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stephenou

78 karma · joined July 31, 2010

Just a dev who likes building things.

http://twitter.com/stephenou http://stephenou.com

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stephenou··on Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?
Fruition (https://fruitionsite.com) - Build your next website or blog with Notion, for free. Notion has taken over the tech/design industry by a storm, and many people have used it to create web pages. However, Notion doesn’t allow custom domain and the page URL contains a long uuid (for example: https://www.notion.so/The-Beauty-of-Notion-4663b221fd154c07b...)

I built Fruition to solve exactly that. You can use a custom domain and add pretty URL slugs like https://fruitionsite.com/showcase. You can also add custom font and scripts like Google Analytics. It’s all free and open source.

I shared this on a couple of Notion communities a month ago, and 40000+ people have checked it out since. Hundreds of sites have been built with Notion and Fruition.

stephenou··on Ask HN: What’s your side project? (June 2020)
Fruition (https://fruitionsite.com) - Build your next website or blog with Notion, for free.

Notion has taken over the tech/design industry by a storm, and many people have used it to create web pages. However, Notion doesn’t allow custom domain and the page URL contains a long uuid (for example: https://www.notion.so/The-Beauty-of-Notion-4663b221fd154c07b...)

I built Fruition to solve exactly that. You can use a custom domain and add pretty URL slugs like https://fruitionsite.com/showcase. You can also add custom font and scripts like Google Analytics. It’s all free and open source.

I shared this on a couple of Notion communities a month ago, and 30000 people have checked it out since. Hundreds of sites have been built with Notion and Fruition.

stephenou··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Late to the party but still want to share!

I created https://fruitionsite.com, a free, open source toolkit for building websites with Notion. You get pretty URL slugs, custom domain, and a whole bunch of other features.

I hacked it together in a weekend, put up the marketing site (using Fruition, oh so meta) and shared it in Notion's Facebook group and subreddit, without any expectations that it would go anywhere.

The response has been incredible. 11000 people have checked it out since. It ended up on the Product Hunt newsletter [1]. People are making YouTube videos [2] about it. Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks [3] shared it too.

The biggest lesson for me was just launch it. There were many more things I wanted to add. But I decided to share it publicly before it was perfect. Now I have users who can give me real feedback rather than me pretending I know what people want.

[1] https://www.producthunt.com/newsletter/4717

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw0x54PzCaI

[3] https://css-tricks.com/notion-powered-websites/

stephenou··on Ask HN: What are your side projects?
http://NeedNumbers.me - a weekend project I did before school starts. It solves one simple problem of having to manually type in names and numbers after you asked for contacts on Facebook.
stephenou··on Show HN: NeedNumbers.me, import contacts from "New Phone, Need #s" FB groups
OP here.

Many said this isn't wide-used anymore. But as a high school student, I still get invited to those groups/events frequently, and people said they've been waiting for something like this for a long time. So there is still a big market here.

Glad I could contribute my little bit to make this process a lot faster. Well worth making this as my 5-hour side project.

stephenou··on Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code
I think this is going to be an interesting experiment:

I am going to test how many students at our high school can get interested in programming after trying out Codecedemy.

stephenou··on Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code
I first thought this is going to be another site with a bunch of long tutorials.

But I was wrong. My instinct tells me this can be the way to get wanna-be young coders excited about programming. Reason being is teenagers/young adults can feel like they are actually talking to a person, not a machine.

(I am the programmer of 5 websites/apps/plugins and a high school sophomore.)

stephenou··on Ask HN: How many users/customers do you have?
We just crossed 100+ customers this week, including few well-known bloggers. http://artsyeditor.com

What is Artsy Editor for? Writers that wants to do their jobs faster.

stephenou··on Ask HN: Best process to validate idea and feature-set before MVP?
Just go to your contacts, email them one by one with personalized message, or utilize any connections you have on Facebook or Twitter.

You might find my idea validating blog post relevant: http://artsyeditor.com/2011/04/how-did-i-get-38-willing-to-p...

stephenou··on Ask HN: I have a startup idea! What do I do next?
You might find my relevant blog post helpful: http://artsyeditor.com/2011/04/how-did-i-get-38-willing-to-p...

I had the idea of Artsy Editor a month ago, and decided to find customers instead of jumping into code.

stephenou··on How did I get 38 willing-to-pay customers before writing code?
Hi, Stephen here. I wrote the post.

Yes, I'm currently working on it and I'll keep everyone on HN with my progress.

Meanwhile, you can also join the mailing list: http://artsyeditor.com

stephenou··on How did I get 38 willing-to-pay customers before writing code?
Thank you. I found sharing my own experience can help consolidate what I've learned.
stephenou··on How did I get 38 willing-to-pay customers before writing code?
Sorry, didn't expect this much of traffic. WP Super Cache turned on. Should be fine now!
stephenou··on Forrst Gets Seeded With $200,000
It is 10% of forrst.me accounts that cost $9/month, not forrst.com accounts.

Forrst.me can serve as the central place of your online profiles, but not everyone on Forrst have a forrst.me portfolio.

stephenou··on Ask HN: Is Your Webapp in an App Store?
It is not 100% related but I have a premium whiteboard application on Chrome Web Store for $3.99. The volume is relatively small in comparison to folks at Apple App Store, I assume it's because many people barely know about Chrome Web Store yet. My sales figures: http://ohboard.com/blog/10-sales-in-2-weeks/

Though, I suggest you adding your web app to Chrome Web Store since it will not take you more than few hours and it will bring you users straight.

stephenou··on Ask HN: What are best ways to determine a pricing strategy?
Determine how much value does your product delivers to the customers. Let's say if it saves them $500/month, you can easily charge/they will happily pay at least $100/month.

Regarding what type of plan, you should think about what do your customer demographic look like. If they are same type of people with same type of needs, give them one price. I tend to support one-price only, because that reduces troubles like different settings on the backend, have customers to decide, and communicate the differences clearly, etc.

stephenou··on $100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success
Are there any apps that aren't featured get as many sales as the featured ones? Can any apps be considered "success" without Apple's promotion?

I found it interesting that almost all App Store success stories mentioned their sales went up when the app was featured by Apple, which indirectly makes me time that getting Apple's attention is the #1 priority for an app developer.

stephenou··on Why Your Form Buttons Should Never Say 'Submit'
I noticed http://news.ycombinator.com/submit said submit on the button too.
stephenou··on Ask HN: Are you a solo creator?
http://ohboard.com It is a little Chrome whiteboarding app that I sell for $3.99. Being a solo creator, I really enjoying numbers without pressure: http://ohboard.com/blog/10-sales-in-2-weeks/
stephenou··on Ask HN: SaaS Pricing Model? Plans or charge per user
It will give you maximum profit if you charge both a base price for each month and certain amount for each user.
stephenou··on Ask HN: Web content over the phone?
It will be fantastic if it can read my Instapaper articles. I think it can be totally possible since Marco Arment is launching his full-access API this month.
stephenou··on Show HN: Taketake Pre-Launch
I think it definitely has potential, at least from my curiosity, I want to know what my friends want to buy. Though my only concern is the lack of content at the beginning, we can't really get much information about different products if not that many people are participating.

By the way, fantastic video. Might to share what you used to create it?

stephenou··on Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in a search engine specifically for code?
I'd really love Google to accept characters like < or } in their normal search query. Makes it convenient for code snippet search.
stephenou··on Ask HN: Finding projects
If you are interested, I can hand you an invite to http://forrst.com. It's a community for developers and designers to share ideas/screenshots/code/questions, which can potentially let you meet other folks and start projects together.

Email: me@stephenou.com

stephenou··on KhanApp - Mobile App for Khan Academy
I've not seen that many apps that utilize jQuery Mobile so far, but your implementation is pretty wonderful - I only need 2 taps to get to the actual video.
stephenou··on Happy New Year Hacker News, what are your plans for 2011?
I am on my path to get better on the business aspect of an app, I've been focusing too much on designing and developing on my previous projects. So for my just-launched whiteboarding Chrome Web App, OhBoard (http://ohboard.com), I am going to learn as much as I can about business by experimenting different approaches.
stephenou··on Ask HN: Who launched something in December?
http://ohboard.com - Basically, a piece of whiteboard, but for Google Chrome.

It is my attempt to learn more about the business aspect because I've been developing stuff but barely handles serious business matter. So I am trying to get better and better on marketing, promotion, customer service, etc.

stephenou··on Ask HN: Inspirational Books
Rework

Getting Real

Delivering Happiness

4-Hour Workweek

stephenou··on Ask HN: awesome web-based documentation?
CodeIgniter: http://codeigniter.com/user_guide

The interface is really simplistic which allows me to read the documentation a lot longer than other site (ex. php.net). Also, it's very well-organized and completed, I can go there every time I have a question about the framework and don't need to Google much.

stephenou··on Ask HN: How much did you spend on Design of v1?
I'm curious to hear what your definition is of a good looking and well-designed website/app.

In my mind, a well-designed website is simply something that delivers functionality in an unobstructive way. What's wrong about the 4 websites listed above?

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