you'd think it would have been much more successful with Obama

(And yeah this is why I stay in software, manufacturing even on non-tech toys is still $$$$)

https://www.shapeways.com/product/9X5DEFHAE/george-w-bush-pl...

It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.

Moral of the story: never trust big tech.

P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.

Pretty much the only way to win it so make something that provides marginal revenue, which makes reimplementation not worth it for the giant (but potentially worth it for you). I suspect a lot of Unity and Unreal plugins and authoring tools reside in that niche.

BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"

Not only you had a person that already knew much more about your product than the average potential hire, but a person that probably was interested in your product (and maybe knew what users wanted) too.

Because you do not want him to abandon the project if it is useful to you?

This is what most dating apps do, except Tinder (trying to do a clustering in an n-dimensional space). That Tinder outclasses most other dating apps is proof that your approach wont work. We don't look for people with similar interests for dating. Unfortunately we don't chose who or what we like in a partner.

current Tech giants are need to be replaced

There's no reason their replacement will be any more moral. They should be dismantled imho.

Patents are fundamentally broken and really don't work like most think or want them to.

As best I can recall, he wrote it in CodeWarrior over a couple weeks together with another guy who presumably knew Illustrator, and Adobe bought it before they had to deal with anything like a business plan.

This is actually how I first got into programming when I was younger. I made my first site in ImageReady, but it couldn't do all the other cool stuff other sites did like comment sections and logging in, so I went on a quest to learn how to do all that and the rest is history :)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ImageReady

Edit: actually, I found an example from 13 years ago https://youtu.be/qCq0JiwMcJs

Wow, that's a name I haven't heard in 20+ years. We used CodeWarrior Pro for my Pascal class at a local community college that I took during high school, because my high school was so small, I literally ran out of classes to take by senior year, so I had to take a programming course at a CC that was 10 miles away. Had to get a waiver to leave school before noon to go to the class because state policy was that students can't be released from school before noon, and because all my classes (all 3 of them) were over by 11:30.

Can you elaborate on this?

[0] https://xkcd.com/323/

You can see this on the main screenshot on the website: http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...

For a 9x9 basic table grid you would set the width 100% of the top and bottom image do the opposite for the sides and fix the corners. All of these tricks involved choosing designs that could work.

It would have been a tool I would have liked.

Not counting that some websites had dozens of PSD files, it was a pain.

The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a paid version that just disabled the ads. Instead of jumping on this to release a paid version and expand the game with more features, I ran into perfectionism issues + decision paralysis releasing any changes.

The game blew up for a few weeks and I got something like 0.5 million downloads eventually but didn't do anything to monetise it more so felt like I missed a big chance.

It was a great feeling checking analytics though to see that there was literally years of collective gameplay time being logged, and I've had several emails and reviews from players saying they've been addicted to playing the game for years.

My biggest lessons are probably:

1) Doing/releasing something is always better than doing nothing so don't let decision paralysis get in the way. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

2) Don't fear releasing or making changes because you might get bad reviews. You'll never please everyone and even the perfect app will inevitable get some brutally unfair and weird/crazy reviews.

3) Some people are obsessed with word games!

Anyway, as a lockdown project for fun, I started making a new web version for mobile + desktop. :)

https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid

I need to add global high score tables. The highest score I know so far is close to 3000 which is nuts.

Word definitions would be awesome. Are there any good free sources for this? That also have offensive words flagged?

I'm not sure how to do a free version of the game that isn't so good that nobody upgrades though to be honest. With the competition on mobile now as well, I feel freeium is a must to get tractor too.

Hmm, Zen was recently added to Scrabble in 2018 though as it's a proper noun but has started being used as an adjective:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zen-and-the-art-of-scrabble-dic...

Either way, I'd be keen to add a battery saver mode because it's not the kind of game I'd want to devour battery on a mobile.

The original had a wall-of-text pop-up of the rules when you first started that I want to avoid and I'd rather players picked up the rules organically. Maybe showing a "proper nouns and capitalised words not allowed" message when you spelled one would be a nice approach but a list of such words would be massive and inaccurate.

I think people generally figure out this rule as they play more but I admit it's not ideal!

If something happens to almost everybody, why don't you change your game?

When I design a complex system like a game or computer programs, once the system starts working on their own, it talks to me. I learn a lot from the interaction with it.

This is specially important when you have millions of users. They communicate to you what the next step is much better than the best design you could draft isolated on your own.

Adding proper nouns has a few issues though:

- Where would you get an accurate dictionary of proper nouns? This would need to include e.g. people names, places, brand names. If it wasn't constantly kept up to date it could lead to more frustrations than just disallowing them.

- There's so many proper nouns it would bloat the game download. The English dictionary used right now takes about 3MB, which is the limiting factoring getting the game download lower than 1MB zipped. I'm failing to find an estimate but if you include proper nouns, the dictionary would be an order or magnitude bigger. Maybe less of an issue for mobile app store downloads but I want the game to load fast when shared online. A web service to check the words won't work for offline play either.

It's feeling like a "dictionary words only" message somewhere is the only practical solution. I could adapt the (single!) tutorial message at the start of the game to be "swipe in any direction to spell dictionary words" but "dictionary words" would probably be overlooked. There's no menu screen at the start because I know people are impatient. :)

It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corners to stay in budget. I was unsuccessful in recruiting a team - partly because I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away. In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.

I attempted to carry on but the shutdowns of tourism in Hawaii and sheer exhaustion over my co-founder mistakes led to shuttering this project we thought would be the next AirBnB.

All told, this was a budget MBA program for me which ended up costing about 1/4 what a quality MBA would have cost me and probably taught me far more.

Lessons learned were: 1) the importance of a founder agreement 2) the importance of doing enough due diligence to understand the true scope of a project and then doubling or tripling the amount of work it will take to achieve that scope 3) the importance of working with the right people and refusing to settle when it comes to product or team

This is, unfortunately, very common in startup communities. There are a lot of people who attach themselves to startups, discover that they're not interested in putting in the work required, and then decide to coast as long as possible when they realize it's not so easy for their partners to cut them out.

These people are often very charismatic and are experts at inflating their previous credentials. Always do a deep dive on potential cofounders' backgrounds, including backchannel references. Always establish cofounder agreements and, most importantly, at least a 1-year vesting cliff on any equity, no matter how much you like the other person. If they aren't pulling their weight at the 9-12 month mark, do everything to remove them from the company before they have any vested equity.

> In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.

Mental illness is also, sadly, disproportionately represented in startup communities. I think it's a combination of factors: People who suffer from certain untreated mental illnesses like you describe are more likely to be unable to maintain a normal career, so they seek out alternative career paths like startups where they don't technically have to report to a manager. Certain mental illnesses can also come with bouts of grandiose thoughts, delusions of grandeur, a penchant for risk-taking, and other traits that can easily be confused for confident, ambitious startup personalities.

This is a perfect example of the importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs, as well as due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.

https://www.airbnb.ca/host/experiences

During the pandemic, AirBnB has also been helping people organize online experiences.

AirBNB Experiences is things like "Come swimming with dolphins" or "come on a wine tour".

This idea seems more like the voice-guided tours you can get in museums etc but creating a market for them. It's probably a decent idea, but possibly complementary rather than competitive with what AirBNB is doing.

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=19419898011

I'd argue it's more important to work with someone you've worked with in the past and know you can trust and will work hard. The operating agreements and due diligence are there for the worst case scenario, but from your story it seems pretty clear they were questionable co-founders to start with.

I like the concept a lot, shame you never got to find out if it would have worked.

It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour.

I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, but I think there's something here I just haven't marketed it to the right audience yet :)

My goal is to make this usable via Slack next year and let teams use it to trial new marketing campaigns or other run other small tests before launching. https://www.thisorthat.ai

But I'm not sure about using Mechanical Turk. If the goal is to have unbiased opinions, is that a good place to source them?

I would assume MT participants are trying to complete tasks as fast as possible. If I'm on MT and you ask me "A or B?" my incentive is to give you an immediate answer. I have no incentive to align that answer with my actual opinion.

Also I wouldn't expect MT to give me a particularly random sample. I mean, if I'm wondering how my B2B SAAS logo is perceived, is an answer from MT going to overlap much with the opinions of my target audience?

It seems like a fun thing to try as a toy, like rolling dice only with humans. I'm just not sure I'd use it for any question I really cared about.

Reaching critical mass may be harder, but I think it would be more random than mechanical turk.

You can also charge people for the ability to ask a follow up question like why they made the decision they did.

I think the Slack idea is brilliant though, and I could totally see that taking off for a wide variety of things.

But something like an engineer asking a colleague which web design they just hacked up looks better would be a much better fit.

The problem here is that it takes 9-12mo to find out whether the app does any good, and YC is a 3mo program! We were only just about to sign a pilot deal at the time, so the timing wouldn't have made sense.

And indeed, that long of a feedback loop is realistically too slow for a VC startup. We closed up and I "pivoted" to something totally different a few months later.

I imagine some bias would be there, but probably manageable. In return you'd get the ability to poll way more than 50 people for a very reasonable price.

> To do this, we take your question and use Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform to survey 50 random people.

I think Will Wright (famous game designer) described this phenomenon well. To paraphrase, every time he would try to describe a new game to someone else, that person would create a game design in their head and play their game in their head, and then tell you what their thinking is. However, what you want, is someone to play _your design_ in their head. That's very hard to do without a prototype. For example, basically everyone told him that idea for The Sims is terrible. Only when they played his game did they see the light.

If the side with the most votes is the side you chose, you get 2 points. If the side with the most votes is not the side that you chose, then you get only a single point.

The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activations, etc.)

The free/open core supplies all the basic operators, but many users would need extensions of the core to support their particular networks (or even just software to feed their parameters into the system and get results out) and hardware companies benefit from the software's existence because they sell chips and NN-512 makes the new vector units on their chips more useful

But it didn't work out that way. NN-512 did generate offers to work on other projects (a generous offer from Intel, for example) but nothing that extends NN-512

Why? There are numerous free end-to-end deep learning tools developed by large, company-sponsored teams (Nvidia, Facebook, Google, Intel, etc.) so a specialized tool that requires integration effort is unattractive. That's my guess. So beware, if you're working along similar lines

1. Improve the web site slightly (add a contact method and pricing info) and make it clear that it's a company offering an enterprise software tool. Programmers will be viewing the site, so it doesn't need much more than is there already.

2. Charge a flat $7,500/year for a commercial usage license and increase it as the functionality increases. Offer email support and updates. Many programmers can buy a $7,500/year piece of software without their management even asking a follow up question.

3. Write some blog posts showing how to use it and why it's good. Some benchmarks (LOC, performance, etc) vs alternatives would be a good source of posts. Real world examples that people can copy/paste to start with is probably the most useful.

4. Submit the blog posts to HN and some subreddits.

5. Profit (maybe)

I’d like to know where you work.

No place I’ve ever worked would approve that without a lot of questions.

My suggestion would be to focus on an initial use case where a very limited low cost / high efficiency CPU model can provide massive advantage. NN-512 should be the framework that expands from that Redis like core. The limited use case tactic is what I'm focusing on[1], mainly as I have a particular application and have less technical brilliance than yourself so need to focus ;)

An aged but still relevant example is the early word2vec work which was (and still is) frequently better to throw onto CPUs than GPUs. A well tuned implementation is not only advantageous on CPU but can win out in many scenarios where cost / latency / ... are important.

Congrats on the project though! I'd be curious for your thoughts for the future if you ever want to chat =]

[1]: Initial experiments written up as a tutorial with Rust and ISPC for a specific CPU based NN task - https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01E8RNH7HRRJT2A63NSX...

But AVX-512 is a real step forward, if you look at the price/performance ratio for real-world workloads. So AVX-512 is the focus of NN-512

GPU cloud compute is almost unbelievably expensive. Even Linode charges $1000 per month, or $1.50 per hour (look at the GPU plans: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#row--compute). It's really hard to keep that GPU saturated, which is what you need to do to get your money's worth

An AVX-512 Skylake-X cloud compute instance costs $10 per CPU-core per month, or 2 cents per hour, at Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/). It's easy to saturate that core

Think about it this way: a GPU is really just a cluster of SIMD units with fast memory. A GPU thread variable is just like a SIMD lane, and a GPU warp variable is just like a SIMD vector register

Nvidia's SIMD pseudo-instructions are called PTX and they are like a 1024-bit version of AVX-512. An AVX-512 core is like a general purpose CPU with a 512-bit GPU core built in

So paying for a single AVX-512 core is like paying for part of a GPU (16 threads), plus the general purpose compute you need to keep that GPU part supplied with work

You motivate the work through bottom-up construction, but I don't think you have a clear explanation for who the users are. They must be:

1) Sure they are only going to use models that are supported by NN-512. This is a big jump for me and many people who want to do transformers, LSTMs, etc. and not just what NN-512 costs. 2) They have to be price sensitive. But if you want larger companies, they will rarely just have one use-case that NN-512 supports; they will probably have a ton of use-cases that NN-512 supports. 3) They want to target AVX-512. If they are a medium or larger company they probably want to have tooling around this, to support model development and later deployment.

Those are my thoughts in general.

I currently need to be able to target and deploy on PC and Mac CPUs from the past 10 years. (I know, this is specific.)

I think parent is saying that individual devs are more likely to try NN-512 if they don't have to learn a new API, since most of them want to have the flexibility to fool around before committing to a new tech or bringing it in-house.

I guess my suggestion is really try to specifically define who the user is for NN-512 and what NN problems they are trying to solve, and let that shape the roadmap.

Same with development of tooling (network conversion, parameter import). It just takes a lot of time/effort for me to write the code. It's easy to say that support for AVX, AVX2, etc., would be nice, but that's months of hard work (unfunded)

I guess we agree that a niche tool like NN-512, that has a reduced feature set (trimmed to allow one person to complete it and release it for free), has trouble competing with the huge, free, flexible, multi-target tools funded by large companies

In retrospect this is obvious!

Tell me if you can find one

https://theymadethat.com

Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone

and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a...

You can also use it to figure where something was used https://theymadethat.com/things/3r1/storyboard/show_used_for...

Different versions of a product also have their own profiles https://theymadethat.com/things/6wy/apple-macintosh/show_ver...

I'm still maintaining it, with some modest future goals of making the UI more mobile friendly

Programmatically importing data is actually my next "big" goal. It'll be hard to maintain quality though when I start on this route.

Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing. Mine is targeted at young parents though, maybe that makes a difference?

My grand-parents love it, so yeah there's a market for this kind of things (at least as long as this generation lives).

Here's the video I made, for what it's worth: https://youtu.be/93XUnsrG18g

It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my app, or you are going to pay ten times more to a late fee bill

After the Windows app failed, I doubled down on the niche, by making it a Linux app.

I thought as plan B, if I do not find users, I could sell it to the library itself. I thought that was a sure sale, because the library had bought software from me before, but they did not want an app

Then I made it open-source, so I do not have to deal with it anymore, but no one understands Pascal code. It only lead to much more work. Now I have been working on it almost every free hour for 14 year. And I really should not have written my own HTML parser for it

It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany?

I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".

Libraries might be more interesting customers but they have little reason to reduce late fee bills as it is extra income to them. You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.

Hope you enjoy working on it.

It should be. The due dates are all listed on the webpage

And some libraries even send reminder emails before the due date

But that is how they got me. I got used to their reminder mails, and then - "Our mail server had a failure and now you have to pay 60€"

>I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".

I wish someone had told me that before I wrote it

But there is also the secondary feature of keeping a record of read books. I read a lot of incomplete series before I had it, and now I want to read the rest of the series, but I do not remember what the series was.

>You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.

They are the worst. They have much less patrons than public libraries, and almost never answer emails. I think I might have gotten email PTSD from them.

>Hope you enjoy working on it.

I enjoyed it 13 years ago. But not anymore.

Is this a German thing, an urban thing, or really a true statement universally? I ask because prior to covid lockdown, we made at least weekly trips to our public library and it always had a steady stream of patrons.

There are more people reading books than there are people reading books from a library. If I had just made a tool (in English) to keep a list books without involving (German) libraries, it would probably be much more successful and only take a hundredths of effort.

And worse, I did not target libraries in general, but libraries in my city. Anything limited to one city has a too low user base. I planed to expand it city by city, by selling it in one city to cover the travel cost to the next city, so I can lend books there, actually test it, and make sure everything remains bugfree.

The alternative option, expert users can use it with any library, by editing the config XML files to include their webpage URL and server parameters, seems to have been too confusing for people

I do. This surprises me.

I always think a weekly trip to the library is good for the soul, just to be reminded of all the knowledge that's out there waiting to be discovered. Good reminder to watch less Netflix :-)

The library has pivoted to social work, helping low-literate people, offering a safe space for teenagers to study, and a place for the elderly and 30+ women to meet. Those are all good reasons to exists, particularly because many of the visitors cannot go anywhere else, but I miss the library of my youth. I loved spending hours moving through the stacks, discovering all kinds of oddities and new things. But that seems passé. Even in the university library the amount of books has shrunk a lot and the depot with a lot of older stuff is now off-limits.

I am really chuckling at the double meaning here.

> And I really should not have written my own HTML parser for it

Why is this? Did you arrange some kind of exclusivity deal with libraries in an area to manage borrowing so that people have to use it?

Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focused cursor point via keyboard accessibility APIs.

LabelScope printed to label printers but wasn’t a design app or a driver. Instead, like MASS it floated above other apps as a “scope” which would real-time capture and dither the image inside the virtual label. Double-click would send the dithered image directly to the printer using the printer’s native commands via USB (no driver).

Fast forward a few years and I started on ANOTHER label printer app based on Electron. I’m happy to report it’s a healthy business and growing! Learn more at https://label.live

I'm happy to be your lab rat and customer for life because we are never going to stop using the printers. I've completed the survey on your site. Shoot me an email if you want any more details.

Btw every lab I've been in has used Brady printer

Finally never got around to building it.

Is this a sustainable business for you now? Or just a side project?

A suspect a browser based SaaS version will knock the socks off of what you have now in terms of conversion.

Try and find some time to build it.

1) Rely on PDF and browser print APIs, which means you give up direct USB access and even some paper size API which is kind of a deal breaker for thermal printers.

2) Rely on a browser extension of some sort. This might work, and I haven’t researched this much, because I find it clunky and error prone, bad UX and at mercy of browsers.

3) Use the existing app as an “agent” that receives “print jobs” from the cloud. This would be similar to ShipStation Connect and Google Cloud Print. This has potential but would need all sorts of engineering and UX to become seamless.

I never considered myself a hardware integrator until I accidentally became one. Oops, e.g. fake it until you make it. Looking back at college, I received barely passing grades in my C and assembly coursework. Sure, I "understand" bitwise operations and bit shifting and LSB/MSB... but it still feels foreign to me, like every time I got something to work I celebrated that I made any progress at all. Me the imposter.

There were times in developing all these apps that I seriously thought, "well, I'm stuck, this is the end" and I just kept working a few hours at a time... If anything, troubleshooting and not getting fatally-frustrated is my super-power. These hard-won-solved-problems led me to build something "simple" for the user, which is its own very special reward (aka dev dopamine and serotonin).

I loved building these apps. I never thought I'd make any money. And my relative success with Label LIVE is just a rewarding icing on the cake of enjoying this kind of puzzle-solving. I mean, native Node modules, WASM... are their own special kinds of hell. The kind of hell you forget quickly and you have better written your future self decent documentation. Makes me nervous just thinking about finally adding Apple Silicon support. hands sweat

1992 A 1U rack mounted utility component for pro touring musicians that included a direct input (DI), tuner, metronome, front and rear rack lights, and surge protected outlets. NAMM attendees loved it. So did all the musician's that I worked with on the road at the time. But it turns out there's a lot to building physical products, especially ones that include custom electronics. We got a PO for 25 units from Guitar Center, but didn't have the chops to get it together and deliver. In the end it came down to capital and we had none left.

2000 A SaaS solution (then known as an ASP) for project management for commercial construction. Not sure what went wrong here. Probably lack of sales competency. A peer and competitor at the time, eBuilder, just sold for $500 million 2 years ago. That was a long ride. We shut down in 2008.

It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the images through Google Cloud Vision APIs to re-order the images putting first the ones with children, pools, playgrounds, etc.

With that done, just an app to find hotels by searching anywhere.

It was more built for personal use but ended up being quite attractive. But marketing apps is hard so never really pushed it. Then, also... covid happened.

I started the project but life got in its way.

People are starting to travel, atleast in India. There will be a surge in tourism as soon as the vaccine reaches its potential.

Most people in my circle are dying to travel. So stick around man

"Congrats, you've been inactive for 4hrs 32m: A new record!"

"Lacktivity has crashed due to sheer boredom."

"Wow, 100 steps in an hour! Next time, try taking the longer route to the fridge."

"Putting the fitness tracker on your dog and then playing fetch in the house is no way to go through life."

It was a fun idea, but I totally lack execution.

Domain for sale if anyone wants to pick up the idea.

I assumed it would be possible to do a lifestyle business out of catering to a subset of the over 1M NetBeans users. Turns out it is not so easy.

I spend some money for a Windows machine to digitally sign builds, the macOS dev certificate and hosting. But the bulk of the cost was the time it all took.

PS: The .xyz domain in combination with the Windows antivirus solutions (looking at you ESET) was a major annoyance. Switched to .ORG just in time for the whole debacle there.

http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

I would have done better if I'd tweaked the algorithm more, done an iPhone version, or just taken it seriously, but it mostly came out of a personal need and in the absence of clear signs it was valuable it was easy to let go (especially when later sandboxing rules for Mac apps broke some fundamental stuff around persistent documents).

You can see some screenshots at:

https://twitter.com/lemonwatcher/status/1286082683412582403

Sadly, the next version of Flash showed that they were thinking the same thing - all those UI widgets I made were built-in on their next release, which came out the day after I finished my first version.

Lesson learned - know the roadmap of the products you are consuming.

I started getting too many alerts so I built a machine learning based system to weed out uninteresting/unrelated stories (basically a spam filter, was 98%+ effective). By this time the service had a database of 100,000+ headlines for crypto stories, so I had good data for the filter. I built a UI to quickly allow me to train the ML algorithm by manually rating stories as good/bad and give me the ability to train/retrain/enhance the models on an ongoing basis as my crypto interests changed.

When the market crashed I lost interest. Was already full time on something else as well. I had visions of deploying the system publicly as a SaaS product, allowing people to sign up, and replacing the config/xml files with a nice web-based UI, and then charging something for it.

Managed to take all the wind from my sails.

1. The initial site hasn't changed since launch.

2. If it has, then its been due to intuition vs data.

From my quick glance, this has potential and she should be able to sell her entire inventory €2000. It would be good to know what the digital marketing strategy has been to build awareness and drive sales from her target audience as well as a better understanding of her customer and industry.

In any case, she has something and I hope she doesn't give up.

- https://www.raremaps.com/

- https://artsourceinternational.com/

- https://www.swiftmaps.com/product-category/antique-maps/

User created API consuming dashboards, I drove lots of traffic to it but it was a really niche product and I just don't think there was a path to revenue with such small numbers.

Static pagebuilder before Square and the like had that kind of thing dialed. Still proud of the technical achievement, had some users, but it never took off. I couldn't afford to market it.

A more traditional digital agency I started with some colleagues. It went well, and then it fell apart when one member grossly mismanaged the money and then took some big clients on his way out. I regret not sticking with it, but it was really demoralising that such bad behavior was rewarded and we were left with nothing. Many lessons learned though, I would never allow it to happen again.

Many other small projects that just waned or never got built to completion. I do all of this on my own and with my own money outside of any tech bubble, so it is pretty easy to get derailed. I have been at it for more than 10 years.

The target audience was supposed to be gamers (back then typical SSD was 150GB and GTA V was 55GB alone). I even got greenlit on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61003...

Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.

But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.

One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.

Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.

All the best for when travel is common again as I really like this idea and think there’s untapped potential.

Thanks for the feedback and well wishes!

Now, it could be that my prices are too high, but that was sort of my rationale--I thought it would be better to let people pay for what they need.

I think a freemium model could work, but at this point I don't think I have any real features that would meaningfully distinguish the free version from the paid version. I did consider limiting like the number of days your trip can be for "free" users--I might revisit this in the future.

Really appreciate the feedback!

- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.

Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.

I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.

I just found the Chicago itinerary in the blog post. It should be accessible from the front page.

I don't see enough value added over spreadsheets / custom Google maps to worth the money, but I'm pretty happy with our current system.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!

- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)

- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).

So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.

The pricing comes off as aimed at those planning big one-off trips not regular annual vacation. Those one-off trips are nice, but would be more sporadic and wouldn't you prefer a regular annual subscribing user over a one-off?

It generally costs more to gain a new customer.

At $35 for 6 months, that would be $70 annually if I wanted that. As what I'd consider an "add-on" product, it's far too much. Maybe something like $4.5/m or $45/yr.

As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.

I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.

As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.

This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.

Good luck!

Yet the price directly to the right of that says "Trip Slot $5".

Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.