You probably get this a lot, but I'm going to say it anyway - Thank you for redis, it's an amazing bit of software and I use it in virtually every project.
Not only is it useful, but the source code is pure poetry to read.
I just read the about page. Could you help me understand a little more about how it works? It seems like a tool that could replace sessions and cookies, and possibly a browser-based database?
My current project is a tournament-scoring app where I'm using cookies to hold match scores, so that the score won't be lost if the page is refreshed before the match is over and saved to the database. Would redis be appropriate in that context?
I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time.
We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare, and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4].
I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are (didn't realize how big edu would be).
1. Took the test. 2. Was impressed 3. Thought to test for a while 4. Installed Chrome plugin 5. Opened facebook for some random reason 6. Page flickering!? Facebook bug? 7. Scrolled 2 times 8. Got smashed in the face by a full-page ad from Beelinereader 9. Removed plugin and will probably never install again
You really caught me. This is something I could pay for after trying out for a while. Do yourself a favour for christmas and investigate if there is any other way than smashing just recently onboarded users with an ad to raise the awareness of the fact that this is not free.
Amazing. This comment must compare to the famous Slashdot takedown of the iPod.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. "
(Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)
> 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Somewhat related, it wasn't Show HN but show YC that turned my side-project into a business. YC's Application has the question "what have you hacked that wasn't a computer". That question compelled me to create a hack that converted a cheap ($10 in some cases) bluetooth headset into a garage door opener compatible with any smartphone. It didn't even require an App. I posted a Youtube video and then submitted my eventually rejected YC application. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo
So many people watched that video they started asking me to sell the fully assembled project. Soon a polite C & D -ish letter from Samsung forced me to stop selling until I made my own hardware which I did in November of 2014.
5 years later I still have growth and sales. Next year I hope to make an enterprise version that would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home. I'll be sure to post that on Show HN. Regardless I owe YC a lot of gratitude as just the process of applying changed my life.
> ... would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home.
I wouldn't expect them to actually do that. Between the girlfriend and myself, we get a lot of packages. They usually leave them by the garage door because it's easier / closer. We've told them before they can leave them inside the (unlocked) garage but the general response is "we can't".
This isn't exactly a software project, but I posted in a "What are you working on?" thread three years ago about my book, Statistics Done Wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796
Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been translated into German, Korean, and Chinese: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.)
Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even more clear to me, and the need even clearer.
Looks like a great book! I think I'll have to buy a copy.
It's interesting that you found the attention the HN post brought helped you focus and finish the book.
Lately, I've been trying to pay more attention to the Show HN section of the site, giving upvotes to interesting projects and commenting or asking questions where I can.
I think that lots of us here could improve the HN community by giving more attention to Show HN posts, even for projects that seem easy or mundane to those of us who have been developers for a while.
The simpler projects might be the ones where encouragement helps the most. Without that kind of encouragement from more experienced developers 7 years ago, I probably wouldn't have a software career right now at all.
I was in college then and found making a well-formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post and went full time on it after passing out of college.
We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our users that make us super happy - https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials
I just sent that link to a dozen people and am already trying to get my scattered-over-the-globe circle of high school friends to agree to a reunion of our Shadowrun group.
Hadn't heard of your site so far. Cannot believe it. Thank you so much!
As an avid D&Der thank you for roll20. I'm a designer and there is probably a lot that I would like to clean up UX wise, but it's invaluable in many ways. I love so much that it exists.
We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
Not shure about your definition of big but https://www.ghostnoteapp.com is doing pretty well. Living in NY with a family being the sole provider it doesent work, but had we moved somewhere less expensive it probably could and i am growing both rev, userbase and product
I posted an Ask HN to review my side project PCPartPicker about six years ago. Got great feedback and things grew from there. I went full-time, had to hire employees, etc. Not big like Dropbox, but we made it over the hump self-funded and without taking investment.
PCPartPicker is the a very unique product with a great community and I've benefited quite a lot from it in the past and hope to continue doing so. Thanks a lot for making this.
So you pivoted from link-shortening to actual content, interesting.
In my industry (reselling) a lot of people use gumroad to sell information, anything from product leads to guides to bulk lists for scanning (for online arbitrage) to chrome extensions. I did it myself briefly and made around $250, but I'm sure people are making a lot more than that.
It's just an incredibly useful tool even for technical people who could set up a store, still saves time.
Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.
Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful (https://www.contentful.com) has raised a Series B (total funding close to $20m), got ~100 employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, over Nike to Urban Outfitters.
It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime soon :)
Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago. Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize their AWS environments.
Don't know what your definition of 'big' is, but my open source project webhook got some attention after posting Show HN: https://github.com/adnanh/webhook
Countly started as a hobby like 4 years ago and it was open source (still is, most parts). Now it tracks more than 11K Android apps according to Mobbo.com, which makes Countly #7 the most used mobile analytics platform. Team is still small (<15), bootstrapped and added a lot more features on top till then. Roughly 1900 stars pn Github. Not bad ;)
I do like how SideProjectBook.com uses gumroad.com (which is 3 posts above this one at the time of writing) to sell the book. It's like a family in here.
CertSimple was announced with a 'Show HN' post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908 ) that led to its first paying customer. We did around 12K GBP in revenue last month and have Travis CI, CrowdCube, and Motley Fool as customers.
Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the only promotion to date.
Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.
Yes, we immediately got picked up by an SF accelerator, then I was able to raise a seed round from billionaire investors Tim Draper and Marc Benioff of Salesforce. Then hired a team, got an MVP out to developers and gained a ton of traction, and now we're about to launch our stable/production-ready release!
antirez|9 years ago
malux85|9 years ago
Not only is it useful, but the source code is pure poetry to read.
Thank you again
Kluny|9 years ago
My current project is a tournament-scoring app where I'm using cookies to hold match scores, so that the score won't be lost if the page is refreshed before the match is over and saved to the database. Would redis be appropriate in that context?
tluyben2|9 years ago
donretag|9 years ago
gnicholas|9 years ago
We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare, and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4].
I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are (didn't realize how big edu would be).
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
2: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-yo...
3: http://www.beelinereader.com
4: see https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc
[updated to add press and award links]
hussfelt|9 years ago
You really caught me. This is something I could pay for after trying out for a while. Do yourself a favour for christmas and investigate if there is any other way than smashing just recently onboarded users with an ad to raise the awareness of the fact that this is not free.
Thanks though, really, impressive tech.
anexprogrammer|9 years ago
I remember it styled links as well as body text which I found pretty annoying.
samstave|9 years ago
criddell|9 years ago
olalonde|9 years ago
jen729w|9 years ago
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. "
(Not meant as criticism; we're all horribly naive in hindsight.)
Swizec|9 years ago
Heh. I started using Dropbox much later than this tagline and the first thing I did after installing was to stop using USB drives.
bdcravens|9 years ago
davisonio|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
louprado|9 years ago
So many people watched that video they started asking me to sell the fully assembled project. Soon a polite C & D -ish letter from Samsung forced me to stop selling until I made my own hardware which I did in November of 2014.
5 years later I still have growth and sales. Next year I hope to make an enterprise version that would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home. I'll be sure to post that on Show HN. Regardless I owe YC a lot of gratitude as just the process of applying changed my life.
jlgaddis|9 years ago
I wouldn't expect them to actually do that. Between the girlfriend and myself, we get a lot of packages. They usually leave them by the garage door because it's easier / closer. We've told them before they can leave them inside the (unlocked) garage but the general response is "we can't".
capnrefsmmat|9 years ago
Someone posted it on the front page soon after: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843
Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been translated into German, Korean, and Chinese: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.)
Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even more clear to me, and the need even clearer.
rpeden|9 years ago
It's interesting that you found the attention the HN post brought helped you focus and finish the book.
Lately, I've been trying to pay more attention to the Show HN section of the site, giving upvotes to interesting projects and commenting or asking questions where I can.
I think that lots of us here could improve the HN community by giving more attention to Show HN posts, even for projects that seem easy or mundane to those of us who have been developers for a while.
The simpler projects might be the ones where encouragement helps the most. Without that kind of encouragement from more experienced developers 7 years ago, I probably wouldn't have a software career right now at all.
bharani_m|9 years ago
I was in college then and found making a well-formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post and went full time on it after passing out of college.
We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our users that make us super happy - https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863
silverlight|9 years ago
We now have almost 2 million users and a small team working on it full-time. I definitely originally thought it would only be a side project...
Gruselbauer|9 years ago
Hadn't heard of your site so far. Cannot believe it. Thank you so much!
vogt|9 years ago
anubisresources|9 years ago
wyldfire|9 years ago
moqups|9 years ago
We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
donutdan4114|9 years ago
siddharthgdas|9 years ago
nixy|9 years ago
Swizec|9 years ago
Oh wait ...
ThomPete|9 years ago
Here is the original Show HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007
pcarmichael|9 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123
hashhar|9 years ago
hrez|9 years ago
netrap|9 years ago
rosstex|9 years ago
jordanielewski|9 years ago
callmevlad|9 years ago
kevinwang|9 years ago
honksillet|9 years ago
dlhavema|9 years ago
smagch|9 years ago
phelm|9 years ago
ikeboy|9 years ago
In my industry (reselling) a lot of people use gumroad to sell information, anything from product leads to guides to bulk lists for scanning (for online arbitrage) to chrome extensions. I did it myself briefly and made around $250, but I'm sure people are making a lot more than that.
It's just an incredibly useful tool even for technical people who could set up a store, still saves time.
Edit: the SSL cert on https://help.gumroad.com is expired for 3 months. You should fix that.
juanre|9 years ago
Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.
maximp|9 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156
josephwandile|9 years ago
You can hear Peter talk about it with Aaron Harris here: https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...
sashthebash|9 years ago
Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful (https://www.contentful.com) has raised a Series B (total funding close to $20m), got ~100 employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, over Nike to Urban Outfitters.
It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime soon :)
zlagen|9 years ago
Rezo|9 years ago
Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago. Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize their AWS environments.
adnanh|9 years ago
Anything >0 is better than 0... :-)
gorkemcetin|9 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254
chrischen|9 years ago
laksmanv|9 years ago
npolet|9 years ago
borski|9 years ago
jayfk|9 years ago
- Typed in a URL to get a free scan
- Needed to create an account
- Needed to confirm my email
- Needed to verify my site ownership
- Got a mail that my site is "borderline insecure". When I click on the link, I'm redirected to the "create an account view"
- Created a new account that opened in a half cropped Iframe displaying some error message I can't read.
This is where I finally gave up.
chrift|9 years ago
You might want to put a warning on there saying that it will submit any forms it can find a LOT.
Also, on the waiting screen, while it's running tests, I filled in the form and it's had an iframe drama.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7rofi17cjormgav/Screenshot%202016-...
pbhjpbhj|9 years ago
c8g|9 years ago
nailer|9 years ago
john_mac|9 years ago
Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the only promotion to date.
Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.
stevenklein|9 years ago
leafo|9 years ago
I don't know where the big cutoff is, but it's been going strong for the past 3.5 years. There are just under 50k games on it now https://itch.io
shanbhag|9 years ago
marknadal|9 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558 For our Open Source Firebase: http://gun.js.org/ !