
Ask HN: Did you build it, and they came? - a_lifters_life
What did you build? To what extent?
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reolbox
I have built a quiz web app that enables people to play a popular Belgian TV
format at home with their family and friends and with their own questions.
Without any marketing, they came :). I am at 5000 active users and counting.
People seem to love playing popular tv-shows at home.

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a_lifters_life
Did you take any recommendations from anyone, or do customer dev. prior?

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reolbox
I wanted to play the game myself and with my family. So I quickly built a
prototype and once I saw my family's enthusiasm I decided to throw it online.
Just a lucky guess I think

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chuhnk
I built this [https://github.com/micro/micro](https://github.com/micro/micro).
It's doing pretty well so far.

~~~
a_lifters_life
Did you take any recommendations from anyone, or do customer dev. prior? What
does 'doing well so far' mean?

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chuhnk
I built based on past experience and an understanding of industry
requirements. Doing well means 10+ companies in production. Recap of 2016 here
[https://medium.com/microhq/micro-past-present-and-
future-1ab...](https://medium.com/microhq/micro-past-present-and-
future-1ab4e492998c)

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stevekemp
Yes. I wrote a trivial interface which allows parsing DNS records and writing
them to Amazon's route53 infrastructure.

I then wrapped that in git, and the end result is that you can write simple
text files containing DNS records, run `git push`, and your DNS updates.

I don't have hundreds of users, but I have enough to make the project a
success. Even if we ignore the fact that I built it for myself.

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gschier
I've been working on [https://insomnia.rest](https://insomnia.rest) for about
two years, and have had steady growth since the beginning. It used to be in
the Chrome Web Store, which helped attract users initially.

It's now at around 2500 daily active users.

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19kuba22
I like your website. Good idea with the screenshots, especially the one on the
first screen, immediately got me interested in learning more about your
product. I will give it a try and see if it works for me better than Postman.

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19kuba22
I built a betting platform for a niche esports game and had moderate success
with it. Mostly word of mouth, but it was a small dying tight-knit community
desperate to attract knew players so it wasn't hard to get everyone
interested.

EDIT: Working on a product for a community I was part of was definitely what
helped me succeed. I worked on the problem I was familiar with, and I received
a lot feedback and support from other people. It also helped me stay
motivated. :)

