Show HN: We built our startup in 100 days | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built our startup in 100 days

giveit100.com

147 pointsFinbarr104 comments

I've been burned before by startups that got hacked and spammed all my twitter friends. Sorry, normal signup or I'm not doing it.

Love the project though.

Thanks! We're definitely open to implementing our own login/accounts system and I'm sure we'll do this sooner or later.

Please do! The idea is awesome and I too am one to not use fb/twitter for signing up. Call it being stubborn, but there's plenty of us out there. In the meantime, is there a mailing list that people can join to stay up to date?

There is not currently a list unfortunately. Would be happy to let you know when we release non social login - ping me at finbarr[]giveit100[]com :-)

Social login does not have to mean ability to post as you. If used just for oAuth (login) it just provides profile information and a list of your friends. Twitter won't even provide your email address. If you use Twitter it will be no more than what is already public if your account is not protected. I would rather not have another login to remember myself.

I use G+ for all my oauth since I am not active on that social network. If I use Facebook I let them only access basic info and not post. If they need post, I make them visible to me only

Fantastic work. I really hope pg has accepted your application to ycombinator. You clearly have a talent for hard work, perseverance and knowing how to market your product well. Even if pg doesn't like the idea, he should realise the team is very capable.

I have a question though Karen, did you know you were going to do this project before you created this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w ? (I originally saw it on r/GetMotivated when it went viral originally) or did you decide to build it due to the popularity that the video got and the requests from people wanting to achieve similar?

(Just curious from a marketing point of view whether you planned for the dance video to go viral to boost your idea or whether you saw an untapped market due to the popularity of the video and decided to fill it)

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[EDIT] - Just got my question answered by watching this : http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s - I'm glad that it was an idea that came out of the viral consequence of the original video, rather than the original plan all along.

Also just realised that the woman learning to walk video I saw today on r/GetMotivated was submitted by you / part of the same project.

I can see pg's mind turning over in the office hours video, trying to understand the concept and how big it can grow - I think he's right in the fact that you should see how people use it and allow yourselves to pivot if another idea emerges out of where you're at so far.

I guess the issue is that one of the reasons for the successful popularity of your original dancing video was that it had a nice balance of unique story, being told in a short enough manner that the viewer keeps watching, combined with the final scene coming together perfectly with the music / train / nailing the dance which in my opinion was the 're share' moment - where the user thinks 'I must re share this!'.

The problem is in the 10 second videos it's unlikely I'll want to 're share a single video' - so it's the compiled story at the end which becomes the thing I want to share as a user - but that's not automated / easy to produce. That said, I did enjoy watching the journey of you guys producing the product in 100 days (10 second clip at a time) so, in a world of transparency and people wanting free publicity it does seem to work. (infact I would happily continue watching the journey for 10 seconds a day, to continue the journey past launch out of interest to see what happens next).

Either way, both you and Finbarr have produced, marketed and launched a cool product in 100 days which is a pretty amazing feat in itself.

Thank you so much, Paul. Your excitement is contagious. Our YC interview is on Thursday. Fingers crossed we get in.

This is such a cool idea. What's the reasoning behind limiting the video length? Quite a few people appear to get cut off in their videos before they have a chance to document their progress.

This one is good, 60+ days of coding: https://giveit100.com/@joanne

Probably the same reason as limiting twitter messages which many people like you criticized when they were just starting.

I think thats actually a great idea to limit video length, the reason behind it is to force people to film only the important and most interesting parts of the process, this will attract more people to watch it vs just film videos. There is a clip of a girl learning to monocycle, I watched it because it's very short, if it was 1min+ I would never watch it otherwise.

Thank you! We restricted it to 10 seconds to help keep the videos interesting. We definitely need a better way to trim the videos though. We'd like to build a mobile app that makes it very easy to select which 10s of the video you'd like. For now, it just uses the first 10s.

Though this will tie you onto a different platform at least initially, have you considered integrating with vine/instagram in any way? Could be a good way to acquire more users.

Best of luck helping people achieve more.

That's a great idea, we'd love to do some importing from vine/instagram, e.g. with #giveit100 hashtags

Great start. It's easy to imagine communities building up around different project areas.

Thanks! Good question. We really wanted to optimize for the experience of comparing one day with the next. Video is much harder to absorb than photo so we wanted to make each day really short and easy to digest.

People getting cut off is a problem. I think we can fix it with better tools for upload, i.e., an app.

Oh yeah... these guys did office hours on stage for Startup School 2013: http://youtu.be/syoqjYLDs48?t=9m57s

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It was great to meet you, and the site is exactly how I imagined it from your description. Great work!

Yeah! I'll post that video into our meta 100.

Some people on here are probably going to flame this idea because it glorifies someone showing off what they are doing, but I think they are missing the point: this is just a tool to keep yourself accountable (a la the Seinfeld calendar).

Feature suggestion (that is probably already in your pipeline): Add the ability for friends to join groups and do something together for 100 days and keep count of their friends who also keep on doing X for 100 days. If I just stumbled on this site, I would probably say "Cool" and then I would never come back bc I don't have anything right now that I would dedicate 100 days to. It seems like the tricky part for y'all will be to get people to realize that your platform is broad, but they are specific and they can find use in this platform right now.

Oh yeah, Congratulations on launching and good luck!

Thank you! We want this be a place where mistakes are okay, and hope to do the exact opposite of glorifying. I've personally tried to take lots of videos when I was feeling stress/down, because that part is usually so well hidden among startup founders. We encourage users to post their fail videos (there's videos of people falling off unicycles, for example).

I think this. https://giveit100.com/advertise

>> it glorifies someone showing off what they are doing.

Yes. You, Sir, are EXACTLY Right. I think it's called Narcissism, and there's plenty of that going around with this Generation obsessed with Instagram (taking #selfies and posting it for the whole world to see), Facebook (showing off how awesome their fake life is) etc.

How about if you get a real life of your own instead of worrying about others fake lives?

I believe the concept is called live and let live.

Or ... it could simply be journaling in public. Gasp someone might learn from something you're doing?

I love everything about this. It was fun watching your videos and how far you progressed over the 100 days. Even more fun to see that made the last video about the post right here on HN.

Okay, I just went to your front page and as soon as I saw your subway shot, I remembered your dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w. Nicely done!

Congrats!

That was the first thought I had. "She looks familiar" check the front page and instantly knew who it was.

I love this idea and the implementation is pretty slick. Hope the exposure from the dance video helps push this along. Best of luck.

BTW I would sign up, but I won't do it via facebook or twitter. If you add a normal email password I will be in.

Thanks Michael! Glad you liked it.

Thank you Michael!

Since this does seem to have roots in the Seinfeld calendar methodology, are there plans to have a before/after of the 100 days? It would probably be more quantifiable and inspirational to see the ends as well as the spectrum.

This will be a great social and personal tool for keeping people (hopefully myself) more accountable for my commitment to learn. Wonderful work.

Finbarr's co-founder here. I personally love the Seinfeld method and use Lift to help with that. We want to make videos of before/after, but with the whole journey. We've made a video of one of our users, who is re-learning how to walk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHSMUq0bDLg

This is fantastic! Such a good idea, and a very clever way to launch it. As I was browsing through the videos (very intuitive interface), I was wondering why I hadn't heard of this "giveit100" site before. Hit me midway through that these were videos of you developing the site I was looking at, and by then I was already on board.

A few things:

* There were details in some of the videos that I wish I could've full-screened to see, but I don't know of a good way to do that from a UX perspective. Keeping video transition delay to a minimum I think would be key.

* This method of auto-playing videos onmouseover is brilliant. Good job Finbarr.

* I think at its core, this is a video Seinfeld calendar. I want to feel some kind of social pressure for skipping a day.

Again, great job, and congrats on the launch! It looks like you had an excellent time making it.

I love the concept, and I dig the "no-click" style of watching. Makes for a very nice UX.

I hope there can be some good stories that come from it.. but what happens if someone starts being inconsistent with their project? I wonder how many people will fully complete the 100 days

Thanks for checking it out. Missing days is fine, in fact lots of people have gaps. We've only been running the project for a few months and already have a few people who have reached 100 days. Lots more are fast approaching.

Yeah, we really hope more people start documenting their startups in this way. So often you only see the techcrunch articles and shiny IPOs, I'd like to see more of the struggles.

Any chance I can use this with OpenId or sign up for an individual account some time soon? I really hate using my social accounts to sign in. I know it's probably super low priority.

I think it's a pretty neat idea :)

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Totally understand and will definitely implement an alternative soon. Thanks for the feedback.

I love the hover to play video! Simplicity of a gif without the horrible loading of everything at once.

Small heads up: many of the avatars are not loading on the front page.

Good luck!

Thanks! Yea AFAIK twitter doesn't provide a uniform endpoint anymore just for retrieving profile image url. I need to write a script that will periodically fetch the "fully hydrated" user and update the profile.

Unless there's another way...?

Mouseover video playback its kinda crappy when your scrolling, if your mouse cursor is crossing over several videos you just keep hearing too many random sounds. Also since everything is recorded at different volumes it makes my ears bleed.

Sorry the experience has been sub-par. What browser and OS are you using? It works best on Chrome and Safari and the scrolling is typically smooth in those environments.

I'm running chrome. Scrolling speed isn't the issue. When you have the mouse cursor on the page and you start scrolling down, if your cursor crosses through a video it will start playing. As you keep scrolling down you'll be moving in and out of videos causing less the a second of playback to occur.

Now since these videos are user generated they are all recorded with various levels of quality. If your mouse moving through ones that are poorly recorded that split second of playback sounds horrible.

You can simulate the effect if you visit https://giveit100.com/@Benjamin and goto the day 18. If your move your mouse past it you'll hear some really bad static for a split second. Now imagine if all the videos are like that while scrolling down the page, it's a pretty horrible experience.

Ok got it. Thanks for the feedback. I think I can probably do something to prevent playback triggered by scroll events.

It looks pretty weird on Safari - "html5: Video file not found" on all videos.

Hmm that's really weird - sorry about that. What version of Safari and OSX are you using?

I have Safari Version 7.0 (9537.71) on Mavericks. I don't think I have strange config/filters...

I'm getting the same issue on Chromium 28.0.1500.71 on Ubuntu 12.04.

btw Safari version 7.0 (9537.71) on Maverick works perfectly for me

I love this idea so much and you two really owned those clips! It's so rare to get a glimpse of how a startup went from day 1 to day 100 on this level. And it looks like you had fun! :)

Thank you!

It's like you took all the best parts of Evr.st, but stripped away all the pretentious bullshit because you're genuinely into the idea.

So yeah. It's awesome. Congrats!

I think this is a great idea. However, I'd like to see a follow up. I'd like to see how they do in their first year, first 5 years, etc. Wish them luck!

One critique of your site design, I don't know if it's just me, but infinite scrolling can be frustrating. I was trying to get to the "About" section in the footer but it kept running away from me.

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/03/infinite-scr...

Ah yes, I meant to remove the footer from the pages with infinite scroll - sorry about that and thanks for reminding me!

Such a cool idea, congrats on your early traction. It reminds me of that video I recently saw of the dude who filmed a few seconds of each day for xdays.

Thankyou! Yea I've seen a few things like that recently. One other interesting one is the 1 second every day app[1].

[1] http://1secondeveryday.com/

Thanks for sharing

Well, to say everything I was sceptic. Then I saw your video of you learning to dance - you should definitely look at that if you didn't already. After one year your progresses are absolutely awesome. That's what worked for me with the video and what might worked too with giveit100: see people starting from scratch and then become awesome into something. Good luck, that's pretty cool.

Very cool idea. I would change the functionality of the commenting system. I'd like to see the comments on the same page as all the videos, rather than clicking through to a new page. I think it would have the nice side-effect of more engagement with the comments. They're also not super obvious at first as I found myself looking around for a comment button of some sort.

Small bit of feedback: If the browser window is big enough to not have to scroll on the first load, the infinite scroll doesn't kick in at all. I looked around for a solid minute trying to find a "next" button. Came back here and saw an "infinite scroll" comment, resized my browser, and loaded again. which solved it for me.

Other than that, very cool!

That was the only thing I came back to comment about. I wanted to keep browsing and couldn't figure out how until I resized the window and infinite scroll kicked in.

I think this is an awesome idea, grats on launching!

Ah no way - good catch! I'll code up a fix - thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Any infrastructure or implementation details for HN userbase? Like where do you store videos (S3?), approximate costs, etc...

I like this idea. I started around week ago, recording short movies (5-20 sec) from every day of work on my latest project. It help me stay focus. That's why I think your app may help people like me to record their projects. But I won't create account because I won't login with Twitter/Facebook...

I love the idea, the design is simple and it's really nice to go through the videos of people, really inspiring!

The @ in the url kills twitter's url shortener (on OSX desktop app) when deep-linking to a specific day…

Alright I managed to fix this. Had to write some pretty dirty route hacks in rails to get around the problem, but such is life.

Oh that sucks, will need to look into that - thanks for bringing it to my attention.

The videos loading all at once crashed my ubuntu computer with the newest version of firefox :/

It also totally bogged down my subpar internet connection since I would hover over a video to check it out, then scroll down, but the video would still be loading.

This is cute, but I don't understand how it's going to make money.

I don't know what they're thinking, but in general with an aspirational product like this I don't think it should be too hard. They could very easily market classes, books, all kinds of stuff to their users to help them reach their goals.

... as opposed to something like Facebook or Twitter, where people are mostly just looking for entertainment or inf0. To me the monetizeability here is a lot easier to trust.

How could you, you've just peeped it for a minute, you don't know anything about what they're thinking!

Good job Finbar+crew. :)

That's awesome! :D

This is awesome and I love the idea. I tend to document what I am working on, dating sketches looking back at old projects. This is perfect. Thanks.

Awesome - hope to see you on the site soon!

Grattis Finbarr!

/Steven from Videoplaza

Tack Steven! :-)

Great idea!

What do you think about the possibility to have several projects for the same account?

Good luck

Congrats on the launch guys, looking great! Hope that we see you in this YC batch!

This is AWESOME!Good hacking

Thanks! It has been a blast.

I'd like a RSS feed of people I follow :D

How did you seed the site with so many videos?

I got a bunch of emails from people who had seen my dance video, and invited them to do the 100-day challenge. The earliest version of 100 was people sharing videos with us via dropbox folders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w

Classic case of increasing your luck surface area http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...

Oh hey, you could've used http://dbinbox.com :D

We've been running a private beta for a few months. Some of our users have already finished 100 days.

Mouseover playing videos. Not cool man.

Why is this generation so obsessed with "documenting" everything instead of actually "doing"?

STOP Documenting. START DO-ing!

I like how Shaun Inman describes some of the benefits of journaling in "Lift Off. The Last Rocket Development Diary". He wrote, “By documenting your creative process regularly, you can identify patterns that make you appreciate the too infrequent peaks, help avoid the pits and hopefully make future creative climbs a little less daunting.”

There are things to learn from an accounting of history. A development journal is among the most personal of histories (not personal as in "private", but personal as in "relates to my daily life"). If you're not going to study your own history, one may ask why study any history at all?

We totally agree. We're all about doing. Check out some of the things people are doing on 100[1]

[1]: https://giveit100.com/projects

Wow, you made a new account just for this?

I think what Give It 100 does is that they take away a lot of the overhead from documenting so that you can focus more on the doing. Like, it lets you be publicly accountable for your progress in a simple and enjoyable way, without needing like... a youtube account?

Thanks! We want to make a native mobile app so it's even easier to upload. Right now it's clunkier than we'd like (especially through web)

Recording, editing and posting the video takes as much (if not more time) than the activity. No?

Did you even watch any of the videos? They're like 10 seconds and not edited. If you're not spending more than 10 seconds on your actual activity... I... don't even.

Well I think you are missing the point, no? This website is exactly that, DO. And I like the idea of forcing yourself to post a video every day, it kind of obliges you to actually DO as you say :)

No. You are missing the point. I can see people signing up to DO, say, Learning to Play Ocarina -- https://giveit100.com/@LylyB -- and then OBSESSING with making the Giveit100 Video for the day more than actually LEARNING to Play by DO-ing!

But you have to do it to document it, so I don't really get what you're saying.

Seriously, you created an account just to flame someone else?

What if I told you that documenting your progress actually motivates some to keep going, to do more?

Why is your generation so obsessed with "complaining" instead of actually "doing"?

Are you serious? I come from a Generation that fought for the Freedom your generation takes for granted. We never complained or showed off to everyone how "awesome" we were. We just "DID". Silently, quietly and without any expectation of fame or fortune.

And then you complained – silently, quietly, without any expectation of fame or fortune.

Confirmation bias much?

Those that are 'DO-ing' and aren't documenting, you don't see.

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