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Comment by mduerksen | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my complete speculation, but I bet your success factor is "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."

My only successful product to this date is an app I built because my wife asked me to. It is in an non-technical domain which I knew nothing about. I thought it was rather non-promising, but, since it was a pet-peeve of hers, I gave it a try.

It was an awesome (and very bonding) experience - she explained me the problem(s), and I tried to simplify and structure it (didn't think gardening could be so complicated). Both of us were in their respective element, and from back and forth an app was forged.

To this day I only half-jokingly call her my product manager. The app has brought in 5 digits last year and is rising.

Last week, she briefly mentioned another problem, in another hobby domain of hers...

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Lucky you. I tried to make a game with my (then-girlfriend, now-) wife and it kinda fizzled out. Sure, took on too much, I'm not the best with bringing projects to launch, but whatever.

I really can't say who spent more time (she did graphics, I wrote code) but to this day it's a bit of a sore point to talk about, just that we were both absolutely not happy with the outcome and see it as completely wasted time.

Thanks for the sobering counterpoint to my perfect formula for success :)

A game is really a tough one though.

a game seems less about solving a problem though. Educational games can semi help with solving the problem of learning specific topics, but often hard to pull off well.

I'm sure you've tried but you might want to try and find another perspective. I did a similar joint project with my wife. At more than one point we butt heads. It was pretty tense to say the least I don't want to embellish. On the other hand we did create something and learned much about each other along the way. If you finished something that is a success.

I'm not saying it can't be a positive experience, just telling a story how it absolutely wasn't in this case.

We've got a ton of those stories, but creating a piece of software is probably not on the table in the next 1-2 decades. :)

My wife and I also started making a game. Though the game didn't go far, I ended up learning new technologies specifically for the game to be scalable that landed me a nice job in another country.

I remember giving an "advice" on this in one of my comments: developers can discover amazing things once they step away from their day to day stuff,where there are already so many things created that it's pretty hard to come up with something unique. Gardening fits the bill pretty well in this case.

> "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."

This also strikes me - After I live with my girlfriend for a while, I (or she surprisingly) found I have no interest in social media apps, discounts, traveling, eating tasty foods, mainstream movies/TV series...

Being immune to popular things is nice sometimes. But not being able to have empathy with most people is a great disadvantage for product development, since markets which are too niche mostly cannot easily afford rents or just don't worth it at all. It's much nicer to "build ... my girlfriend a tool" TBH.

My wife works in fashion and sometimes has SaaS ideas that fill a niche in her world, and which I never would have thought of myself. Unfortunately so far my programming skills are not up to snuff to fulfill her needs. But I’m working on it!

The ideas generally fall into “my company is paying lots of money for some really powerful, complicated software, and we use about 5% of what it offers. Why not create cheaper software that just does the 5%?”

what kinds of ideas?

Any chance we could check it out?

https://m3u-editor.com/

This does not seem to be it. GP was talking about something to do with gardening.

Edit: I see, you linked without reading what we were talking about, so you linked to the thing OP made, not the thing GP made.

Or they accidentally clicked the wrong level and linked there, since it was a little bit irritating that the OP did not provide a link - I mean I was about to ask for one.

Sry for the confusion my bad, too late to edit unfortunately. As pointed out this is the link to the OP post that was missing initially as well.

Sure: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/veggie-garden-planner/id132992...

Suggestions are always welcome.

My friend is also working on an Android version, though it doesn't have feature parity (yet).

As a gardener myself... This looks super handy :)

Really neat! Have you considered a cross platform framework like Flutter or React Native so you could deploy to both?

What a coincidence, you're in the same small town as the company I work for! ;)

Great app btw and congratulations on last year's success :)

The world is a small place! I once worked for a startup, one of our investors was from Herford, apparently got rich off Bitcoin. We visited their coworking space, it was pretty fun.

You're probably talking about Oliver Flaskämper, right? We're renting an office in his coworking space!

Hah, we might have met then!

... and just last week we were thinking about utilizing exactly that co-working space. Small world indeed :)

Nice App! Love little niche Apps like this that work well for their sole task.

Shows there is a need for paid Apps!

Looks nice! As someone thinking about building an app, how are you balancing the app's free functionality with paid functionality? That's the tricky thing — you want the free functionality to be useful, but you also want as many people as possible to upgrade.

<humour> There’s no ‘e’ is potato</humour>

Dan Quayle has entered the chat.

Very cool. My girlfriend (and probably her father) would love this, but they're both on Android. Any plans to port it?

Didn't link it before, but my friend is on the task: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bentosoftw...

That looks really nice! I work for a competing Garden Planner, it's really good to see some more effort put into this space

I'm not into gardening myself, but looking at all of the other comments people responded with I can see that you have done a great job -- and also, you know, the fact that it's been doing so well too ;). Nice work :)

I would use it. My wife would use it. Then I read the comment about being iOS only.

Fingers crossed for the future of your friend's work.

I didn't word my above post clearly, but the Android version is actually already available as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100642

Most notably though, it doesn't have the virtual planner yet.

My girlfriend and I share a couple raised beds at the local community garden. We talked about building a similar app like this together, looks like you beat us to it! Will check it out!

That's pretty cool! Have you thought about making it into a PWA and ditch the proprietary ios/android ecosystems and just allow anyone with a browser to use it? It doesn't seem like there is much in this app that NEEDS to be a "mobile" specific app. It looks like you could do it all with html/js and some local storage. I'm a big believer in open crossplatform systems, when it's possible. Obviously if you need access to hardware sensors, etc, it wouldn't work very well.

For a big portion of the app, I would agree (arguments about native feel aside).

But well, there is the virtual planner feature that makes heavy use of carefully tuned iOS gesture recognizers for zooming, panning, dragging, tapping and holding, all in combination for a smooth and useable editor on a small screen.

Not that I have actually tried, but I suspect I would have to lay more groundwork to implement the same experience with the browser DOM. This could of course just be a lack of knowledge on my part, but my time is finite :)

Hi, web app dev here. It’s possible to do. Whether it piques your interest or is worth your personal effort to do is of course up to you, but it is doable. Some may scoff, but I’d even say it’s possible to do it elegantly.

Can you give some examples of simple open cross platform systems that make money?

I like my apps to be apps and a lot of the "Apps" that are HTML/js are janky cross platform and are tricky to pay for (vs one touch on ioS)

"Make money" is a misnomer, but successful PWAs tossed around here include Uber, Starbucks, etc...

Sorry - but Uber is very much a app first app. Most people using it are coming through the "proprietary" ecosystem parent wants to get rid of.

I don't use starbucks, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also had a proper app store app and didn't require users to use a web browser to access the app.

If anything - this proves the user preference for apps vs websites.

My mother will love this. I bet she had no idea she needed it as well!

This is a totally random suggestion but, I used to work with a Marijuana company that wanted something almost exactly like this to track their plants between different strains, lifecycles etc. that were on a grid system. This was a few years ago. You might want to check out that market and might be able to re-use a lot of this feature set?

GROWTRACKER on F-Droid!

Yep.

eBay started as a website to sell Pez dispensers for the founders girlfriend.

https://time.com/4013672/ebay-founded-story/

Yeah. That really was some PR story, completely fake. Omidiyar admitted it later on. I think the first thing to ever be listed on eBay was a broken laser pointer.

How interesting! Thanks for posting, I had no idea and bought it even though I've been aware of other similar sorts of submarine PR stories.

Do you have a link to the debunking?

Sorry I don't often go on HN. I believe this was in an interview of Pierre Omidyar, although it may unfortunately be in French. He has not done much of these, so I think I may be able find it, I'll check.

https://www.achievement.org/achiever/pierre-omidyar/

This is it, a link to the video and the transcript, just type laser on the and you'll find it !

It makes sense that building something that other people want to use is going to be more successful than building something primarily for yourself. Particularly if "other people" means "non-technical people", because anything you can build for yourself, any other technical person can also build for themselves. (Just look at the crazy number of javascript build tools and dependency managers.) But building for non-programmers, well, that's a potential customer base.

  > Pardon my complete speculation, but I bet your success
  > factor is "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."

The first unicorn in my country was born the same way.

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