Show HN: 2 guys -- Learned to code in 3 months and built this
My co-founder and I had been 'working' on our startup for 8 months. I say 'working' because as the "business people" - there wasn't a whole lot we could do except philosophize. We had gotten really awesome intros to some of the top VCs and entrepreneurs, but had nothing to show.
And now we felt stranded. Had we wasted 8 months of our lives? Identity crisis? Check.
So we did what any rational person would do - we ran to the mountains. Literally. In Boone, NC - we talked about why we started Knowit, what we believed. We talked about how we had taught ourselves so much on our own time, but couldn't save or share what we were learning. We didn't get any real and tangible credit for it.
And then it hit us - we are saying that anyone can teach themselves anything. That's the web. We simply had to give it a shot -- we owed it that. So we taught ourselves to code, for free, from the web. In many ways apropos.
We starting building and 3 months later we have a real product with over 375 users who have added over 3000 items.
We built Knowit to make it really easy to save and share your thoughts on the things you read, watch, and listen to. We want to help people build an online portfolio of what they know and what they're learning. We are excited about helping people take the things they are already doing - and make them count.
Check it out at http://knowitapp.com/ and example portfolios at http://knowitapp.com/jeff and http://knowitapp.com/nash - Things are still very early - and we have a ton of really cool ideas. What do you all think?? Are we doing this right?
If you want to check it out in more detail - we set up an invite backdoor for HN. http://knowitapp.com/invite/hn
What we learned from all this: - You can learn almost anything on the web from free resources. (and everything w/i 10yrs)
- It's easier than you think - the hardest step is the first one.
- If you are not technical - start learning - you will never regret it.
- Save and share your journey and teach the rest of us how you got so awesome.
19 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadCongratulations!
http://knowitapp.com/
http://knowitapp.com/jeff
http://knowitapp.com/nash
http://knowitapp.com/invite/hn
The UI looks good :)
When Tumblr gets their act together we will post on our blog more!
Let's see, roadblocks: - front-end -- getting everything to work tolerably in IE7+ - front-end -- the bookmarklet. Definitely the bookmarklet. Huge issues injecting javascript into DOMs. The version live now finally works every time without fail. (details: array leaks, style conflicts, calling in jquery, etc) - back-end -- nothing too serious. Joins in mySQL took a while to get right. Ajax can be finicky but nothing too bad. - Server -- we hadn't set up DDOS protection on our amazon server and so the site went down a few times. There are some great tutorials for getting a Lamp stack up on ec2 - if you know what you are doing should only take five minutes.
Needless to say figuring out what to search is the biggest problem. Once you know what to search, stackoverflow and google can fix all your problems.
4 months ago sucked. Our technical co-founder quit after 6 months and we still had no product.
Did you build off work that he did? Was he not producing? You built it in three months - and he had nothing in six months? Or, were the ideas difficult to communicate that it took a crisis for you to finally buckle down and get to work?
Happy to communicate privately with you more (jeff at knowitapp dot com). Publicly I'll say: - the site didnt work after 6 months and was built in python. - we didn't know python, but Nash had read one book on php so we went from there building the site from scratch. - We built on LAMP stack with jquery and open-source. A beautiful, intuitive MVP was our mantra. Just make it work.
1. It should endlessly scroll. Clicking load more is annoying.
2. The top part requesting my e-mail is annoying. It should not permanently stay there and take up valuable screen real estate when I'm trying to scroll down and read content.