Show HN: Starter.place – Gumroad for Starter Repos (starter.place)
If you’ve made a starter repo you think others would find useful, you can immediately reach a wide audience without having to make your own site/app to sell it and advertise it by posting on starter.place. Just focus on building the starter all while earning from it if you so choose.
starter.place is so helpful to buyers and sellers because buyers are added as view-only collaborators to the repo on GitHub, where they get continuous updates. Buyers can help drive the project by submitting issues and PRs too.
Let me know what you think! And if you have a starter template but are hesitant to list it, let me know what I could do to change that.
Oh and as for the app's own stack, it uses Remix, EdgeDB, and Tailwind deployed on Vercel and AWS Fargate.
19 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadpersonally i cant wait for starters to become unnecessary. the need for all these PxMxN permutations of tech stacks is just untenable. great place for some handwavy AI action here.
Edit: Looks like it fixed it
I built a free Django and React starter repo for https://learndjangoreact.com, and can share some feedback from that perspective:
1) I’m hesitant to post it because I don’t want to create a new account or connect my GitHub to promote a free repo.
2) I think Google is good enough for anyone looking for a Django and React starter app, especially since I already have a site for it. GitHub search is pretty good too.
3) I built my starter app mostly for myself to build new ideas faster, and I already moved on to a new idea (https://mailgrid.app) — so any effort spent on this feels like energy taken from that, etc.
4) I think new developers should pick whatever stack that inspires them, and I don’t expect my starter app to appeal to a wide audience.
Hope that helps!
1) That is a reasonable point. We request the most granular features we can to make our app work. For OAuth, just the minimum profile info. For connecting repos, you can give access to just the repo you want to list, and we access repository hooks so we can update our listing when you update the repo. I listed some public repos that I'll have to manually update, so maybe I can allow others to do the same and just have a cron that does it. We also ask for administration permissions so we can add buyers to private repos. Unfortunately GitHub doesn't seem to allow more dynamic permissions to only apply to private repos and not public ones.
2) Valid. Maybe this is more suited for the premium case where you'd like to find starters where the creator has a paid incentive to keep updating and addressing issues.
3) If you charged for it and got people buying, maybe you would feel differently?
4) I agree developers should pick the group of tools they are interested in, but they still have to piece them together, which can be more work than the project itself in the worst-case scenario. If someone wanted to work with Django and React, I think being handed a starter with some instructions would get them running faster than having to understand at the core how they can work together and actually getting that functional.
Your own example reminds me of one feature I'd like to add is a "built with" section for each starter that would show live projects that started with it.
Anyways thanks for the feedback! Really valuable for me.
I am the kind of person who wants the easiest possible set up for my ideas so I can make them in a weekend. I also want them to be server hostable for as little money as possible.
Firebase or Amplify are great for making things really quickly. But even last weekend, dealing with Amplify for the first time, there are still a ton of things that aren't done for you that I'd like.
A proper Amplify + Next.JS + Typescript + Tailwind starter would be nice. Those tools are great for speed running your side projects. And Amplify does the CI/CD + hosting + domain set up for you.
I actually had a feature in mind where people could vote on starters they want and others could build them out and list them for free or a price. Do you think that would fit your needs and is there anything in particular you'd want to see in a feature like that?
My starter project is for Flutter, https://github.com/wiradikusuma/starter-flutter and it's part of my upcoming book about building mobile apps, https://opinionatedlaunch.com/
1. First thing someone does after clone is search-and-replace e.g. com.example to com.mycompany. Sometimes it results in broken code or partial replacement e.g. bcoz the phrase is whitespace-separated.
2. Starter code can be very complex. For my starter project, I ensure each commit is "atomic" e.g. one commit for unit tests, another for swagger-generation. So that people can follow it easily.
So I'm just wondering if you can "standardize" those two, or even provide "UI"?
1. I feel like codemods and a setup shell prompt are the best solution to this, but this looks different for each language (eg, in JS there is https://github.com/facebook/jscodeshift). I could make UI around that for listers to provide parts of the app that should replaced and buyers to provide values for it, but it could be quite a rabbit hole. This is actually why I show the README for the repos, so users can see if the setup steps are comprehensive before buying (for paid ones).
2. I agree atomic commits can help someone navigate a new codebase. In the same spirit as my response to #1, I don't feel confident I could enforce this, but I could surface the commits on the starter repo page so potential buyers could see if the author laid things out well.
Thanks for the ideas!