
Ask HN: What are some successful products that had a disappointing Show HN? - the_wheel
Anything from low traffic and upvotes to a weak product.
======
eps
Not HN, but still epic:

    
    
        No wireless. Less apace than a nomad. Lame.
    

[http://slashdot.org/story/21026](http://slashdot.org/story/21026)

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sopooneo
Not on HN, but I remember the initial demo of imgur being torn to bits on
reddit. And when Joel Spolsky announced his idea that would eventually turn
into StackOverflow, it was derided as useless because the work already had
enough question/answer sites.

~~~
e19293001
Found this page:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/71i4v/stack_ov...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/71i4v/stack_overflow_launched_into_public/)

Much people don't like experts exchange and found this site much better.

~~~
fphhotchips
My favourite comment (on _Reddit_ ): The fact that Joel Spolsky can jump in
and arbitrarily add and remove to what a person wrote is a little unsettling.

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applecrazy
Dropbox was criticized when it first came up on Show HN. People said that they
could create their own and that nobody would adopt installing something.

You can view the original post here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

Edit: it only had 71 comments and 111 points, and if I'm not mistaken, that's
not much by today's standards.

~~~
jmcgough
people were still very positive about it

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mattbgates
I released MyPost ([https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io)) which allows anyone
to create beautiful simple web pages in minutes with just a few clicks.
Completely free with no registration required.

I didn't put "SHOW HN" in the title as I was fairly new to Hacker News. It
also didn't do much to gain many comments on Hacker News, but as far as
gaining attraction from around the world.. it managed to gain a huge amount of
attention in Russia and other parts of the world. It probably has so far
received over 100,000 visitors in about a year with no advertising on my part.
I would love to monetize it eventually, but for now, it was definitely a nice
project that helped me learn a lot about PHP and MySQL.

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Peroni
Sleepio appear to be doing pretty well despite a fairly average Show HN -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504639)

Pixelapse did reasonably well and ended up being acquired by Dropbox (not
necessarily suggesting that's a success) -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3572755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3572755)

My personal favourite is Mondo (or Monzo as they are now called). Their
founder/CEO posted here when they launched and the thread got very little
attention. These days they are one of the most respected startups in London
and are on the cusp of enormous success -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638345)

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arrmn
Well, maybe if their show HN got low amount/no votes nobody saw it. So it
would be impossible to name it.

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aaron695
This seems to be a bit of a meme I don't think is true.

Every mentions Dropbox because it is the only one?

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ahmetsulek
Our lovely @usepanda app.

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

It's a reader offering RSS and bookmarking as well as ability to view in
different layouts. Got 1781 upvotes on Product Hunt.

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breerly
gRPC seemed to have had a pretty rough opening.

Initial announcement -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114748)
And for their 1.0 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344995)

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jv22222
Nugget only got 14 points on HN but 350+ points on product hunt... As to final
success we're still working on it.

~~~
wwalser
The difference in taste between HN and PH was on display in the thread about
the AngelList's acquisition of PH. I found it really bizarre. A gathering of
people who build stuff just completely deriding something built by a small
team for reasons I couldn't make heads or tails of.

~~~
kristianc
1 / The perception that PH isn't doing anything 'hard', tech wise.

2 / The perception that PH was created to capture value and act as a
promotional vehicle for a narrow SV elite, rather than creating anything new.

~~~
wwalser
Yeah, that's a fairly succinct summary. I suppose I put some effort into
having a positive-by-default outlook on stuff others have created. I don't
think those descriptions of PH are _bad_ things and even if they were bad,
then I would assume that it became bad only by mistake not out of intention.

