Akcium

Agree, you should keep balance here. Between something very competitive and something non-competitive at all.

Indeed!

This is exact statement I made in the article: if there is a competition, that means the idea is already validated for you.

So there is at least some demand

Yep, you should try anyway because if you dig deeper, you'll still find dozens or hundreds of more or less similar apps.

What can you do? Make them better, or at least try =)

Indeed, while monopoly prevents from improvement/bug fixes I think

Never heard about mom-and-pop store, but now I get what you mean.

My family literally has one, mom-and-pop store of radio receivers :)

Thank you!

I wouldn't agree that people choose products based on what their friends are using. At least for me it doesn't work.

While the second part is true, I agree.

It's really hard to overcome existing players, on the other hand there are some advantages: existing players are kind of slow in terms of changing (adding new features) and in terms of support.

Among these 170 alternatives, more than half of them were built in 2010 I guess, and they do not evolve.

Regarding paid ads. This year I was watching how other guys do with their side projects and I literally haven't seen anyone who tried paid ads. They did SEO though, but not google ads or something like that. Because they are good at reaching the right audience in the right place, I guess.

You mean, you were the therapist?

I'm okay with small products, like screenshot taking app.

The more responsibility I give to the product, the more solid background it should have.

For example, if I had a company with 100 devs, and I need a to-do app for them, I won't choose small indie hacker product.

However for myself, I use them: screenshot taking apps, gif making apps, etc.

Oh thank you so much, this is indeed cool feedback.

Now I'm considering having many options for hack detecting, screenshots/crawling etc.

Especially thanks for the imagemagick. When I researched for such libraries, I haven't found a lot of them, so it's treasure

Saw these lists multiple times.

For me maybe 1-5% of links worked, while other places are just typical blogs without traffic.

Still maybe worth though

Then I'll need to make some crawler, which is also not that easy to implement.

Maybe it's a good idea to have some kind of complex functionality, broken down to parts:

- screenshots - links - DNS - ...

so that user can enable/disable them as he needs too

You mean if there is links to external sources? Which is the purpose of hacking actually...

Then, how to tell users to include all links which are exceptions? Like, it maybe a link to some javascript library or something, and users will always need to update the list.

However checking for porn / malware domains is good too, not sure how to get these links database thought...

However comparing pictures can handle content changing as well I think

I was shocked when I that France had 80k cases... O_O

Oh thank you for such a good feedback.

Well, as a first step I thought that if we have a site with changing content, like a blog, then the area of blog posts occupies some percentage of the site. So we can correct the threshold, like, if the picture has changed more than 50% then alarm.

Regarding static sites: well yes, they are easy to protect, however I guess there are tons of sites on wordpress with 1-2 pages (like company site), which are in fact static but written in php and may use outdated plugin or something.

I'm somehow thrilled of this idea because I want to provide something new, while it's pretty hard :)

In the end it's kind of possible to do all this stuff like - Select areas which should be checked for changes - Select areas which shouldn't - As you said, text-basic machine learning, though it seems hard for me, but still - Plus, what I also like is Google Vision API which at least can detect adult content. This should be pretty universal, if you know that you shouldn't have this on any condition, even if you have dynamic content changing

Hmm..

If ads taking a big area, then the threshold can be bigger. Like, if more that 50% of site has changed, then notify you.

If ads showing a nudity or something, then it's not possible to avoid it.

However you just got me an idea! I can give user an ability to setup area of site which should be checked. Like, if the ads on the right side of page or something like that!

Thank you!

Turning down yet another productivity product :D

So funny

Is it a newsletter with funny gifs? If so then at least it's funny :)

I remember this guy!

Amazed by the his results. Personally I haven't read the book but some of my friends have and their review was pretty positive.

Spent the whole year working on https://pingr.io which is similar to yours :) Well, your is better for sure, you know your deal very well.

Added lifetime deal and posted here twice, barely got any customers sigh

But I still trying :)

YOU is inspiration for other solo founders

Thank you!

Indeed, it was a bug.

I work on this product every day, and bugs is like an alarm for me, these I try to fix ASAP.

Pricing was always a pain for me.

My excuse is that I include all features in all plans.

If you need to monitor 1 site and its SSL certificate it'll be 7$/mo for uptime robot. Or if you need to setup custom headers etc.

I take the pain away, like any feature is included and I'm going to constantly improve it.

But yeah, Uptimerobot is kind of big player on the market

Don't know if it's relevant but I spent almost a year on "zombie startup" and still is working on it.

I wrote about some techniques how to keep persistence for solo founders: https://medium.com/@victor.ponamariov/how-therapy-turned-out...

Thank you again. Will try a bit later :) Maybe I'll make two posts, one just a general post about how I did it, another one is Show HN.

It's interesting that everyone was telling me it's better to expose personal experience ("Show HN: I build something because something..") instead of what the project actually does ("Show HN: Uptime monitoring").

Anyway thank you for your kind response! :)

Not for now, they are expensive to maintain till I get some users

You're right, I agree.

However it's still Show HN section, and the product is still tech, so design is kind of nice addition

But I'm going to write an article about how did I make it too, maybe it'll be more interesting indeed

Well, I'm just curious why then it got hidden in Show HN section, since I definitely didn't try to spam with many posts. I waited for a week on purpose.

So is it okay if I post tomorrow for example? I'm just new to HN.

By the way I even tried to make a welcome comment, but I think that I'd need to get into technical details more.

Thought probably I'd make a separate article for this, not in show HN section.

Regarding "Show HN: Pingr – Know when your site is down before your customers do" - I asked a lot of people and they told me that it's way too promotional for HN :)

Anyway thank you for your answer!

Yeah, that's kind of my passion. At first I saw uptimerobot and really didn't like how it looks & feel, so this is why I decided to work on my side project. Wanted to make something like uptimerobot which looks better

Honestly I asked few people who were previously posting on HN and they said that it's alright to do this like once a week if it didn't get much attention.

I haven't found anything about this in the rules so I decided it's okay. Before posting, I checked out that my link already disappeared in Show HN section.

If it's not okay, could you tell me is it at all acceptable to post a link twice? I saw really quite a few guys who did it. Sorry if I'm wrong.

Hello everyone.

I’ve been developing this for quite a while, almost a year. Even though the idea is common, I started it because I just didn’t like how others services look.

It’s hard for me to find any USP for such tool, so I’m just keeping on fixing bugs & adding new stuff, and I’m trying to make it look good. I mean UI/UX side.

Right now I’m working on mobile version. Got almost 150 tasks in backlog...

Surprisingly the task of monitoring uptime turned out to be much harder than I thought! Looking for your feedback, suggestions, maybe some feature requests!

By the way it was a hard time for me, I've also posted here on HN an article of how I used therapy in order to cope with problems while I've been working on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091986