Ask HN: A project you gave up on? (time, cost, you were not smart/ready enough ) - casper345
======
TheGrumpyBrit
I haven't given up on it yet, but my hobby project is a portal for free live
music gigs in my local area. It's working well enough on Wordpress, but real
life always seems to get in the way of my attempts to move it to a standalone
product. Probably because it's always my go-to project when I want to learn
something new, so I've ended up with multiple unsatisfactory versions because
I've not had any experience with the language/framework.

------
existencebox
I'm not sure this counts; since I less "Gave up on" and more "figured it was
done enough for what little time I had to work on it as a personal toy; to my
later regret," but...

Maybe 4-5 years ago I wrote this.
[https://github.com/Gehn/JustADistributedVPL](https://github.com/Gehn/JustADistributedVPL)
(I uploaded it to github ~2 years back on the request from a friend who wanted
to use it.)

It was a hobby project to control the raspberry pis around the house by giving
me a visual programming language to connect programmatic modules in a graph
via a web UX, including allowing networked hops between nodes. IFTTT for IOT.

I thought I was being derivative even at that point given yahoo pipes and some
similar concepts, but having seen the IOT control/home automation boom since
then (and the many products who later moved far past what I had been thinking
of), I do feel like there might have been opportunities to be ahead of the
curve there.

~~~
nicholas73
I planned a project for home automation in 2008, and many of my ideas are in
the market today (like doorbell video, smart smoke alarms, etc.).

However I don't think I missed out because the bar for execution is so high in
hardware, and the winners are most often large incumbents with networks
effects. Like, even if I pushed out a product, I neither would be able to
establish protocol standards nor would I have services like Alexa on top of
it. Then of course is economy of scale.

------
thrifter
The world's first search engine for sales tax (in Canada):
[http://isittaxed.com](http://isittaxed.com). I have over 10K goods and
services in the database, for all provinces and territories in Canada. All
told, it has cost me almost 4K to develop. Monetizing it has been more
difficult than I thought.

------
jatins
I worked on project to make any database with a change log realtime (like
Firebase)
[https://gist.github.com/jatins/11aac836f25257148a1d61def2c72...](https://gist.github.com/jatins/11aac836f25257148a1d61def2c7270c)

Ultimately, when you are building a developer oriented product even an MVP
needs to be confidence inspiring, which needs money and people, didn't have
much of either. And couldn't get much investor interest just on the basis of
alpha - they either need traction, or someone to vouch for you.

------
happppy
I have some vague ideas. One idea was a fb integrated music app, but after fb
scandals I just gave up that idea. I didn't invested on it at all. I am not
sure many people will use it after fb scandals.

------
pontifier
You mean every project I've ever worked on?

