Show HN: I'm a non-hacker "idea guy" and my weekend project took 1,670 + days
"If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental exercise. Ideas would peep in, I would spend 5 seconds and if it wasn’t related to THE TOOL, I had to throw it out. That's it. Focus achieved. I've been idea sober for 1670 straight days.
I was now ready to find the right people that are the exact opposite of me. Translated: People that actually do stuff. I went through tons of people, but I finally got the team together: 1 backend, 1 front end, 1 designer and hired an n number of freelancers whenever we needed it. I paid for this with my consulting day job.
We “launched" 18 months ago, got some decent press and yc feedback
http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/07/tutorials-made-easy-with-iorad.php http://lifehacker.com/5584834/iorad-creates-your-step+by+step-computer-instructions-for-others http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1437395
Thousands of people signed up, but the tool just sucked and it didn't really work the way it should. This was most definitely my fault. While I've been non-related idea sober for 1670 days, if it was related I had to try it, which means adding half-baked features on top of half-baked features. Anyway, the only good thing that came out of the whole experience: it validated that lots of people had the same problem and needed this solution.
We regrouped and simplified, simplified and then simplified some mo. The result: www.iorad.com - “instant application instructions”.
What the...? Translation: There's no easy way to show somebody how to do something in an app and share your knowledge. Screencasting sucks and is hard to follow along. Copy/pasting/emailing screenshots is painful. Desktop share is hard to schedule.
Our goal is to let you create easy to follow instructions (both interactive and print) for your application in minutes so your users know what they’re doing and you can get back to doing things that matter. Give it a try and let me know what you think, what sucks and if you think it can save you some time.
PS if there are other "useless idea guys" mixed in with the YC Hacker community (that actually does shit), and you are semi-interested in some of my story, maybe I can start blogging it.
11 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 14.9 ms ] thread> Screencasting sucks and is hard to follow along. Copy/pasting/emailing screenshots is painful. Desktop share is hard to schedule.
I spent 2 min looking at the site, and I can't visualise how this would be easier to create or consume than screencasting/screenshots. I'm sure it is, but could you work on making that clearer.
Btw when I first started reading I thought you were creating a human-curated directory of tutorials like Yahoo was for web pages in the early days. I would definitely use that. But its obviously a very different problem you're solving.
1 year into my project I have a back end developer, designer, graphic artist, illustrator and startup lawyer... Still a long way to go but I'm amazed how far the idea has come.
In the quick tutorial, images are distorted (stretchet) and that gives an amateurish feeling, you should fix that.
And definitely I would like to see your blog about this journey. It seems that you really know how to tell things.
Best luck!
Best of luck!