HN Explorer

RailsRumble Apps that Deserve to Be Startups

80 points by railsjedi ↗ HN
Rails Rumble 2009 (railsrumble.com) ended this weekend. Since I'm a contestant (alertme.tv), I've been able to browse all the 157 teams who were able to get deployed. Here's an sneak peek at 11 amazing entries that I think could easily be successful as startups if they are given a chance after the competition ends. All of these apps were built by a team in 48 hours.

#1 LowDown - http://mcp.r09.railsrumble.com If you are into cucumber (cukes.info), you'll love this app. It enables you to build specs, and share them them with your clients before implementation. Amazing interface, and huge SaaS potential. I would for this pay right now.

#2 Hi, I'm - http://hi.im Cool way to build a landing page for yourself. This is what google profiles should be. Landing page urls look like http://hi.im/jacques

#3 Omnominator - http://omnominator.com Cute & useful site to choose restaurants among groups. This would be huge as a google wave widget, or integrated into an existing communications platform. The site is incredibly useful on its own though.

#4 Thingivore - http://thingivore.com If you've used delicious library on the mac, this is basically the web version of that. Insanely nice ui and interactivity. This app could make a fortune off amazon's affiliate program.

#5 Neighborhood Watch - http://neighborhoodwat.ch A new peer 2 peer way to monitor web site uptime. You install it on your server and everyone checks everyones websites. Tons of additional data and alerts you could with all the additional servers checking up on you.

#6 Techmeets - http://techmeets.com Nice looking alternative to meetup.com - focused on technical meetups. Crowded market, but this is a decent niche and easy its especially easy to monetize developer eyeballs (job boards, dev tools, etc).

#7 Straightlist - http://husohuso.r09.railsrumble.com Allows you to post and browse installation / deployment steps. Every linux blog on the planet could integrate with this site. Some sort of simple website integration widget is needed.

#8 SmackSale - http://smacksale.com Reddit like tool for tech bargains. Lots of sites already like this, but this one is nicely built and could easily compete among the others. Obvious affiliate potential if they can get traffic.

#9 Nybbl - http://nybblme.r09.railsrumble.com A way to publish small bits of knowledge, with micropayments. Any good hacker comes up with tidbits of useful knowledge every week that he runs across. This could be a neat way to try to monetize that knowledge by getting paid subscribers to these tidbits.

#10 Last Percent - http://lastpercent.com Nice and simple tool to check a website. Looks for broken image links, html validation errors, and css errors. Every developer should use something like this.

#11 Table Surfing - http://tablesurfing.com Cool way to meet new people by setting up dinners with strangers. Would be tough to get enough people on the site to make it useful for finding random dinners, but the site's well designed and looks like it would work well just using it amongst friends

Some awesomely ridiculous apps that deserve mention: - lazeroids.com (online massively multiplayer asteroids). Seriously.

- stomachly.com (restaurant ratings based on bowels)

- celebritypassage.com (tribute site to dead celebs)

61 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread
railsjedi
Official judging starts today, with public voting on apps at the end of the week.
adamhowell
I was really happy with where we were with ours:

http://mocksup.r09.railsrumble.com/

Until a couple last minute changes by me unknowingly broke our main feature, which is adding links to mockups. Dammit.

But, it was really fun and a great way to get started on an app idea.

railsjedi
Cool. Yeah, I had some trouble using the mockup tool. The landing page is awesome though. Are you guys planning to launch as a startup fully? Here's a domain suggestion: http://domai.nr/mocksup/with/mock.su :-)
adamhowell
> Cool. Yeah, I had some trouble using the mockup tool. The landing page is awesome though.

Thanks man. Yeah, it would still have been crippled (couldn't update or delete links once you'd made them -- I went down a rabbit hole all Sunday morning w/ a couple of jQuery plugins that didn't work out) but adding them would have at least worked correctly.

I actually grabbed mocksup.com a couple of months ago, so this week once we iron out the big bugs we'll be pushing it to there.

railsjedi
Simple apache config and you can get it pointed to your linode. You should get that set up
bmelton
I haven't gotten a chance to actually use the app yet, but clicking around, I have to say that the app is just gorgeous.

I look very forward to using this.

wwkeyboard
There are some polished looking projects there, how did they ensure that all of the work was done in 48 hours?
railsjedi
they monitor the github repositories. relatively easy to find people who blatantly cheat by doing implementation beforehand

there's no restriction on paper planning so i'm guessing the top sites probably spent weeks on design and specing. whether or not they created photoshop comps probably doesnt matter

adamhowell
No digital assets could be created beforehand, so they better not have made anything in Photoshop 'cause I worked my ass off to get our landing page in and I'd be pissed! ;)
adambair
Yeah, they monitor your repo during the competition. You're only allowed to create paper assets before the competition begins. You can see our paper mock (for smacksale.com) by clicking the robot in the footer or here http://smacksale.com/images/sketch.jpg
Hates_
For convenience:

#1 LowDown - http://mcp.r09.railsrumble.com

#2 Hi, I'm - http://hi.im

#3 Omnominator - http://omnominator.com

#4 Thingivore - http://thingivore.com

#5 Neighborhood Watch - http://neighborhoodwat.ch

#6 Techmeets - http://techmeets.com

#7 Straightlist - http://husohuso.r09.railsrumble.com

#8 SmackSale - http://smacksale.com

#9 Nybbl - http://nybblme.r09.railsrumble.com

#10 Last Percent - http://lastpercent.com

#11 Table Surfing - http://tablesurfing.com

Some awesomely ridiculous apps that deserve mention:

http://www.lazeroids.com (online massively multiplayer asteroids). Seriously.

http://www.stomachly.com (restaurant ratings based on bowels)

http://www.celebritypassage.com (tribute site to dead celebs)

jskopek
These are all remarkable, but the one that really gets my imagination going is #7 - Straightlist. If they can implement embeddable widgets that can be put into blogs and forums I can see the site picking up a lot of steam, and once they start keeping track of hits on each page the site has the potential to become a reddit for guides
railsjedi
Oops, they actually already do have the integration widget via an iframe link. Missed that around the first time.
cousin_it
LowDown, Straightlist, SmackSale and CelebrityPassage sound like names of porn sites.
Heff
The quality was much higher this year. I think teams are really learning how to compete, and it's getting a lot harder to win.
visnup
lazeroids.com is all javascript + canvas. not flash.
bryanwoods
Still reeling from the weekend; my first Rumble.

We also got an app built and deployed, a simple little game: http://marryboffkill.com

The whole time I expected that it would be the smoothing-over of rough edges, double-checking, and doing general "cleanup" that would take the most time, but even so was surprised how quickly the deadline snuck up on us the last day.

I have a feeling if the rumble was over a long weekend instead we would have been able to clean up all the rough edges, but I have a feeling there are many other teams in this boat as well. :-)

Was definitely a great way to spend a weekend (creating something) with friends and a real learning experience. I'm already excited to do it again next year.

railsjedi
Heh, your app is pretty hilarious. It definitely needs a gender section though. Since 99% of the users will be male for the time being, maybe you should have made it female only list.

Having to think about boffing Salman Ruschdie was too terrifying to continue playing.

foca
We built http://howsmycode.com -- We didn't get time to finish the "marketing side", and a couple of big features didn't make it either (we were too ambitious, I think), but we're still happy with the result. And we plan to continue work on it :)
smeade
I'm happy with how my entry AffiliApp turned out -http://affiliapp.com. It let's web app developers instantly create an affiliate program for their app.
r00k
Our team built http://pocketsapp.com. Pockets is visual voicemail for twitter. Pick a user, and we'll call you and record a voicemail. They get an @reply with a link to the voicemail (and any others left for them).

All feedback appreciated!

jbr
Hey, really nice job on pocketsapp. How did you do the phone interface? Is there a good resource for learning that tech?

Thanks!

r00k
Thanks! We used Twilio for the telephony piece. They have excellent docs with everything you need to get going. Check 'em out.
railsjedi
Hopefully the Rumble organizers drop Rails from the competition next year. At this point it no longer makes sense. If Django, PHP, or Java folks want to enter, they should be allowed. It would say a lot more for whatever language/framework the winners of the competition used.
nestlequ1k
It might be too large to support all the judging & infrastructure (hosting, etc). However, if they could, I agree it would be awesome!
zapnap
Hi, I'm one of the organizers. Any Rack-based framework was allowed this year (keeping it Ruby-specific). We're looking to do a more framework/language-agnostic event in the very near future, leveraging a lot of the infrastructure / services we've already built. Stay tuned :). Of course, we'll keep doing Ruby/Rails Rumbles too. <3 community.
guitsaru
My team built http://operatorapp.com/

It's only open for a demo at the moment. We don't have an easy way for people to set up their own accounts because it has to go through twilio. We plan to keep working on it after the competition is over.

jbr
I built http://www.sharelocally.org/ for RailsRumble (solo), which I plan to open-source. Anyone interested in the concept? I've got a lot more planned I didn't fit in. This was my first rumble and learned a whole lot about exactly how much fits in 48 hours. Can't wait until next year's.
thesethings
Looks great!

And I think the "space" (sharing stuff/ re-thinking owning/renting) needs a lot of attention.

Related:

* https://neighborgoods.net/ Neighborgoods is currently in private beta right now. They seem to be a social site centered on finding people to borrow/loan/rent stuff in your immediate area for free/small fees. Hopefully they will have an API, and projects like yours could benefit. spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it.

* For a Yahoo! Hack day project, somebody took the Yahoo! Mail API to make Freecycle data available "on the outside." It looks like this was done only as proof-of-concept, and since each Freecycle community is its own list, this might be hard, but I think there is a LOT to gained by scraping the goods out of there.

* Maybe take the eBay reputation data out via API, and display in your system?

A related idea is being done

jbr
It's actually really exciting that neighborgoods exists. Do you have any idea how they're planning on monetizing? I did this as a weekend project and am considering open sourcing because it doesn't really seem like there's a demographic that's clamoring to pay. I guess maybe small brick-and-mortar businesses might want hyperlocal targeting, maybe.

As far as reputation system, instead of pulling eBay's reputation data, I was hoping to build a sharing-borrowing reputation system. I don't have any reason to think that being a good eBay seller/buyer would make someone a timely and careful borrower/lender.

"Stuff lending" seems like the sort of thing us internet folks could help with, though, which is why I built ShareLocally.

Do you know where the beta of NeighborGoods is starting?

thesethings
I know just a little about Neighborgoods. @mickipedia (twitter id) is the founder, she's based in Los Angeles, and even before starting this site, she's been interested in the environment for a bit. I don't know her personally, but she seems constructive and smart and funny.

As for monetizing it, since their system will/does support renting/loaning between people, I imagine they can take a cut of that? Maybe membership? (Now i'm just guessing)

I in no way mentioned Neighborgoods as a reason you should stop working on your project, but rather something to validate it! (Yep, I'm one of those polyanna's... :D)

I really do think you should open source it though, or at least big chunks of it, even if you do a hosted service. (I can save the reasons for this for another time.)

As for eBay rep, I don't think it should replace an internal reputation system, but especially in the early goings, what could it hurt? And not just eBay, selective data from as many 3rd party places as possible. Even a Twitter account that's more than 6 months old could make some people (like me) more comfortable loaning certain kinds of things.

And man... I think there's so much wasted cycles on sites like Freecycle and Craigslist free section... basically there is no item "management." Even when stuff is free, so many inquiries on stuff that's gone, or redundant follow-up letters to tell people it's taken, etc. I know your system is a different use-case than give-aways, but I see an overlap in need and purpose, and stuff + relationship management is applicable to multiple situations (and similar demographics of people who like to be resourceful).

As for beta of NeighborGoods, I have an invite for you. I will hit you up on the email I found in your profile.

thesethings
(oh man, too late for me to edit, pretend this line, "spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it." and this line, "A related idea is being done" are erased. Sloppy me!
jaswope
Man, http://stomachly.com got a mention. Thanks!
joefio
Stomachly is awesome! Great design, even better tagline! Nice work!
nestlequ1k
RailsRumble needs a prize for most hilarious app. We should lobby for that next year.

This year, stomachly wins.

zackadams
Had a lot of fun putting this together and I'm thrilled everyone's enjoying the site!
joefio
Our team built http://loanit.to as our entry. It allows you to track things you've let friends borrow. Some great potential for Amazon affiliate integration.

Very impressed with the quality of the apps this year. Some awesome ideas! It's going to take days to go through them all!

zapnap
Stay tuned throughout the week, peoples. Our expert panel has just started qualifying applications and the homepage will soon be updated to reflect the apps that are in-the-running for the top spots.

Later this week, Thursday if all goes well, we'll use the expert panel advice to whittle the list down to a top tier and open up public judging to decide the winner. I hope everyone here will want to participate!

Winners will be announced next weekend.