. well-known
companies.

[0] [https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop](https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop) [1]
[https://luameter.com/](https://luameter.com/)

~~~
eps
Scrolling on luameter.com is broken in mobile Safari. Just FYI.

------
richardknop
My Show HN project: [https://pingli.st/](https://pingli.st/)

So far saw only minor interest. I have been slowly improving it since I posted
it on HN.

But it is not profitable yet so I am focusing on my full time job and only
spending evenings now and then on Pinglist.

------
ljw1001
22 days ago, got just 6 points for a high performance java dataframe. Today
had 30 unique visitors on github:
[https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw](https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw).
Good thing i have a day job :)

~~~
kristianp
Looks cool, do you have an online demo/sandbox?

~~~
ljw1001
Not yet. There is some documentation at jtablesaw.wordpress.com. I plan to
publish a Beaker Notebook with an extended example pretty soon. If you're not
familiar with Beaker it's like an Jupyter data-science notebook, but supports
Java.
[https://pub.beakernotebook.com/publications](https://pub.beakernotebook.com/publications)

------
bonzoq
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-
client/id9394542...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-
client/id939454231?mt=8) \- iOS HN Client, currently #1 in the US App Store

~~~
sjroot
I used your app in the past. I love the design; my only gripe (and what
ultimately caused me to uninstall) was being unable to sign into my HN
account. Other than that, great job with it.

~~~
bastijn
FWIW I think Boreal is the greatest ios app for HN. It has great features like
filters and comment collapsing. Also allows commenting, voting and publishing.

[http://getboreal.com/?ckattempt=1](http://getboreal.com/?ckattempt=1)

------
rayalez
About a year ago I have launched
[http://rationalfiction.io](http://rationalfiction.io) (a platfirm for
publishing hard sci-fi). I'm still working on it, it's growing gradually, slow
but steady. 900+ users by now.

A few months ago I have launched [http://lumiverse.io](http://lumiverse.io) (a
website where you can publish and discover educational videos). Since the
launch I had other priorities, so the traffic slowly trickled down, now it's
consistently at around 100 visitors per day. I'm planning to get back to it
soon with new ideas and improvements, hopefully it will take off.

------
vhost-
A couple years ago I posted
[https://github.com/kyleterry/tenyks](https://github.com/kyleterry/tenyks) and
it gained about 150 stars. It's a service oriented IRC bot that was backed by
redis pubsub (now zeromq pubsub). You can write commands and services to
handle messages in any language.

I wish I've had more time to spend on it, but work and has been draining. I
really want to build a saas around it with docker to see how people respond to
it and use it. I should dedicate some time to this.

Sorry about the above text, I'm on my phone and it keeps autocorrecting >_<.

~~~
MildlySerious
May I ask why you switched from Redis PubSub to ZeroMQ?

------
neilk
[https://github.com/saucelabs/isign](https://github.com/saucelabs/isign)
posted about 5 months ago. It's a reimplementation of Apple's app signing,
that works on non-Apple platforms.

For a while it felt like nobody cared, but the minute I went on vacation we
started getting some good contributions, mostly from the sideloading
community. Although I'm not very familiar with that world. Lately facing some
challenges with iOS 10. We know roughly what the changes are, but I'm at the
point where I guess I have to provide things like a roadmap.

------
vladdanilov
Also have one project on autopilot.

It's a set of Automator workflows for text manipulation in OS X apps
[https://github.com/vmdanilov/TextFlow](https://github.com/vmdanilov/TextFlow).
It had a warm welcome on HN
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9585115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9585115).
Since that time it collected 486 stars on Github.

Happy to know that people still find it useful.

BTW, donations don't work for projects this small. But that was rather an
experiment to prove what I've heard.

------
antouank
Got an HN reader as a side project (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809477)
) and I got some users daily, which pushed me to rewrite the whole thing after
a year and keep updating it since then.

It's an excellent way for me, to experiment with things and learn on something
that other people see/use ( to keep you responsible in some way ).

Most weird thing is that, although I now have at least 100 unique visits every
day, no one gives any feedback, positive or negative. Don't know how to
interpret that...

------
acconrad
PeerGym is still going on strong, increasing traffic every month, now with
reviews and gym edits!

I'm still able to run a hobby instance on heroku because it's all on Phoenix
Elixir. Very happy with it as a fun pet project.

www.peergym.com

------
franciscop
I got hired to do some VC you have heard about websites and
[http://angularattack.com/](http://angularattack.com/) contest and others
after showing [http://umbrellajs.com/](http://umbrellajs.com/) (and after
[http://picnicss.com/](http://picnicss.com/) ) on the front page. It was
really awesome, since it was almost the only email I got from the Show HN, but
also a great opportunity.

~~~
arranf
I've used Picnic CSS in a project I've been working on. I sent you an email
about a bug I've found and have another bug to share if you're interested!

~~~
franciscop
Yes! But please send it/them to
[http://github.com/picnicss/picnic](http://github.com/picnicss/picnic) , in my
email it might slip away

------
alpb
This is not software but 2+ years ago I have redesigned the Microsoft employee
badges:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254786)

Today 120,000+ Microsoft employees and vendors are wearing the employee badges
I designed: [http://www.geekwire.com/2015/the-new-microsoft-even-the-
blue...](http://www.geekwire.com/2015/the-new-microsoft-even-the-blue-badges-
are-getting-a-redesign/) :)

~~~
nojvek
I love the new badges. They are very well designed and sleek. Good job.

------
Two9A
554 days ago, I posted about Commodore Clicker:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806169)

It didn't get any traction, and I haven't had time to work on it since, but I
still run into people from time to time who say they've enjoyed a quick game.
It still stands as a high-point in my technical achievement, as a full
emulation of the interface between the Commodore 64 and its disk drive, all in
JavaScript.

Didn't find a way to monetize, though.

------
cddotdotslash
Almost a year ago, I posted my open source side project (an AWS security
scanner): CloudSploit[1]. Since then, I have kept the open source version, but
built an entire web service around it with paid plans. It's gotten a good
amount of traction and I've enjoyed adding new features, as well as the
process of learning to start a new business (it's all new for me).

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062746)

------
ajaxaddicted
In 2011 I showed a simple server monitoring tool called Amon
([https://www.amon.cx](https://www.amon.cx)). The project got a really good
reception (front page) on HN and it even helped me land a job at a Y
Combinator company (S12 Batch).

5 years later the projects is still going strong, profitable and I still
really enjoy working on it.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3612200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3612200)

------
jasdeepsingh
About a year and a half ago, Me and my brother posted
[https://github.com/metaware/angular-
invoicing](https://github.com/metaware/angular-invoicing)

We got ~70 upvotes and approx 500 stars on Github.

I've consistently seen traffic on our repos Github page since then, and have
reasons to believe (Google Analytics metrics) that people use it on a regular
basis. We have added a couple new features since our Show HN. It's free and
always will be. :)

------
joemcelroy
In jan I showed Searchkit, a Elasticsearch React component framework
([http://www.github.com/searchkit/searchkit](http://www.github.com/searchkit/searchkit)).
Grew from 0 to 2200 stars and 400 + on product hunt. Me and the other coauthor
consult on react js projects around london
([http://www.teneleven.co.uk](http://www.teneleven.co.uk)).

------
desfan
A year and something ago I posted about my first mobile game that I developed
for Android. It got some cool traction (~3M downloads) and I've ended up doing
an iOS version, and a landing page for it
([http://2121.io/](http://2121.io/)). Was pretty cool to do a start to finish
side-project, since most of them end scrapped. I expect to start developing a
new game later on this year. :)

~~~
Im_a_throw_away
Cool game! Do you mind sharing how you marketed your game to get 3M downloads?

~~~
desfan
Believe it or not, I didn't do much. Facebook / Twitter posts, then nagged
everybody I knew to share it (I mean, _really_ nagged them). Before I knew it,
it was trending in Portugal and kept spreading to other countries.

------
electrotype
[https://www.spincast.org](https://www.spincast.org)

No comments at all on my "Show HN" thread! ;-)

But it's not that surprising since it's a new Java web framework (and it's
still in beta).

The development goes very well though! WebSockets are now fully supported.
Version 1.0.0 will be released in a couple of months.

If you are a Java developer and a Guice fan, please have a look. We are
looking for new ideas and contributors.

~~~
pkd
Were you a C# dev for long? Your naming conventions reflect that.
Traditionally, Interfaces are not prefixed with I in Java.

Can you some up some salient points which makes spincast different from all
other existing Java web frameworks? (spark, ninja, jooby etc)

My interest is because I love Java and would love to have a great goto
framework in this language.

~~~
electrotype
I've worked a couple of years with C# and, indeed, my love for "I" prefixed
interfaces comes from there! In fact, Allman [0] is also my favorite indent
style, but I've done much more Java than C# in my life, and I'm now used to
the "{" at the end of the line.

That said, I don't really care that much about "Java standards". I like Java
as a language (it's cross platform, solid, typed) and I use it the way I think
it's best. For example, Spincast doesn't use the Servlet API at all.

Before starting Spincast, I've tried pretty much all those modern frameworks.
Maybe I should have kept notes about what I didn't like about each of them,
but I finally decided to start a new one. I would have _loved_ to find a
framework that would have met most of my preferences, and with an existing
community, but I didn't. Maybe the closest one I found was Pippo [1]. I don't
really like Spring (even if I'm a certified Spring developer) neither, even
Spring boot.

What makes Spincast different, in my opinion? I guess one have to play with it
a bit to really see how it works, how it feels... But the most obvious thing
is that it's based on Guice from the ground up. Guice it the only strong
dependency Spincast core has (except for SLF4J).

Maybe the section about Spincast Integration Testing [2] is a good read to
have a feel on how Spincast works, and how Guice is used everywhere.

Anyway, thanks... There are now comments about Spincast on HN, wouhou! ;-)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style#Allman_style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style#Allman_style)

[1] [http://www.pippo.ro/](http://www.pippo.ro/)

[2]
[https://www.spincast.org/documentation#testing_app_example](https://www.spincast.org/documentation#testing_app_example)

------
jishangiras
Shared this over a week ago.

1News – 1 sentence summarized news – inspired by Hacker News
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003510)

Has had over 160+ visitors so far. iOS / Android apps have had over 300+
downloads. 30+ daily users.

Thank to HN, I got some great feedback from users. This is still in its early
stage, will definitely continue to improve the service.

------
blackice
It's nice to see people doing well after posting their projects on HN. Perhaps
I should share mine but I don't want to seem spammmy about it :/

~~~
corysama
This is explicitly the thread where it is asked that you please be spammy
about it :)

------
jph
GitAlias [http://gitalias.com](http://gitalias.com) launched here in June, and
now has hundreds of stars on GitHub.

The project is a free repo of handy git commands, and so far it's working
really well with teams. Ideas are welcome!

Repo is
[https://github.com/gitalias/gitalias](https://github.com/gitalias/gitalias)

------
tschellenbach
getstream.io, show HN 2 years ago. Stream is an API for building, scaling and
personalizing feeds. (Think Twitter/Facebook style feed technology in a box)

We now power over 300 production applications, raised funding and have
gathered a pretty awesome team:
[https://getstream.io/team/](https://getstream.io/team/)

~~~
tbarbugli
Originally from Amsterdam, we joined Techstars in NYC 2015 and afterwards
opened up an office in Boulder, CO

------
hippich
My last project which is still online is from 2014 - Hashcash.io - But nothing
really changed since then. It was pretty cool experiment and I use it myself
on many content websites I have, as well as many people use it to protect
their wordpress (mostly) blogs. It is running on auto-pilot, just does its job
:)

------
milankragujevic
Sad news, a hacker news reader which was me testing random web technologies.
no users, no traction, shut down.

------
mvrekic
About two months ago we show HN'd www.zora.io - A tool to help landlords land
and keep great tenants by using data analysis.

Since then we have head a steady 8% week over week growth. We closed a small
seed round and added 4 developers to the team to work on the mobile app and
keep improving the algorithm.

------
towit
Last year we shared [https://towit.io](https://towit.io) \- no HN love but we
did receive international press and to this day a slow but steady pace of new
users.

Was a traumatising year of highs and lows, 6/10.

* Edited for readability.

------
monty5811
Shared an open source web-app for churches to manage their SMS communication
recently [1].

Not much of a response, which is fine.

[1]
[http://github.com/monty5811/apostello](http://github.com/monty5811/apostello)

------
elbear
I created a site that gathered curated stand-up comedy videos:
[http://www.comedylib.com/](http://www.comedylib.com/) Now it has around 50
weekly sessions and is on autopilot.

------
hippich
Ah, also in 2015 launched redirecto.io - idea was super simple, but afer
pitching it to multiple people - no engagement, so I just left it on 'auto-
pilot' too. Does its job for me :)

------
kup0
This was a great post idea, and I've been very inspired by many of the posts
here. Maybe someday soon I'll be able to create something of my own and have
it go somewhere :)

------
nojvek
Started working in Http://bewolo.com part time a couple of years back with
some friends. Slowly lost interest.

------
amirouche
trash! After a good reception from HN (600+ github star) the project ignored
by conference artists and everybody else.

------
eecks
It would be cool if we had an Update HN section where the only things that
could be posted were things that were posted months ago in Show HN

------
marknadal
About 2 years ago I posted an Open Source Firebase alternative, GUN
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558)
. It stayed on the homepage for about 5 hours.

Since then we raised a seed round from billionaire investors like Tim Draper
and Marc Benioff of Salesforce after having gone through the bitcoin/virtual-
reality accelerator BoostVC (their applications are open now, message me about
your startup and if it is awesome I'll try and refer it in)!

Now we're about to release a performance focused version (30M ops/sec, see
[https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-
IE6-on-2...](https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/100000-ops-sec-in-IE6-on-2GB-
Atom-CPU) with a podcast by readthesource.io on how) and onboarding enterprise
customers.

It has been a real honor and huge blessing. Very thankful to be able to work
on Open Source full time, check it out at
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) and
[http://gun.js.org/](http://gun.js.org/) .

