

Show HN: 2 guys -- Learned to code in 3 months and built this - jeffchuber

4 months ago sucked. Our technical co-founder quit after 6 months and we still had no product.<p>My co-founder and I had been 'working' on our startup for 8 months. I say 'working' because as the "business people" - there wasn't a whole lot we could do except philosophize. We had gotten really awesome intros to some of the top VCs and entrepreneurs, but had nothing to show.<p>And now we felt stranded. Had we wasted 8 months of our lives? Identity crisis? Check.<p>So we did what any rational person would do - we ran to the mountains. Literally. In Boone, NC - we talked about why we started Knowit, what we believed. We talked about how we had taught ourselves so much on our own time, but couldn't save or share what we were learning. We didn't get any real and tangible credit for it.<p>And then it hit us - we are saying that anyone can teach themselves anything. That's the web. We simply had to give it a shot -- we owed it that. So we taught ourselves to code, for free, from the web. In many ways apropos.<p>We starting building and 3 months later we have a real product with over 375 users who have added over 3000 items.<p>We built Knowit to make it really easy to save and share your thoughts on the things you read, watch, and listen to. We want to help people build an online portfolio of what they know and what they're learning. We are excited about helping people take the things they are already doing - and make them count.<p>Check it out at http://knowitapp.com/ and example portfolios at http://knowitapp.com/jeff and http://knowitapp.com/nash - Things are still very early - and we have a ton of really cool ideas. What do you all think?? Are we doing this right?<p>If you want to check it out in more detail - we set up an invite backdoor for HN.
http://knowitapp.com/invite/hn<p>What we learned from all this:
- You can learn almost anything on the web from free resources. (and everything w/i 10yrs)<p>- It's easier than you think - the hardest step is the first one.<p>- If you are not technical - start learning - you will never regret it.<p>- Save and share your journey and teach the rest of us how you got so awesome.
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Rust
Clickers!

<http://knowitapp.com/>

<http://knowitapp.com/jeff>

<http://knowitapp.com/nash>

<http://knowitapp.com/invite/hn>

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jeffchuber
Thanks Rust.

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fourmii
Congrats! I love getting inspiration like this!! I just signed up through the
backdoor, good looking website. Are you going to publish your blog on how you
got it done? I see the link to the blog on the site isn't working at the
moment.

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jeffchuber
We we're pushing our blog over to Tumblr, but this feature has been down on
tumblr over the last two days. But yes - soon! Thanks!

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mrgreenfur
Nice looking site! When you say "business people" do you mean "interaction
designer"? Orrrr did you also have no experience in UI?

Congratulations!

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jeffchuber
Our only experience in UI was using the web. I had extremely little html
experience, no css, no jquery. Thanks a lot!

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cd34
Expand on this:

4 months ago sucked. Our technical co-founder quit after 6 months and we still
had no product.

Did you build off work that he did? Was he not producing? You built it in
three months - and he had nothing in six months? Or, were the ideas difficult
to communicate that it took a crisis for you to finally buckle down and get to
work?

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jeffchuber
Sure thing.

Happy to communicate privately with you more (jeff at knowitapp dot com).
Publicly I'll say: \- the site didnt work after 6 months and was built in
python. \- we didn't know python, but Nash had read one book on php so we went
from there building the site from scratch. \- We built on LAMP stack with
jquery and open-source. A beautiful, intuitive MVP was our mantra. Just make
it work.

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andr3w321
Two suggestions:

1\. It should endlessly scroll. Clicking load more is annoying.

2\. The top part requesting my e-mail is annoying. It should not permanently
stay there and take up valuable screen real estate when I'm trying to scroll
down and read content.

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thiagofm
NICE! I wish I had determinated co-founders like you guys.

The UI looks good :)

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jeffchuber
Thanks! We are making it up and figuring it out as we go along!

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vijayr
nice work, and inspirational. There was another one, a while ago, two guys
built an iPhone app from scratch, and launched it successfully. No prior
programming experience, mobile or otherwise. I can't remember the app name
right now :(

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TheDoctorWho
What languages did you use and what was your learning process?

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adamnemecek
I as well am interested in hearing more about the learning process.

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jeffchuber
Will post up a blog post in the next few days!

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samstave
What resources did you use to learn what you needed?

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gdhillon
Congrats. Can you share details on which programming language you learned and
roadblocks if any?

~~~
jeffchuber
The site is LAMP(php) stack on AWS ec2 and jquery on the front-end.

Let's see, roadblocks: \- front-end -- getting everything to work tolerably in
IE7+ \- front-end -- the bookmarklet. Definitely the bookmarklet. Huge issues
injecting javascript into DOMs. The version live now finally works every time
without fail. (details: array leaks, style conflicts, calling in jquery, etc)
\- back-end -- nothing too serious. Joins in mySQL took a while to get right.
Ajax can be finicky but nothing too bad. \- Server -- we hadn't set up DDOS
protection on our amazon server and so the site went down a few times. There
are some great tutorials for getting a Lamp stack up on ec2 - if you know what
you are doing should only take five minutes.

Needless to say figuring out what to search is the biggest problem. Once you
know what to search, stackoverflow and google can fix all your problems.

