Ask HN: What are some successful products that had a disappointing Show HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some successful products that had a disappointing Show HN?

42 pointsthe_wheel17 comments

Anything from low traffic and upvotes to a weak product.

Not HN, but still epic:

    No wireless. Less apace than a nomad. Lame.

http://slashdot.org/story/21026

Not on HN, but I remember the initial demo of imgur being torn to bits on reddit. And when Joel Spolsky announced his idea that would eventually turn into StackOverflow, it was derided as useless because the work already had enough question/answer sites.

Found this page:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/71i4v/stack_ov...

Much people don't like experts exchange and found this site much better.

My favourite comment (on Reddit): The fact that Joel Spolsky can jump in and arbitrarily add and remove to what a person wrote is a little unsettling.

This comment is still true -

"The only problem with Stack Overflow is that the rate of activity pushes all but the easiest questions off the front page quite rapidly. Most people there just answer the easiest questions and ignore the hard ones."

You notice when uni's go back the questions are often just homework

Dropbox was criticized when it first came up on Show HN. People said that they could create their own and that nobody would adopt installing something.

You can view the original post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Edit: it only had 71 comments and 111 points, and if I'm not mistaken, that's not much by today's standards.

people were still very positive about it

I released MyPost (https://mypost.io) which allows anyone to create beautiful simple web pages in minutes with just a few clicks. Completely free with no registration required.

I didn't put "SHOW HN" in the title as I was fairly new to Hacker News. It also didn't do much to gain many comments on Hacker News, but as far as gaining attraction from around the world.. it managed to gain a huge amount of attention in Russia and other parts of the world. It probably has so far received over 100,000 visitors in about a year with no advertising on my part. I would love to monetize it eventually, but for now, it was definitely a nice project that helped me learn a lot about PHP and MySQL.

Sleepio appear to be doing pretty well despite a fairly average Show HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504639

Pixelapse did reasonably well and ended up being acquired by Dropbox (not necessarily suggesting that's a success) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3572755

My personal favourite is Mondo (or Monzo as they are now called). Their founder/CEO posted here when they launched and the thread got very little attention. These days they are one of the most respected startups in London and are on the cusp of enormous success - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9638345

Well, maybe if their show HN got low amount/no votes nobody saw it. So it would be impossible to name it.

This seems to be a bit of a meme I don't think is true.

Every mentions Dropbox because it is the only one?

Our lovely @usepanda app.

http://usepanda.com

It's a reader offering RSS and bookmarking as well as ability to view in different layouts. Got 1781 upvotes on Product Hunt.

gRPC seemed to have had a pretty rough opening.

Initial announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114748 And for their 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12344995

Nugget only got 14 points on HN but 350+ points on product hunt... As to final success we're still working on it.

The difference in taste between HN and PH was on display in the thread about the AngelList's acquisition of PH. I found it really bizarre. A gathering of people who build stuff just completely deriding something built by a small team for reasons I couldn't make heads or tails of.

1 / The perception that PH isn't doing anything 'hard', tech wise.

2 / The perception that PH was created to capture value and act as a promotional vehicle for a narrow SV elite, rather than creating anything new.

Yeah, that's a fairly succinct summary. I suppose I put some effort into having a positive-by-default outlook on stuff others have created. I don't think those descriptions of PH are _bad_ things and even if they were bad, then I would assume that it became bad only by mistake not out of intention.

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