Show HN: My failed-wannabe-saas-startup project Beyondpad going open source | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My failed-wannabe-saas-startup project Beyondpad going open source

github.com

51 pointsdzjosjusuns15 comments

I'm curious to know how / at what point you decided it has failed? What metrics helped?

It came down from two sides. I kinda burned out while working on Android app and I was expecting much more users and engagement. And I didn't want to create another note taking app - idea for BP is to be one unified place for your data. And notes is only one form of casual-data. Sentiment was like this - Imagine note taking app, calendar app, task tracking app, etc. as destinations on a map. And to get to each of those destinations you need to have special vehicle for each one! So idea was to try to state than notes, calendar entries, tasks, fitness info etc. ar casual-data. And you can have one tool that gives you mechanics to aggregate and manipulate those data in one unified place. Where then you can slice, combine and get insights on your data as a whole. And its is hard to pitch something so generic!

I'm always sad when I see a startup/service 'fail' that I would've used had I known about. I've been searching for something like this for a really long time. I didn't think something existed and hobbled together a solution using fedwiki.

Thanks for open sourcing!

Whoa, that seems awesome. I think it is too full-featured for me (also, I don't use these kind of apps), but I would imagine people would be using this. It seems much better and faster than Evernote or Trello, for example.

Why "data-driven"?

data-driven cause I want Beyondpad to be about casual-data. And notes are only one form of casual data! Other forms could be calendar entries, task tracking. Or for example when Ill add ability for tags to work as bi-directional data adapters, you could create tag "hacker news", and under that tag, this feed would show up! If this info would be something you considered for yourself as data you are interested in.

That's a thing I like. Did you get users doing this kind of complex data manipulation? Or did them all just use the app as a simple note-taking app?

I've been making prototypes for a long time now to try to turn Trello (or make my own Trello-like app) into a "data-driven" collaboration platform. I think the idea is similar. My idea was to let people create magic Trello cards that would behave like database queries, or mapreduce views, for example, a card with some special instructions would show an aggregate value based on properties of all other cards in the board, or list; another magic card could show a list of links to some other cards, working as an index; that kind of thing.

From what you say I imagine your app is probably better than what I am only imagining for this Trello-thing. However, my idea was to have this for teams, small businesses and projects. Since I'm not used to note-taking apps, calendars, smartphones or anything like that I don't imagine a tool like this for my own "casual data" (but the name "casual data" is a good one, maybe you should use it more on your marketing efforts).

Did the same a few years ago: https://github.com/rafaqueque/responsly

It's always cool to give back to the community :)

Thanks for open sourcing it!

Relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8361258

Question: why did it failed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10491357

Demo: https://www.beyondpad.com/demo

Nice idea, but i suppose it's to featured for a "MVP"... I'm curious how long you spent on this ?

From the video,looks just like Google keep, does it have anything that is better than Google keep ?

just to name few things - ability to create custom forms or templates, different note lookup mechanics via tags and tag tree traversal, ability to assign "logic" to tags and forms. Ide is to be more data centric than keep is!

Plus it's self-hosted which is always nice, especially if you are worried about what data you are sticking in there.

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