Hacker News Reader

Comment by zserge | Hacker News Reader

I work on these three projects to launch them soon:

* https://onthesamepage.online/ - a minimalist private whiteboard with no registration; already used in German schools, but working on scaling it and prepare for a more general market.

* https://lalatabs.com - a tiny tabulature website for amateur musicians who can't read notes; need to add a few hundred songs and open it to the public. This won't be monitized, and will remain my little hobby.

* https://nullitics.com/stats/ - a zero-effort web analytics, easy to embed or self-host; much lighter and smaller than the alternatives, and as a result - much cheaper (I plan to charge 1€/month and that would still be profitable).

View on HN

On the Same Page is brilliantly simple - thanks for sharing.

One minor improvement: the auto-selection of items by hovering the cursor could be a bit more visible - the dark grey is quite subtle (and not too different from black). May I suggest using a lighter color (or a classy red / orange)?

Regarding the pricing of the analytics, please reconsider. 1€ sends the signal “I’m the cheap option” and will attract cheap customers. In fact, everything below 19€/mo or 199€ sends that message.

It has been a tough decision, and I still have doubts to be honest. However, I personally would never pay for analytics more than what I pay for domain+hosting. Also, the niche of mid-priced analytics is already rather full - SimpleAnalytics, Fathom, Plausible etc. But there is nothing for casual bloggers/developers, who a) value their users privacy enough to pay for it b) do not have a budget to pay 200€ annually.

I think the similar problem exists in many areas and that's what stops people from moving away from Google and such - abscence of really cheap, simplified alternatives. For example, I wouldn't pay too much for the email, no matter how good it is. But I would pay 1€/month without a doubt. It's how we perceive the value of the product. No way the number of visitors of my humble blog is worth more than my cellphone data plan or my gym. But I realise that there are people who could say that analytics should cost more than a cup of coffee.

I think this is me, I've been looking for some cheap solution to get basic data, without the need of a cookie. I would self-host any of the open source but I couldn't find any using sqlite. I was even thinking about building something myself.

If may I ask, how long have you been working on these projects? do you have a full time job?

Thanks for the feedback! OnTheSamePage is the oldest one, I made it more than a year ago, but then got distracted with my relocation to Germany and all the related fun. Lalatabs was a very fun challenge - I made it during 24 days in December. Now it's time to turn it into a proper product from a quick PoC. Nullitics is what I started last week, but plan to launch in February. Somehow I manage to combine it all with a full-time job and occasional consulting. But I definitely need to slow down, I guess.

The reason I would advise against it is it severely limits the possible profitable cost of customer acquisition which makes sense in turn strictly limiting how you can market it. If you can create all your own content and want to pursue a 100% organic strategy then this will be less of a concern.

I like the blackboard web app and works nicely with touch devices. nullitics is down tho.

On the same page is really cool!

In case you didn't already know: using the same whiteboard on a 27" screen vs a mobile screen hides a big portion of it on mobile. It seems like the whiteboard isn't scaled according to the screen size.

Love the concept though!

EDIT: Never mind looks like if you just dezoom it works, my bad!

Just discovered that the random token generation still needs work for https://onthesamepage.online/. You can easily guess or create (short) board ids, and see what was drawn there by others.

That was deliberate. There are password-protected boards, password can be set from the menu. But the default page IDs were meant to be short, pronouncible and easy to type. Also you may enter your own page ID manually, just open https://onthesamepage.online/hello-hacker-news

On the same page is cool! unfortunately I have Teams' Whiteboard so I don't need it

On the same page looks really nice! Is there an export functionality?

Yes, but not in the menu yet (there is a big launch planned) - https://onthesamepage.online/example/png or https://onthesamepage.online/example/svg (just append "/png" or "/svg" it to the board URL for now)

Very nice projects, all three of them. Good job!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com