I launched Open Exchange Rates (http://openexchangerates.org) - the Robin Hood of exchange rate (FX) data - which collects exchange rates every hour and distributes them for free via a GitHub repository, in a nice, clean, simple JSON API - with values going back to 1999.
It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people.
Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost.
The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!
Are you crawling for this data? Also, since currency is a tricky thing to price (almost any bank/broker can trade currencies) how do you select the "most correct" price?
This sounds like an amazing project! I bet you taught/learned quite a bit - I'm looking to start a couple hackathons at my school (barely any webdevs!) and I'd love to churn out projects like these.
Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in--software for civic engagement.
A few friends and I are working on an app and website that lists corporations' political contributions. The mobile feature that makes it interesting is that you can scan barcodes to find out the political contributions from those products right away--inspired by Boycott SOPA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsop...
I'd really appreciate it if we could talk some time about publishing an iPhone app. I'm still in college, so I don't have much experience with iPhone App publishing and would really appreciate some advice, especially for a non-profit app dealing with politics.
A week or two ago I launched http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ to enable WebGL on iOS devices. In theory, it's profitable -- it cost me nothing (outside of a few hours of dev, which I spent on myself anyway) and has made a whopping $26 or so -- but it'll never really go above that, and 'sales' have already stagnated. It was interesting to see the breakdown of downloads versus payment, and how much people paid. I also wonder how much I would've made if I put it up for, say, $1 only.
Edit: Also interesting that it got quite a bit of attention on HN and several hundred (maybe 400?) downloads and not a single sale (from what I could tell). That surprised me a bit; every sale has been driven by people coming from tweets that some big names in the jailbreaking scene retweeted.
I launched http://hackershelf.com on Valentine's Day. It stayed on the frontpage for a little more than a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963. Save for a few Flattrs, haven't made a cent from it, though that was never the plan. I have, however, met a bunch of interesting people because of it, received a job offer, an investment offer and a few advertising inquiries. Learning alot from the experience :)
If you were to include screenshots and write a blog post on this it could generate a discussion which could get you some useful feedback (and promote your site on HN).
Sometimes simple and ugly triumph? We read some marketing experiences of ugly banner adverts getting more click conversions than modern ones. 1 it's an odd one.
I made http://tutorials.github.com. It's a variant of a larger project I'm working on to make documentation more personalized and more awesome. I hacked it together during the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia, and I posted it to HN, but it never made it to the homepage.
I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited.
I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even for an MVP for the high-tech crowd.
I created a site based off of the idea of Facebook Timeline, except for a professional player's career. It's called Player Career Timeline. It works for just about any NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL player and the data goes back 5 years.
It works by aggregating thousands of stories over the years and assigns them to a specific player/sport. Then I monitor how users interact with the stories to formulate trends in his career. Each story presented in the timeline has a link back to the original source so you can read the full article.
I already had all of this data from my main site and thought it would be fun to use it in another way.
This is really cool. The timeline helps provide some meaning to a players stats. Also, it's a great way to get a quick overview of a players career or recent history.
This is the coolest fucking thread ever! I'm learning so much!
Is there anything more useful than taking all the bragging out of Hacker News and seeing what didn't quite work, or works but isn't blowing up? These are the great lessons
It was built over a weekend to experiment with the Yii PHP framework and because I wanted to see what the list looked like (wasn't disappointed, there's some surprising stuff on there - like how Braveheart on DVD is mankind's greatest accomplishment according to Amazon).
I was considering promoting it as a quick way to find gifts for people and use it for this purpose myself, but I have more profitable/enjoyable things to be doing.
Only project I have done this year (http://route.im), makes $xx/pm however doubt that it would ever cover the server costs, especially when more locations are added.
Although it was done more for me, than generating revenue, so that's not too bad.
I wrote a proposal for Tiger Scheme[1] to radically alter the structure of the scheme and change the general direction, in effect a reboot of the scheme. If it's accepted, it'll be a shedload of work with no financial reward and a massive time sink, but it has the potential to really change information security in the UK and help with the skills shortage in industry so it's worthwhile.
We've silently launched Photofable. It's a social site aimed at promoting global culture exchange through photography and descriptions. Can be used as a travel tool as well. The focus is for each photos description to be informative or educational about the place it was taken.
Those sites are great! It's a nuisance finding your way around so many social networks and their different settings pages. Bookmarking your sites, thanks for building them!
We've launched http://heattest.com/ two months ago. It's an app for heatmap analytics, which was a pretty hardcore to develop. We've spent a lot of time to make the algorithm really good and reliable, but so far we have like 3 sign ups in total, all of them for free trials. The market looked really promising at first.
You spell "conversion" incorrectly in two different ways and your grammar is poor ("Why noone...").
If I were you I'd get the site redesigned, preferably by a professional web designer.
Maybe slim the main page down to your banner, a tag-line saying what the product is and a "Try It Now" button. I don't want to sign up for anything; why not let me demo it on your site in real-time?
And where's the initial Wow? There's a heatmap picture on the main page but nothing happens when I click it. Why not have the image work as a heatmap too?
Sorry to be so negative, but maybe you'll get better results if you fix some or all of those things?
I built http://artistsnclients.com - It was an idea I had back in 2011 but couldn't find time to do. Now I built it, but it doesn't seem to be viable. I had a few people test it and the profit is at about $4 right now.
At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.
There are some real gems here, it's a great concept and I think it's worth putting in the time to make it shine. Maybe hit some people up on other artist sites like deviantart and ask them to submit to beef up the portfolio. I commission art for various occasions and it's also a great gift idea, eg. http://artistsnclients.com/slots/13
We started TimePanel (http://timepanel.net) this year. I love building apps, and always wanted a really fast, simple way to track time and invoice. TimePanel is the result of taking the small, private app I've always used for that and deciding to build it into a product with speed and simplicity being primary goals.
Its 3rd beta update was released in May, and we're hoping to launch very soon. While its technically not profitable, it does have a small # of users, and we still have the payment system to hook up.
Despite it being very young, building it has been an incredible amount of work, and one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had.
I've released Gmelius (http://gmelius.com) a few months ago, a cross-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox.
Gmelius made the first page of HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153) and has been featured on TechCrunch, Lifehacker and other tech related news sites since then.
The idea was and still is to propose some enhancements to the new Gmail UI. Donations are welcome and are currently just sufficient to pay the coffee/beer intake necessary to adapt the code to constant Gmail changes and provide some new features ;)
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|13 years ago|reply
It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people.
Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost.
The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!
[+] [-] omarkj_|13 years ago|reply
Great project btw!
[+] [-] marquis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jontonsoup|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prezjordan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garethsprice|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyup|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guiomie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamens|13 years ago|reply
Meant to be free for all, included a silly in-app purchase. Generated lots of calls to congress, got some press, currently losing $2.10/week on hosting.
[+] [-] teebs|13 years ago|reply
A few friends and I are working on an app and website that lists corporations' political contributions. The mobile feature that makes it interesting is that you can scan barcodes to find out the political contributions from those products right away--inspired by Boycott SOPA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsop...
I'd really appreciate it if we could talk some time about publishing an iPhone app. I'm still in college, so I don't have much experience with iPhone App publishing and would really appreciate some advice, especially for a non-profit app dealing with politics.
[+] [-] mmanfrin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prezjordan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stereo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] revorad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daeken|13 years ago|reply
Edit: Also interesting that it got quite a bit of attention on HN and several hundred (maybe 400?) downloads and not a single sale (from what I could tell). That surprised me a bit; every sale has been driven by people coming from tweets that some big names in the jailbreaking scene retweeted.
[+] [-] bearwithclaws|13 years ago|reply
Except nobody paid.
[+] [-] vineet|13 years ago|reply
* offer a $100 credit to start off.
* offer more services than just a tweet if successful - for example a very simple feedback widget that shows up.
* charge only for delaying ship dates, but not for changing what is being shipped, or for minor delays (say within a week).
* don't charge if the person accepts public humiliation with a tweet saying "I sucked and did not ship my planned item.".
[+] [-] lukeinth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhebb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikedmiked|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyfleming|13 years ago|reply
Let's see a post with some screenshots!
[+] [-] mskierkowski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparknlaunch|13 years ago|reply
http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...
[+] [-] Whitespace|13 years ago|reply
I definitely should have polished it up more and included documentation on how to use it and why it's cool and why building it on Github's infrastructure was a particularly neat trick, but I announced it too early because I was excited.
I definitely underestimated the importance of proper marketing and UI, even for an MVP for the high-tech crowd.
Edit: typo and clickable link
[+] [-] xpose2000|13 years ago|reply
For example, LeBron James' career timeline: http://careers.fantasysp.com/player/nba/lebron-james/
It works by aggregating thousands of stories over the years and assigns them to a specific player/sport. Then I monitor how users interact with the stories to formulate trends in his career. Each story presented in the timeline has a link back to the original source so you can read the full article.
I already had all of this data from my main site and thought it would be fun to use it in another way.
[+] [-] Lorin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streptomycin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtTheLast|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomasien|13 years ago|reply
Is there anything more useful than taking all the bragging out of Hacker News and seeing what didn't quite work, or works but isn't blowing up? These are the great lessons
[+] [-] sylvinus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garethsprice|13 years ago|reply
It was built over a weekend to experiment with the Yii PHP framework and because I wanted to see what the list looked like (wasn't disappointed, there's some surprising stuff on there - like how Braveheart on DVD is mankind's greatest accomplishment according to Amazon).
I was considering promoting it as a quick way to find gifts for people and use it for this purpose myself, but I have more profitable/enjoyable things to be doing.
[+] [-] iSloth|13 years ago|reply
Although it was done more for me, than generating revenue, so that's not too bad.
[+] [-] _b8r0|13 years ago|reply
[1] - http://www.tigerscheme.org/
[+] [-] n_coats|13 years ago|reply
http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php
[+] [-] benjlang|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmartin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praveenrajukusu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m4xt3r|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaemon|13 years ago|reply
You spell "conversion" incorrectly in two different ways and your grammar is poor ("Why noone...").
If I were you I'd get the site redesigned, preferably by a professional web designer.
Maybe slim the main page down to your banner, a tag-line saying what the product is and a "Try It Now" button. I don't want to sign up for anything; why not let me demo it on your site in real-time?
And where's the initial Wow? There's a heatmap picture on the main page but nothing happens when I click it. Why not have the image work as a heatmap too?
Sorry to be so negative, but maybe you'll get better results if you fix some or all of those things?
[+] [-] daveid|13 years ago|reply
At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.
[+] [-] marquis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genwin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vishnumenon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mzarate06|13 years ago|reply
Its 3rd beta update was released in May, and we're hoping to launch very soon. While its technically not profitable, it does have a small # of users, and we still have the payment system to hook up.
Despite it being very young, building it has been an incredible amount of work, and one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had.
[+] [-] xpressyoo|13 years ago|reply
Gmelius made the first page of HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878153) and has been featured on TechCrunch, Lifehacker and other tech related news sites since then.
The idea was and still is to propose some enhancements to the new Gmail UI. Donations are welcome and are currently just sufficient to pay the coffee/beer intake necessary to adapt the code to constant Gmail changes and provide some new features ;)
[+] [-] xpose2000|13 years ago|reply