10 years, 8 months and 12 days | Hacker News Reader

10 years, 8 months and 12 days

prototypo.io

37 pointsapp4soft14 comments

Here’s an online demo of the technology: https://spectral.prototypo.io/

It seems like such a fantastic market, and a real shame they couldn’t convert it into a profitable product.

For decades I have wanted to do a similar startup, but I’ve always judged the technical challenges of what I wished to achieve to be beyond my skill (edit: more of a visual pipeline of stroke and adornment transforms with parameters).

It’s not a shame if there’s no market, it would only be a shame if there was a huge market and they failed to capture the opportunity.

It's a shame the market mostly allows for building mediocre products that millions of people want, instead of great products that thousands of people want.

What a fantastic way of putting that sentiment. I will probably steal that at some point.

Plenty of beautiful things have no market.

> It seems like such a fantastic market

Does it? Maybe I am misunderstanding the product, but I am really struggling to think of potential customers. To me, it seems that people who actually design their own fonts will be doing this on a much more professional level than just adjusting a few sliders. On the other hand, people who know so little about font design that such a technology would help them will get their desired results faster if they just use a stock font from Google Fonts. After all, they offer sliders, too, but the result is always a polished font which has been worked on by an actual designer. Also, it's free.

Agreed, it's a fantastic idea, and great execution, but sadly not a fantastic market.

Totally agree! This is exactly what I tell people who ask me why we have failed (I’m the author of this post : )

Yannick.

What a tough decision to make after nearly 11 years. My heart goes out to all the individuals who had their hearts in this company and product.

Prototypo font editor app source code actually hosted on GitHub.[0]

[0] https://github.com/byte-foundry/prototypo

I applaud this person's effort and persistence. Many people have ideas, but many of those same people do not have the cajones to get it from paper to a product.

The post is from March, and the product ended in June (see the awkward tense flash across the top).. this seems.. untimely

Actually we shut down the product in June because we used graphcool and graphcool shut down in... June : )

Congratulations on what you built, and good luck with what comes next!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com