1. were made by single hackers (or verry small teams)
2. make money
If possible add a short description.
http://www.boostcam.com - Built it in a weekend a couple of years ago. costs next to nothing to run and makes money on adsense.
http://www.sproutvideo.com - SaaS video hosting platform that I built with a partner (I coded everything and he's the business man) in a couple of weeks. We've got a lot of paying customers already.
http://www.physicalfix.com - Fitness web app that I've been building with another partner (Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent) for a couple of years and just launched. Taking a little time to get tracking but doesn't cost much to run and has a few paying customers already.
None of them make me enough money to work on them full-time yet but it's a nice supplement to my day job salary.
Funny, I would have considered you the talent ;-)
For players, check out jwplayer and flowplayer.
If you can host from your home ISP connection, it might be a good way to test things out.
I love this treatment for the role of your non-techical co-founder. Doesn't come across as false modesty either.
a) It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, which is one very specific problem a large group of people know they have, is close to trivial technically to solve, and for which almost all solutions suck. This makes it very achievable for one guy to tackle as a hobby project. (It eventually got to the point where full-time employment was my poor paying quirky hobby project.)
b) The business, as distinct from the application, works because over the course of four years I became very good at organic SEO and metrics-based optimization. These are broadly applicable skills in software (and marketing generally). Surprisingly few people can do them well.
c) No, I do not see myself being the bingo guy for forever. If you wanted to address a similarly small niche yourself, I would say it is a wonderful learning opportunity and has been lifechanging for me. I wouldn't recommend starting with bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, because if you are capable of beating me at it your skillset is worth a heck of a lot more money than can ever be extracted from that market for that problem, but virtually any developer can find something similar and learn enough to make it work. The amount you learn from having your own experimental laboratory is better than grad school, and you get paid to study. I wouldn't particularly recommend that route if you take money from investors. Two models, vastly different lifestyles, pick your favorite.
I'd love to see rankings for other countries besides the US.
http://tenderapp.com — Customer support app created by 2 people (out of necessity when Lighthouse started getting big).
Both apps are by ENTP. We have 2 programmers & 3 designers now and are working on redesigns for both Lighthouse & Tender. We actually just released a sneak peak yesterday: http://hoth.entp.com/2010/10/5/sneak-peek-tender-admin-2-0
1. The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow. (I realize the difficulty with email)
2. On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?
3. Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc)
Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.
> The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow.
Unfortunately, I tried this one week and it didn't work. The emails ended up being very long, the click through fell down, and I received a few emails of complaints from people who liked the more compact email without descriptions, because they didn't feel obligated to read the whole thing.
It's possible that I may make this an option in the future, but at the moment I'm dealing with other items on the todo list.
> On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?
This is a very valid suggestion and it will probably be implemented soon enough. I think even a one liner saying why it's our pick would help.
> Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc)
I added this feature this week: http://blog.anynewbooks.com/2010/10/new-feature-for-internat... BTW, I'm in Canada myself. :)
> Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.
Thank you.
One strange thing I noticed is that when I search for something, say javascript, there are lots of results but the page automatically jumps all the way down to the sign up form. Why don't you let me see the results first? If you want me to sign up, you could have a link next to each result saying something like "Don't miss out on more good books like this. Sign up now for weekly updates." If your suggestions are any good, I would love to sign up anyway. Please don't force me to.
Basically, the Sign up page contains the word "javascript", so if you search for it, that page will be included by the search function. Given that the email textbox grabs the focus, you'll get immediately sent to the bottom of the page.
If you try to search for something else you will not experience this behavior: http://img.skitch.com/20101007-xpcmkm4ebj4kiwsbsfiknsc7m4.jp...
Thank you again for reporting this. I'll fix this ASAP.
But I'm still not clear how the sign up page is included. Aren't you searching a database based on keywords and generating pages on the fly? What do you mean by "that page will be included by the search function"? I don't see any dedicated pages for individual books.
In the future I plan to make the search a much more prominent feature, sort of like a search engine for new books. At that time, I will use a backend which will contain the individual books, rather than simply do a text search through the newsletter archives.
I didn't do any marketing, just mentioned it to a couple of friends. Apparently those friends know some crazy people because in ~24 hours it was on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and Yahoo Tech.
Since that initial spike of traffic, and the settle-out afterward, it's been growing slowly but steadily ever since.
http://www.w3roi.com - developed and operated by myself, profitable since 2009 - real-time conversion tracking for online advertising
Probably 2 weeks of work all said but by far my biggest success in terms of sheer numbers.
It makes money to help pay bills now via AdSense and is totally hands off.
Actually, given our analytics, I think that it's really underperforming monetarily. My partner and I have largely moved onto other things, but if anyone out there loves to do that kind of stuff, maybe we can work something out?
Possible bug: The 'link' button shows a nice popup but did not generate either of the two promised permalinks in 15 seconds, at which point I left.
Do you mind talking about how you are doing the translation?
we're very profitable.
Customer support for 5 million users also takes a bit of time, and we have several part-time support staff that help people with any issues they run in to.
Having said that, both of our full-time developers are amazing and get things done at a pretty incredible pace.
This is not me being all "I DID ALL THE WORK WOOHOO!" -- far from it. I'd just like to note that there is far more that needs to be done for a successful app than just code + design. I think people don't realize that, when they see 1 or 2 creators listed by narrow roles, for a successful product.
I think the idea is to not start with the thought "I want to make a web app that makes money" but "I want to make a useful web app that solves a problem" - the money will eventually come if you crack that nut!
Made by a small team, doing well.
"""
Why is Xpenser free? How do you plan to make money?
We'll be introducing premium accounts that'll carry a monthly fee in the near future. The goal is to keep the base product free and charge for longer data retention and other services. """
It's not yet making money, which would disqualify it from the criteria for this Ask HN
Xpenser for Business is the commercial version of the product for businesses, and it's bringing in a good bit of revenue. At the moment it's by request/invite only, but will be generally available soon. Anyone interested in an invite can send an email to feedback@xpenser.com .
Users sign up for the free product, like it (or love it it :-) ), and ask to use it in their company. The free product is acting as a very good way of bringing users to our commercial product, so it's remained free.
(For what it's worth, my love is not abstract -- I actually learned something about my spending habits in the mere two weeks of using Xpenser that helped my peace of mind. It's something that makes my life demonstrably better!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga
I have no idea why no one has made an English clone yet. Apart from messy copyright problems and hosting costs (which all youtube clones have anyway), it's practically a guaranteed success.
I think I'll use it to register my next website ;)
I built the prototype myself, then my current partner came onboard when the app started making money. He dramatically improved the code and I'm mostly working on the business stuff now.
http://www.mailfinch.com - on demand direct mail
Built by me and profitable.
I switched on billing just this morning so it hasn't actually made anything yet.
http://www.leadnuke.com - B2B sales lead generation by monitoring online conversations.
Both built by me. Both make money. Not yet enough to support me full-time. Still consulting to bootstrap.
(I feel like we just got Mechanical Turked to an SEO farm, but hey- $GOOG juice!)
It seems like you could ad maybe 3 Square Button ads in various places and still be unobtrusive about it..
Don't get me wrong I don't sell online advertising or anything but your site design would make it really easy to add more inventory and have them still not be distracting.
In the mean time I may add more ads but I would hate to detract from the experience for the small userbase.
It would be great to add some more locations around the world.
If you add monitoring and alerts I would probably pay. Not that much as its already a corwded space, but I think a cheap alternative could get traction.
I wonder if its possible to have a business model of only charging when it alerts you to a site being down? E.g. we just alerted you to a site being down. Donate and we will do it again! Dont donate and I will delay my alerts by 1 hour next time!