mehmet_mhy

After 2+ years and 17k+ unique visitors, we're open-sourcing Notify Cyber.

In early 2023, Dylan Eck and I (Mehmet Yilmaz) built Notify Cyber because we were frustrated wading through fragmented cybersecurity news sources. We built a platform that aggregated news from 7+ sources, cleaned the data, summarized articles using OpenAI's API, and presented everything in a clean, searchable interface.

The launch was humbling. We launched in June 2023 with almost zero daily visitors. We spent the first two weeks doing Twitter marketing but got zero new users. Dylan and I were discouraged and we were going to can the project but as a last resort, we decided to make one final push on Reddit.

After days of back and forth, Dylan got a single post approved on and posted on r/cybersecurity. And within 3 days, we had 8k+ visitors and 100+ people on our waitlist. That post eventually hit 65k+ views with a 96% upvote rate.

Over two years, we grew to 17k+ unique visitors and 43,000+ page views, all through organic growth. We also increased the waitlist count to 160+ within that time range. We even optimized ruthlessly, reducing monthly costs from $38+ to just $1.85 by partly hosting key services of the site on a Raspberry Pi in my home.

We proved there was real demand for what we built, but we couldn't crack monetization or find a real business model. More importantly, both Dylan and I reached a point where the opportunity cost became too high. On October 5, 2025, we decided to retire the platform and open-source the entire codebase.

What we learned through this was that timing and distribution matter. The MVP can be scrappy, but execution must be clean. Build what you enjoy solving. Real demand doesn't always translate to a valid business model. And there's dignity in retiring/pivoting a project.

As for what's next... I'm currently focusing on solving some interesting problems at Charter and I've got some exciting projects on the horizon. But until then, I want to close this chapter with Notify Cyber. It has shown me a glance of what product-market fit looks like and how you don't need that funding and fancy marketing to make an impactful project/product. Bootstrapping might be the way for most software based products and I am carrying that lesson forward into everything else I build moving forward.

If you're building something, don't be afraid to fail publicly. Keep shooting, iterate fast, pivot as needed, and know when to close one chapter so you can start the next one better.

Special thanks to Dylan Eck for driving the frontend and our Reddit success.

Links:

- GitHub Repo: https://github.com/eandf/notify-cyber

- Archived Site: https://www.notifycyber.com/

- The Reddit Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/13xpg3k/my_f...

Hi HN,

I built Ch to bring AI directly into the terminal, offering fast, lightweight functionality that remains fully under user control. Most AI tools feel detached from developer workflows, but Ch is designed to integrate seamlessly, with no hidden automation or costs.

Vision:

Ch aims to keep AI interactions explicit, transparent, and user-driven, empowering developers to use LLM capabilities without leaving the terminal or surrendering control.

Highlights:

- Single Go binary: Starts instantly, streams responses in real time.

- Multi-provider support: OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, xAI, Mistral, Together, DeepSeek, and Ollama.

- File + web input: Load PDFs, DOCX, images (OCR), scrape URLs, or analyze YouTube content.

- Unix-style integration: Pipe command outputs or files directly; colors auto-suppressed for clean pipelines.

- Developer-focused: Record shell sessions as context, export code snippets, integrate with editors or other AI CLIs.

- Transparent & explicit: No background actions or silent model switches.

Install in one line:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MehmetMHY/ch/main/install.... | bash

Links:

- GitHub: https://github.com/MehmetMHY/ch

- Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH0xG1iStf4

- Website: https://mehmetmhy.github.io/ch

I'd love feedback on the UX design, supported platforms, and ideas for new enhancements and features. Thank you for reading and I'm happy to answer any questions!

Best regards,

Mehmet Yilmaz

After years as a developer for both startups and large tech companies, as well as recently founding my own startup, I’ve spent a lot of time digging into where real software value is moving as AI transforms the industry. Based on my experience and market research, I drafted what I call the Barbell of Software Value theory.

In short: Software value is concentrating at two ends—platforms and primitives (clouds, models, foundational dev tools) and private or internal systems built solely for a single large company. The middle generic horizontal SaaS is being squeezed out by AI-driven feature parity and vendor consolidation. Only highly vertical, deeply integrated SaaS with undeniable ROI survives. Everything else is getting commoditized or brought in-house.

I’d love to hear how others on HN are approaching this. If you’re building or investing, are you focused on platform, vertical SaaS, or internal leverage? Curious to get your perspectives.

This looks awesome. I like how clean it looks. I made something similar called Cha (https://github.com/MehmetMHY/cha) that supports image generation, answer search, and web scrapping.

Also, there probably won't be another update on Cha. I've decided to focus on other projects, because Cha has all the essential features it needs for the foreseeable future. Of course, if there's demand, I'll happily add new features. But for now, I will just maintain Cha. Thank you all for reading and I hope you all have a great day.

To make Cha more seamless, I created the following command in my .zshrc:

chatgpt () { DEFAULT_MODEL="gpt-4-turbo-preview"

    # path to your OpenAI API key
    source /Users/mehmet/.custom/.env

    if [[ "$1" == "-f" && -n "$2" ]]; then
        cha -m $DEFAULT_MODEL -f "$2"
    elif [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
        cha --model $DEFAULT_MODEL
    else
        cha -m $DEFAULT_MODEL -s "$1"
    fi

    unset OPENAI_API_KEY
}

What sub-reddits were analyzed in this dataset?

This really has changed how I read Hacker News. Most of the time I just read the title but these summaries are significantly better at getting an overview of the article.

On another note, I also made something similar but for cybersecurity news. It’s called Notify-Cyber, you can check it out here: https://notifycyber.com/

Nice! I use this app all the time. Though it is simple, I find this app essential!

This is great!

Nice! I love the frontend design, it’s simple and feels like a newspaper. Also, I made something similar but just for cybersecurity news. You can check it out here: https://notifycyber.com/

This is awesome!

This is amazing! I made something similar to this but this is way more polished. I found tools like this really useful because it helps prevents you from getting click baited.

This looks amazing! I can definitely see myself using this if I were traveling since I am bad at planning trips. But I have some questions: Is the database used by Tripnotes regularly updated? And if so, what source(s) does it use to get updates on when, let's say, a restaurant shuts down, relocates, changes something on their menu, etc?