Ask HN: Those starting new side projects in 2018 – Show and tell
48 points by crack-the-code 7 years ago | 59 comments- ezekg 7 years agoAlpaca My Bags - Travel website for pre-planned weekend vacations
https://travelalpacamybags.com
Been working on it on and off for about 6 months with my wife (I'm behind the tech, she's doing the trip planning/social media stuff). We're looking to officially launch within the next few weeks. We're starting out in the 2 person vacation niche, but looking to expand to other trip sizes and also to trips outside of the US later this year after launch. This will be my first B2C business, so excited for a little change of pace.
- Nilef 7 years agoLook at LuckyTrip - Similar thing but afaik only in the Europe market
- Chloro 7 years agoThis looks awesome! I would love to do something like this with my wife. I would be very interested to see how it works out for you after launch.
- ezekg 7 years agoAppreciate it! Hoping to launch soon. I'll post a followup on HN after our official launch.
- ezekg 7 years ago
- wingerlang 7 years agoThe website is very cool!
At the same time it looks very cookie cutter "2017 white diagonal popping colors". If that makes sense.
Still A+
- ezekg 7 years agoYeah, agreed--the website was a quick and dirty landing page I threw together so we could start marketing. Grabbed lots of code from other side projects that are more tech-focused, so that's why it looks that way. The full webapp we'll be releasing looks a lot more polished!
- ezekg 7 years ago
- to-too-two 7 years agoLooks neat! What's your dev stack for the project?
- ezekg 7 years agoIt's written in node using express and postgres, plus a bit of redis for a caching layer, and some background job processing using node-cron.
- ezekg 7 years ago
- Nilef 7 years ago
- longnguyen 7 years agoI'm building `react-qml` [1], a build-tool (and Qt plugin) to help you build native app (desktop/iOS/Android - any platform Qt supports) using JavaScript and React. It's not quite ready to use in production yet but I hope to have a beta release in the next few months. Here is what it offers:
- UI development in Javascript, using either custom React components or React-wrapped .qml components. You can use almost all of your beloved front-end library (react-redux, redux, redux-obserable, lodash etc.)
- Hot reload support! So no more `build/rebuild` in QtCreator (you still need to rebuild for C++ native components)
- Supports JS tools out of the box (React DevTools, Redux DevTools...)
- Use any programming languages to develop backend as long as it has binding with Qt (ie go-qml[2], qml-rust[3] etc.)
[1]: https://github.com/longseespace/react-qml
- leonagano 7 years agoI decided to build https://maximiseyourannualleave.co.uk that is helping friends to plan 2018 annual leave in the UK. I was inspired after reading an article that says if you book 14 days of your annual leave, you'll get 25 days in a row
- vinrob92 7 years agoManypixels - Unlimited premium design services for startups from $159/month (100% money back guarantee)
I started this in December 2017 as a side project but given its success it has now turned into almost a full-time job.
- jchung 7 years agoHow do the economics work out for the clients? let's say we're just doing landing pages all month long (for example). If they turnaround in two days, that's about fifteen landing pages, which at $160 for the month comes out to about $11 each. Obviously this is a contrived and unrealistic example, but am I getting the math right?
I guess this is unlimited the way my data plan is unlimited: with rate capping?
- vinrob92 7 years agoThanks for the interest!
Turnaround is 1 to 3 working days depending on complexity of the landing page. So you can expect 7 to 20 landing pages per month. If you want to complete a full website with the same design guidelines that might be done quicker (for example if you want a Home, Pricing, About us page, this will be done much quicker than doing 3 different homepages). We also often have clients requesting us to work on separate design styles in parallel (they can decide to pick the landing page they love the most).
Here is a work in progress we're currently doing for a popular SaaS (like Buffer) so you can gauge the quality of our work: https://invis.io/ZXF811CP2
- vinrob92 7 years ago
- crack-the-code 7 years agoSounds like a powerful service. What have you done to market it and find customers?
- vinrob92 7 years agoThanks! Right now -- only direct sales via niche Facebook groups (SaaS lifetime discounts is an example), which was a great way to understand if our value proposition was interesting for our target market. This resulted in about ~$5k MRR.
We also did a little bit of content marketing (Reddit, Indiehackers) which resulted in ~$2k MRR. We should normally hit $10k MRR and will launch a v2 of the site pretty site (right now it is just a landing page that I created in 5 hours to launch ASAP & let the market decide if our productized service was worth it!)
- vinrob92 7 years ago
- jchung 7 years ago
- brogrammer2019 7 years agoConverted Stack Overflow Documentation into free PDF books
- ahamedirshad123 7 years agoAwesome, man. Keep up the good work!
- brogrammer2019 7 years agoThanks ahamedirshad123!
- ahamedirshad123 7 years agoNO documentation for react?
- brogrammer2019 7 years agoHi ahamedirshad123, yes there is documentation for react :D
- brogrammer2019 7 years ago
- brogrammer2019 7 years ago
- jackaroe78 7 years agoNice work!
- brogrammer2019 7 years agoThanks jackaroe78 :)
- brogrammer2019 7 years ago
- ahamedirshad123 7 years ago
- d_runs_far 7 years agoNot for income, but for learning and to scratch my own itch. Finally picked up a raspberry pi and a USB ANT+ reader to pair with my heart rate monitor chest strap. I've had an old 26" LCD TV in our home gym that I will use as the display for the pi. Goal is to create a simple workout timer that also tracks heart rate and logs everything to a local db. My goals out of this are: - learn some python - do some hardware hacking (it's been way too long since I wrote control codes for RS-232 controlled video equipment in the 90's) - will probably do some image analysis down the road to do things like stride count on my treadmill, count reps in the squat rack - still mapping out the long term.
Next steps are to finish the plan for the mvp and then continue messing around. I also need to figure out the best input device for while in the gym and being quite sweaty; something wireless and somewhat rugged.
- fiftyacorn 7 years agoI had a project a few years back to connect my indoor bike trainer to google streetview -
https://dzone.com/articles/virtually-cycling-the-alps-with-a...
I ended up using the ant+ dongle and connected straight to my laptop. Using the GPL code from GoldenCheetah for the handshakes -
https://code.google.com/archive/p/routeviewer-antplus-bike-c...
It was a nice project but refresh rates were too slow - i should have built trainerroad!
I keep thinking about doing the same with rasp pi and retropi, then use hr, or speed to control a game. but dont have time at the moment
- fiftyacorn 7 years ago
- patwalls 7 years agoI'm building an Indie Hackers style website geared towards e-commerce and consumer product makers.
Appreciate any feedback :)
- sabarasaba 7 years agojson-menu, converts a json endpoint into a electron-dashboard for your mac.
Launched it a few days ago and already made me a few bucks.
- MattPearce 7 years agoI really like this - is the price being hidden behind the "Buy License" button a deliberate design decision? I feel the price is low enough that having it shown upfront would encourage me to buy it, so interested in your thinking.
- MattPearce 7 years ago
- mattbgates 7 years agoI did release my side projects at the end of 2017, but these are ever-evolving projects, so I am posting it here to show and tell for 2018 as well.
https://callmeprivate.com - great for entrepreneurs, startups, and businesses; masks your real phone number behind a virtual number with incoming and outgoing call functionality.
https://textmeprivate.com - same as above, but SMS-virtual numbers only.
I've since built a feature so you can now use the same virtual number on both services.
Since release about a month ago, I've had over 50 signups, about 5 paying customers, and a company in China just recently contacted me and wanted to purchase numbers from Text Me Private in bulk, in order to receive confirmations from various websites, but were unable to do purchase numbers, as I hadn't taken into consideration that when I released these products into the wild, that they would make it all the way to China in just a month. China doesn't use the traditional credit card system. So I've agreed to build it in if they could give me a few days to do so.
Never know.... something you create could end up around the world... and more importantly, could be very valuable to a company in another country.
- rwieruch 7 years ago2017 was full of web development with JavaScript and React for me [0]. It was time to peak into another subject. That's why I started to learn about machine learning in the last months of 2017 and want to continue this endeavour in 2018. My desire is to spread the knowledge for web developers and JavaScript enthusiasts [1]. Maybe I can give people coming from web development the opportunity to hop on the machine learning train by using JavaScript instead of having to learn another programming language (Python) for it. At the moment, I learn ML myself by implementing the learned things in JavaScript [2].
- [0] https://roadtoreact.com
- [1] https://bri.im
- ISNIT 7 years agoThis year I'm committed to launching 12 projects in 12 months. For January, I took a couple of days out and built API Console
NOTE: the website was "heavily inspired by" (copied from) ZeroNet.io - I built the whole thing in 2 days, didn't have time to make my own.
The aim is to have it making some money, but I'd really appreciate any feedback on the copy, pitching, etc. Copy is NOT my strong point (though I'm learning).
Any feedback is welcome, but I'd primarily appreciate the following: - Framing/Pitching of the product - Copy - Product/idea itself - Should I continue developing it before I get email addresses?
- jozi9 7 years agoMine is a REST API monitoring service - because I needed one!
Going to rework the landing page a bit to make it more benefit/monitoring oriented, I don’t think ‘testing’ is compelling enough as a keyword.
- mahesh_rm 7 years agoThat's an awesome service: the landing page works just perfect in conveying what it is. I would suggest (my 2 cents) try to focus on marketing to get the tool out there instead!
- mahesh_rm 7 years ago
- hakanderyal 7 years agoAfter working in B2B space for the last several years, I will be releasing 2 consumer focused apps this year. Planned initial release date for both it Q2 2018.
- Want My Body Back (wantmybodyback.com - not released yet) Nutrition and exercise tracking app, with motivational resources and social features, for people who want to get in shape and have a healthy lifestyle.
- Doer's Camp (doerscamp.com - not released yet) Personal development app. Habit tracking, goal tracking, quantified self tools, with motivational resources and social features.
- jwho82 7 years agohttps://blog-planner.com - A very very simple tool to help me write blog articles. You can break the article down into topics. Also wanted to play with Symfony 4, try out Webpack, and test some better continuous integration.
logmyproperties.com - Empty atm. Going to be some kind of simple property management tool, to help me manage my rental property, track expenses and create reports for taxes.
- buliam 7 years agoI'm working on http://madewithreactnative.com where I showcase apps made with React Native and interview developers and teams who have gone down that road about their experience.
I want to expand to also include interviews with developers who have made tools and libraries FOR React Native.
If you're interested in doing an interview, I'd be happy to talk to you.
- campingalert 7 years agoI am building https://www.leads-daily.com so freelancers can focus on their professional work instead of finding clients.
- tuacker 7 years agoI've wanted a simple site to keep track of the TV shows I watch without any fuss. Just a list of (new) episodes. So I made it.
I've put it online a few days ago but didn't do any 'launch' yet and I don't have the payment process implemented yet so feel free to use it for free until I get that done.
- wingerlang 7 years agoNice, looks similar in functionality as showRSS.com though.
- tuacker 7 years agoThanks! showRSS seems to link to torrents though, something which I don't want any part of (piracy).
- wingerlang 7 years agoFair enough
- wingerlang 7 years ago
- tuacker 7 years ago
- wingerlang 7 years ago
- manuisin 7 years agoEnd of last year released an experimental custom postcards web app: https://www.cardwhat.com. Currently about to release an update for it https://cards-nrhwdfdpsx.now.sh/.
Later in 2018, I want to extend this to a custom t-shirts app.
- lionpixel 7 years agoI like the website but on mobile safari (iOS 11) the headline on top of the 3D card is cut off. :)
- manuisin 7 years agoThank you! Will account for it in the next release
- manuisin 7 years ago
- to-too-two 7 years agoNeat idea. The website looks pretty good too.
- lionpixel 7 years ago
- methochris 7 years agoI'm making Keepshelf.com (not available at time of this writing), a side-project I've been off-and-on with for awhile now but I'll be launching this year.
Keepshelf is the note keeping/organizing app I've always wanted. Take notes with ease and copy/move into folders through a fast and convenient UI, instantly synced and accessible on all devises.
- protoduction 7 years agoI'm working on a side project that involves getting useful NN based networks working in a browser.
There's some demos which for instance will do class prediction (cat vs dog), but who needs that? I would love to see stuff like colorization working in a static webpage, at decent speeds (under 5 sec for a big image). It should also be easy enough that my mother could use it.
- fiftyacorn 7 years agoHadnt planned on a side project - but my son wanted to learn about computers. So we're connecting a rasp pi zero + camera up to the bird feeder to take photo's of birds, with a plan to post to instagram. So far no birds on feeder
Anyone able to advise on the easier way to run it off solar power?
- antonpenev 7 years agoBotFrog. Chatbots for several channels.
Automating support and marketing campaigns for multiple social media channels using easy to setup bots
Current stack: React, Express, Mongo. And we'll be happy for any feedback or subscriptions.
- longsangstan 7 years agoMade a dark web chat story app in react native.
Currently iOS only: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tormento/id1291133449
- AR6jSs1IVOtEOcg 7 years agoI saw that many Rust developers complained about not being able to find jobs so I'm building a job board specifically for Rust.
- desaiguddu 7 years agoI started working on App Fixers in late November.
Still iterating copy of the website & interacting with new customers.
We are growth & maintenance as a service for app owners.
- clementmiao 7 years agoI want to build a side project that involves exploring public city data and building a product/analysis based on that. Not sure where to start, if anyone has any idea of city problems to solve.
- Bumerang 7 years agoI'm building a tool to help people with their decision making via the well known pros/cons lists.
- Slaul 7 years agoI'm working on a web based fitness and nutrition tracker because I am not satisfied with the current offerings out there.
I'll be launching my mvp in the next month or two I hope!
- thecupisblue 7 years agoHey can you ping me when it's done? Would love to check it out
- Slaul 7 years agoFor sure! I appreciate the interest!
- Slaul 7 years ago
- thecupisblue 7 years ago
- kunqiana 7 years agoI been working on easyinfograph.com for a few months now. Plan on featuring it for product hunt when I am done with a few more features.
- 7 years ago
- swlkr 7 years agoOutsidelist - A list of the most inspirational outdoor places
- maheshs 7 years agoBuilding a quotation system for small business.