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Open Startups List

open-startups.xyz

215 pointsferminrp35 comments

As it is, the website is a usability nightmare. Why should opening regular links be Javascript functions? There is no tab navigation, you can't use accessibility tools and you can't use any mouse interactions besides the hardcoded click event.

It's a nice idea, but I'm really surprised that even a page as simple as this can suffer from over engineering.

> Why should opening regular links be Javascript functions?

This is annoying me in the youtube redesign as well. When you visit a channel you can't open the "videos" tab in a new tab because it's implemented as a javascript thing instead of a proper link.

A link can be both a suitable-for-tab link and a JavaScript thing. They simply didn't bother.

Yeah, this trend is pretty lame. For me, now it's often hard to just cut/paste a string to enter a search different tab.

> Why should opening regular links be Javascript functions?

Because they are tracking clicks on each button that goes to an open page. It's not really over engineering, but side effect of good old tracking.

  function trackClick(){
     //steal users' privacy here
     return true;
  }
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $('a').click = trackClick;
  });

The page includes hotjar, so you can draw something nice with your mouse movements :)

Hey!

I'm not a developer ... I studied business and work on marketing. I barely know how to code.

The whole backend for this is a google sheet and I'm using sheety.co. This is one of the first times I've coded a whole page and I'm really really lame with javascript.

By the time I had finished creating the divs with the startups and the code that imported them from the API I realized I didn't have any links to the startups, and since making the site responsive had been such a challenge for me I searched for the easiest way to patch things up.

This wasn't over-engineering just me being lame at coding and I have no problem with that ... not what I do for a living so nothing to worry about.

It might be a usability nightmare but it reached product of the day on product hunt yesterday and 2nd position on hacker news for a while today. So don't worry about those issues too much on your own projects, as they say, "If your website is perfect, you've launched too late"

Hope you have a great sunday afternoon and thank you for visiting the site and taking the timea to give me some feedback. I've definitelly learned a lot from my mistakes during this first launch.

Hey buddy, I'm a developer, would be glad to help building that. I think it's great information and hat with great ux is useful to everyone. DM on Twitter: aleattorium

There are a bunch of other lists of open startups:

https://baremetrics.com/open-startups

https://postmake.io/open

I love this movement / idea.

I am however interested in what people feel the benefits are to the companies who decide to operate in this manner?

Andy from Tettra here. We recently made all our metrics public using Baremetrics. We're very transparent internally and decided to be transparent externally too. You can check out our metrics here: https://tettra.baremetrics.com/

The honest answer is that when we asked ourselves the true downsides of people outside our company knowing our numbers, we couldn't really think of any that were actually that detrimental. Sure, potential investors or acquirers are now going to know how we're doing, but they'd find that out in due diligence anyways.

The thinking for why we made the decision to share is that it helps us with marketing because people want to follow along with our story. It also holds us more accountable because we're building in the open, similar to a public company. We get a lot of people who reach out that want to work for us or partner with us because we share so much. Happy to answer more questions if folks are interested.

Hey Andy, sorry I missed your startup. I've just added it to the list. =)

Thanks Andy, do you think this makes sense for B2B and B2C companies to the same level? Do you think there are certain product categories which do not fit into the model, i.e less developer focused?

I don't see an explanation anywhere, what is an "open startup"?

It's mentioned half-way down the blogpost (https://hackernoon.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-open-start...)

>There’s no official definition yet, and the Oxford dictionary weren’t available for comment, so let’s write one; A product or company which operates in the open and shares their statistics publicly.

From the subheading of the site.

> All these startups and side projects are building out in the open. Check them out!

I think this definition is a little lose though. I went to try and see the Muzeek source code and the only thing I found was open source SDKs. I wouldn’t call that building in the open

Apparently it has nothing to do with open source, bur open business practices and metrics.

A bit of a hijack of the word "open" but I'll be generous and say "naming is hard".

If I have to pay money to use something, it's not open. It's a total cooption

What happened to "free as in speech, not free as in beer"?

I don't have to pay to speak either

That's true, but not what they mean by that saying. It's distinguishing between the two common usages of "free" to clarify that free and open-source software isn't about price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...

While some of us intuitively get it, a clearer word here might be “transparent”.

The business stats (income generated, views, etc) are available publicly, the business practices and choices might be available, the customer data is of course not available, and the service is not required to be free.

Think of these as very valuable learning tools for how to run your own business (and IMHO a pretty great marketing tool for them).

I'm doing this right now! Well sort of - I'm blogging [0] about trying to build https://boxci.dev from just an idea to a product with paying customers in 10 weeks, with the aim of recording the whole process transparently. I'm 3 weeks in.

I'm doing it while following along with the YC Startup School program, and writing about applying the learnings from there in practice is one of the goals of the blog. Hopefully it'll be entertaining / useful for fellow hackers and bootstrappers in the community.

[0] https://davnicwil.com/zero-to-startup-in-ten-weeks

Open business startups (I think), not open source

This reminds me of the (mind-blowing) book "Honest Business: A Superior Strategy for Starting and Managing Your Own Business" by Salli Rasberry and Michael Phillips

https://www.worldcat.org/title/honest-business-a-superior-st...

Opening this on Firefox mobile with js off by default. Half empty page, ok I'll turn js on. Then the scroll just changed on the end of a scrolling swipe, damn that's not user friendly. Like, I tap down, swipe to scroll, and when releasing it Scrolls by a few items.

Hey lecarore, not sure I understand whats happening to you once you turn js on. If you can spare a couple of minutes, can you send me an email with a screenshot or recording? Hello@open-startups.xyz

There is also Alephobjects creators the Lulzbot 3D printers. I'm not sure about the start-up thing but they are making open hardware and they are very open about their modus operandi and finance. Does this work?

I see the financial data is validated by Stripe, but how would this compare to, for example, a 10-Q or 10-K? Is the Stripe data a complete representation of the financial state of these businesses?

Something I would love to see is how much it costs to keep some of these smaller startups running. Cushion app used to do this and it was really great.

I like https://macopenweb.com/ too!

Er, the first couple listed were created by the same guy. Did that same guy create open-startups.xyy and/or is OP?

Hey! I'm ordering them by the number of clicks they get. None of these startups are mine.

You can see a screenshot of my Google Analytics data here: https://ibb.co/THtnDtX

Have you seen https://www.equityfront.com/? You can use it to easily share startup updates and monthly results with the world.

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