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 "Show HN" projects a couple of years ago and it was funny reading those posts again.

Basically all of the projects went on 'auto-pilot' right away, meaning that I didn't touch them since I posted them. However, my latest 'Show-HN' 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).

I was wondering what your 'Show HN' 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), 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/) 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!

[fillskills]

I have used webflow to start my own business. Second year into it. I guess in addition to Vlad I also owe thanks to HN!

[jboogie77]

What sort of advantage/features do you provide over something like wix.com?

[pradipmj]

Awesome work. Do you support https by the way?. It's one of the main things missing from other providers like Wix etc

[mjrbrennan]

The ad on the front page is fantastic!

[sytse]

In 2012 I did a show HN for GitLab.com 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/ with more than 100,000 organizations running GitLab. Over 1200 people contributed to the project http://contributors.gitlab.com/

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

[bemmu]

Almost exactly 5 years ago I posted about a Japanese candy subscription service (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:

[jay-anderson]

Happy former customers here. We had to cancel since we live in Phoenix and received melted candy during the summer months (not your fault) and we forgot to sign back up. If we could be subscribed during the rest of the year we would.

[biztos]

I too remember this, though not from HN... and I remember thinking, "wow, what a glorious and probably doomed project!"

Glad to hear it's doing well.

[e12e]

Did you get an email from my friend a while back about the possibility of buying real/high quality soy sauce? I'm not so much curious about the actual exchange, just reminding you that there are other (food) things that are hard to get outside of Japan (partly due to the language barrier, and not all traditional crafts shops being particularly Internet savvy) -- that a lot of people would likely be willing to pay a premium for. It would proabably be a quite different business model - maybe enough of a change for you to keep your interest (and us to get our good stuff). I know he did sign up for the candy either way, and was very happy that I pointed him to your service ;-)

Btw, for others interested in good food, and/or Japanese food, the inspiration for this request came from the excellent documentary:

"Shoyu and the Secrets of Japanese Cuisine" / "Shoyu et les secrets de la cuisine Japonaise"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3898014/

http://www.pointdujour-international.com/catalogueFiche.php?...

[przeor]

Definitely, you should start accepting BitCoin. I have some of $ it in my mobile wallet and probably I would order some ;-D while I've got an impulse to try a japan's candy ;-)

[downandout]

I cannot believe it's been 5 years. I remember reading about this like it was yesterday. Congratulations on the success!

[yitchelle]

Man, has it been 5years already! I remember reading it when it was ShowHNed. And the book you wrote about it. Hope you had some success with the book as well.

[tjalex]

Just added $25/mo more :) awesome, awesome idea!

[RomanPushkin]

great service, +1 customer!

[pcarmichael]

A bit over five years ago I posted an 'Ask HN' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123) for my side project PCPartPicker (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.

[karim79]

In 2013 we show HN'd Kraken.io Image Optimizer: 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.

[harvestmoon]

I designed a new name generation software called 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?

[mabcat]

I needed something like this literally last night, glad to find it now.

If you want it to be more widely used, maybe it could use some SEO or marketing love? You don't seem to be on page 1 for company name generator, business name generator, name generator, etc., and you deserve to be. Get an h1 tag, get a few blogs to list you on their "top 5 web 2.0 name generators" articles.

[aleem]

Pretty cool. How do you bulk query .com availability?

[leeuwnhawk]

I've bookmarked your website for future use. I have lost count of the number of hours I've spent in coming up with unique names for my web projects, and your software would surely help me in the name brainstorming process.

[zaidf]

You did better than my domain finder(http://DomainKush.com) side project :) Btw, multiple names suggested by namebird could also be drug names(pharmas pay a lot of money in settling on the right name.)

[lohengramm]

Oh my god, it's so amazing! The web app is very simple but the names quality is awesome.

I used several similar name generators recently and they all sucked each on its own way, but this one rocks.

[blowski]

I used it only the other day, and it was very useful, so thank you.

[amrit_b]

This is really awesome! The generated names are amazing. How do you do it!? Please don't kill this project!

[morpheyesh]

This is too good. I'd use it all the time.

[typpo]

AdDetector (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) - 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/) - 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/) - 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) - posted 4 years ago but it's a niche tool. 62 subscribers, 2.5k dreams recorded, on autopilot.

Asterank (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/) - did well on HN, finalist in some Popular Science viz contest.

Dinosaur Pictures database (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?

[snowwrestler]

Thank you for textbelt! Not long after your Show HN post, I used it to set up cron scripts that send me a text message if server load climbs above a certain number. It was a simple free way to monitor and deal with some performance issues at the time. To this day those scripts are running, although they haven't been triggered for a long time.

[gabemart]

3 years ago I did a Show HN [1] for 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

[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

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

[shanwang]

Last year I posted www.hnjobs.io, which is convenient tool to browse "who is hiring post", not nearly as sleek as yours, I only have a few hundred visitors a month, but it's my first project from learning angular/bootstrap/javascript/expressjs, so I'm happy about it:)

[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.

[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

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

[endymi0n]

514 days ago we launched JustWatch - https://www.justwatch.com

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?

[hypercluster]

Congrats from a fellow German. And if it's still the case: awesome example of an Ionic app.

[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

I've created and put up 6 tutorials at

https://alexatutorial.com

Worked with Amazon on a guest blog post:

https://developer.amazon.com/public/community/post/Tx14R0IYY...

Flask-Ask and AlexaTutorial have been featured on

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/4qdy73/learn_t...

and

https://www.producthunt.com/tech/alexatutorial-com

280 github stars

https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask

Having a blast!

[Rezo]

I posted 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 [2] https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

[jfoster]

I did a ShowHN for 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.

[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 [2] https://www.class-central.com/

[sideproject]

About 2 years ago, I posted my side project HelloBox (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.

[stevekemp]

I posted a simple Dynamic DNS service, 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 . 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

(that was nearly 10 years ago!)

[bhouston]

Did a Show HN on https://clara.io ~1000 days ago:

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. 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 (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.