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Show HN: I made a simple Markdown blog creator (portfolo.app)

47 points by sansjack ↗ HN
Hey I'm Jack, a developer from England!

I recently made portfolo.app to make, making a portfolio / markdown blog easy for everyone!

Just claim a unique URL for your page, select a template and theme and start adding your projects with the built in markdown editor!

It's free to have a play around with but if you want to deploy there is a yearly subscription!

I hope you all reaps the benefits!

Thanks, Jack!

23 comments

[ 238 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] thread
efilife
And as always, it's paid. How many blogging platforms did we have this week? 4? 5? This really must be the way of milking money
jachee
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is definitely the father.

Lot of money to be made catering to the latter.

dewey
> This really must be the way of milking money

Check the projects that are still there in 2 years, building a blogging platform is the developer's favorite hobby when they already have a todo list app.

langcss
Lol I am considering this one. Seems like it hits a spot. Longevity is my main concern.
prepend
Why is this a subscription? Are there ongoing costs? It seems like you just have generation software that would run for free on GitHub or whatever.

It seems like a better fit to have a one time purchase. And charge for upgrades or something.

sansjack
i think this is valid, i think i will open source this or even make it free!
brudgers
It is ok to charge money for things you make and charity toward the poor has more impact than charity toward developers.

In addition, using a credit card online is much much easier than using github. Particularly for non-developers.

prepend
My point is in the means of charging. I’d rather pay once and be done, than pay forever.

I think whenever possible, a one time fee is easier on users.

brudgers
Subscriptions segment the market away from potential one time customers and toward potential repeat customers. Repeat customers are usually better because their incentives tend include your business staying in business so that the product remains available. Maybe this particular product isn’t for you. Or maybe it’s not ideal for you but still good enough. Or not. Everything isn’t for everyone.
torstenvl
Yes, exactly. It's rent-seeking in an intentional bid to distort the market and cause deadweight loss. It is inherently evil.
prepend
Everything isn’t for everyone, that’s true.

I want the world to have good products that are for lots of people.

Having lame things that are rent-seeking with no functional benefit is not good. Saying “it’s only for idiots, not for everyone” isn’t very constructive.

I’d rather people make products that are efficient and equally beneficial for creator and user. Not to exploit every drop of value from users that they can without making users quit.

8mobile
Hi, I like your markdown blog project, it's simple but the graphics are a bit too rough. I advise you to also include a free plan, at least the user has the opportunity to try it. Nice start
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FilipPanoski
Seems that the target audience for this are non-technical people? Since I am a developer I am more interested in a CMS tool like https://decapcms.org/ that is open source and I can integrate within my app. Perhaps it'd be useful to you to check it out!
rekabis
IMHO your domain name is a confusable that will make many people think it’s offline if they try to manually type in that domain name - because even I typed in portfolio dot app, and not portfolo dot app. And portfolio.app doesn’t lead anywhere - the owner of that domain name hasn’t stood anything up.

And while this product may appeal to many, IMHO most technical people are going to want to self-host in some fashion in order to avoid the issue of niche/boutique SAAS products being suddenly discontinued by their creators.

I certainly don’t touch the vast majority of SAAS products unless it has a significant commercial backing behind it, and even then I try to avoid SAAS as much as possible for philosophical reasons: if I can’t control it, I can’t depend on it.

KomoD
+1, I also read it as portfolio.app at first
langcss
I think something based on portfolio would be better.

portfoliohq, tryportfolio, useportfolio, withportfolio etc.

AlexDragusin
Might wan tto check, the LinkedIn link goes to 404.
byearthithatius
The only testimonial is by the Founder and you're posting this on a website where the vast majority know how cheap/easy it is to host a static website. For instance this is free from GitHub and cheaper than your price from Netlify.
langcss
It is free* from Netlify

* until you get DDoS or a lot of traffic

LordShredda
You're posting on HN, everyone here knows how to setup apache. I'd suggest you target less technically inclined people or offer more features than github pages. Honestly, just having an easier way to publish than github pages would be a good idea
rmdes
it's a cool thing, but make it one time subscription, self-hosted, Docker, k8s, whatever else.. even a binary and I would pay for it, at least once. but I'm never going to deploy my blog on your stuff, that's for sure. also.. have you considered adding a few bricks of the indieweb.org / indiewebify etc..?