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've created http://pazler.com, and it isn't making any profits :)
Built using Clojure, Postgresql, StringTemplate, hosted at Hetzner.
Learned quite a lot of things in the process..
yeah.... who didn't have that idea, creating a pinterest clone full of amazon affiliate links - would've been too easy if that actually worked ;) on a sidenote: good job on the design, looks solid!
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.
You could do an Ookla like thing and create a mini version people can host. My server seems to be in the same place as yours, otherwise I wouldn't have minded hosting one.
Although not really a tech company, I started http://www.thoughtthreads.org/ with a few university friends. We don't expect it to be profitable since it's a non-profit. :)
I created http://www.sherbondy.com, a website that gives family members free subdomains @sherbondy.com. Learned Clojure while making it. Wrote the entire thing in Clojure and ClojureScript. Tons of fun. I've even open-sourced it so that others can do the same for their families: https://github.com/sherbondy/sherbondy.com
Still need to fix/optimize a bunch of stuff and better document/test, but it was a nice break from studying for exams. And man am I loving Clojure.
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.
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.
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!
This is a great idea but it returned Dutch for "voy al supermercado", though it was correct for "ik ga naar de supermarkt' and 'je vais au supermarché'. Good luck!
For very short phrases the data corpora are too shallow. I have to improve that, and the identifier logic, and... The most important part was discovering that django is amazingly fun & simple. Thanks for the encouragement :)
Yes, but I also want some kind of enforcement: for short phrases I want to check for being in corpora, if it is clearly in a language I don't want to say "write more," but just identify the language and only in dubious cases put the blame on the user. Ahh, if I had more time and less projects I'd finish this right now :)
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'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.
feedback: those oblong shapes and the square images make your site ugly. Strongly suggest using a lot of golden ratio on everything. Really love your idea, I hope you stick to it.
Made something similar just tracking products in Argentina, where I'm from, pretty much the same concept but I don't understand why don't you put a big nice button with an affiliate link to buy the best price listing you found for today, that would help, believe me :)
I built an AWS image for launching a bunch of machines and using them as a Blender Render farm. It'd need work to make it secure enough for public use, and I have too many other things on to get around to that. It does what I need though, and I like the feeling of power of clicking a button and knowing so many large computers start calculating for me :)
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.
Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making any traction, let alone profit from the blog.
It's hard to diagnose, but as other says (and your stats point out), there is something giving a little amateur feel.
From a blog point of view, you should definitely show your authors, to make a genuine, personal impression to readers.
The part of the name of the blog that says 'Biz Startup Tech Blog', it may sound too generic, but also a bit pretentious, and it lacks originality (even if it works from a SEO point of view?). I'll also work on the tagline, to describe better what the blog is about. You could try things like "Personal insights of an entrepreneurial journey", maybe also A/B test it... Tell your visitors you are for real, before they leave.
And last, but not the least, I think the images are not helping. Usually images help make everything a little more attractive, but here, it's not the case. They are giving an amateurish, cheap feel. Try something else on that front. You could avoid the images unless they really illustrate your point with some personal sources: a screenshot from your project, stats, etc.
And please, tell us the results of the experiment!
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?
Fair enough, I was talking about the content more than the look. The top half is certainly nice enough. The lower half is too noisy with an excess of that "writing" stuff. I didn't get where I am today by reading! I want cool stuff I can click on! ;)
Thanks for the feedback. We really thought of at as an MVP from the beginning and put up a website in one day and spent the rest of the time on the backend. Maybe you're right and that's the reason why we're not seeing any demand.
Well, perhaps I was too negative. As I mention below, and as the others have said, the look is pretty good. The heatmap image is pretty cool which is why I wanted to click on it and see it change. So let me do that!
Also, I did want to see how it actually worked, but I don't want to sign up and install stuff for that...so that's why I wanted a live demo.
I think you should drop the "completing with Google Analytics" angle too. Even if it's true that you're better, no-one will believe it. Why not show how you integrate with it instead? If people are using both and realise themselves that they only need your product, then that's good enough.
Yes, maybe we didn't have enough motivation because of lack of feedback. In fact we did have the live demo planed, but it seemed like an unimportant feature.
We really should put a little more effort into this project.
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.
I launched a simple app that puts new music releases in your iCal / Google Calendar or on a RSS Feed. It didn't really catch on, I've sort of given up. The UI kinda sucks too, I realised.
I quietly launched/brought out of beta http://requeue.com this year. I built it mainly for myself, since I found myself watching more and more long-format web video and wanted a better way to organize it.
The terms of the Youtube API pretty much rule out monetizing the site with advertising, but usage has (sadly?) been low enough that I just eat the cost of the two Linodes it takes to run.
How about this: let a user enter a tag (#awesome, #sxswi) and your app trolls the tag's search results on twitter for videos. They get sorted by hotness and presented as a playlist. New things get added to the end.
Thanks for the suggestion. When I initially starting brainstorming on the idea, I had some Twitter integration included: auto-adding videos from your timeline (stolen from the Boxee folks) and hashtag "subscriptions"... but it started getting more convoluted to explain to people, so I thought I'd start more simply with just allowing folks to subscribe to "shows".
Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (great signup conversion rates, terrible usage rates), so when I have time I may reboot it as something more like what you're describing.
I still think there is something to the idea of improving the leanback and placeshifting experience for all this great long format web content that's out there (Rev3, This Week In, etc). I'm apparently just not smart enough to figure it out on my own ;p.
This is so old, you may not see this... but placeshifting -> start watching in one place (laptop/work), close window, pick up where you left off in the video later (Boxee Box/home).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadEdit: 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.
Although it was done more for me, than generating revenue, so that's not too bad.
Still need to fix/optimize a bunch of stuff and better document/test, but it was a nice break from studying for exams. And man am I loving Clojure.
But at least it is a small start in transitioning to be some kind of product company instead of just doing consulting/contracting.
http://woboq.com/quassel.html
http://www.ngcoders.com/category/projects/locux-projects
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.
I don't expect it will ever make any money!
Except nobody paid.
* offer a $100 credit to start off.
* offer more services than just a tweet if successful - for example a very simple feedback widget that shows up.
* charge only for delaying ship dates, but not for changing what is being shipped, or for minor delays (say within a week).
* don't charge if the person accepts public humiliation with a tweet saying "I sucked and did not ship my planned item.".
http://bestofcalvinandhobbes.com/2011/10/a-swifty-kick-in-th...
At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.
I'm quite surprised I got any upvotes.
http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php
Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..
Thank you (:
This is my version: http://numok.com
PS, the guys from priceonomics.com seems to be the leaders in this.
And yes, I'll be changing design and button placement in the coming weeks, that's a valid point.
[1] - http://www.tigerscheme.org/
http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/
Had 250 referrals from HN domains in approximately six hours landing on the home page. c. 100 blog posts were viewed
Not earth shattering but more visitors than normal. Just need to work out how to make them stay for longer than 10 seconds.
Maybe you could include less posts in the frontpage, and have more of the post show up.
The default font size is rather small.
I did like the content. It is a good blog. Just looks to busy.
Good luck.
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 agree about "noone", but I don't think the website can be called awful. It's certainly quite pretty.
Also, I did want to see how it actually worked, but I don't want to sign up and install stuff for that...so that's why I wanted a live demo.
I think you should drop the "completing with Google Analytics" angle too. Even if it's true that you're better, no-one will believe it. Why not show how you integrate with it instead? If people are using both and realise themselves that they only need your product, then that's good enough.
We really should put a little more effort into this project.
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.
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.
Never intended it to be profitable, more of a learning experience (first webapp).
http://nearupon.herokuapp.com/
The terms of the Youtube API pretty much rule out monetizing the site with advertising, but usage has (sadly?) been low enough that I just eat the cost of the two Linodes it takes to run.
Obviously my execution is not resonating with people (great signup conversion rates, terrible usage rates), so when I have time I may reboot it as something more like what you're describing.
I still think there is something to the idea of improving the leanback and placeshifting experience for all this great long format web content that's out there (Rev3, This Week In, etc). I'm apparently just not smart enough to figure it out on my own ;p.
Also: if you want to say thanks, just click the tiny triangle pointing up next to my name. That's how we give out happiness around here.