Hacker News Reader

sideprojecton Gail.com

ahh typo-squatting... it creates so many interesting stories.. I have a few products related to domain names [1][2] and in the past I knew some users who owned "none.com.au" (which is a typo for nine.com.au - one of Australia's TV channels) and "gail.com.au" (similar to gail, but with .com.au) - which all attracted pretty decent traffic without any effort. They had some pages with Google AdSense going.

I also knew this user, who had the same domain name as one of the more popular YouTube video downloading tool, but with ".net". He put up an adsense that attracted 8k clicks per day.

Internet is filled with these fascinating stories.

[1] https://www.newsy.co [2] https://www.domainy.io

sideprojecton Ask HN: Whats your ideal PhD workflow

On the tools side, saw this project the other day for annotating and collaborating on research papers. It's not live yet, but something like this would have been useful during my PhD days.

https://www.scholars.io

sideprojecton Show HN: Domainy – Monitor domain names for availability

Nice suggestions! Will add to our backlog!

sideprojecton Show HN: Domainy – Monitor domain names for availability

Yes via API.

sideprojecton Show HN: Domainy – Monitor domain names for availability

Clickable

https://www.domainy.io

sideprojecton Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

It's not really an exact Reddit-looking clone, but we built a tool called Newsy, which builds content aggregator like Reddit without code.

https://www.newsy.co

We focus on users with un-used domain names and try to spin up a news site like Reddit quickly with various features built in.

sideprojecton Postgres.app

Was just installing this on my fancy new M1 machine... the app itself worked fine, but I'm used to Laravel Homestead. Well, that didn't go so well. VirtualBox doesn't work on M1. Tried all sorts of combination to get Laravel, PHP, Postgres working well as a combo. In the end, it was a combination of MAMP, Postgres App and quite a few tweakings to get things in order.

sideprojecton Ask HN: How did you establish and maintain relationships with your first users?

Been working on Newsy for some time.

https://www.newsy.co

Newsy is a tool that converts your un-used domain names into a Reddit-like content aggregator. Allows you to make your domains useful rather than just sitting there.

We did an alpha launch through Betalist and had ~250 people sign-up. From there on, we emailed and talked to every single person who would reply to our message. That built pretty solid relationships which still last today.

Something surprising I realised was that people engaged more when I asked them about who they were (e.g. What do you do? What do you do for full time job?) and when they replied, I kept asking about their role, challenges. Sometimes I ask about where they are from, if they are ok from COVID. I was genuinely curious about those users as humans (how did you find my tool? What do you do on the other side of the world from me? Is it cold? Hot? etc etc).

sideprojecton Show HN: Latest news from over 100 countries in one single place

Thanks!! I'll look into it!

sideprojecton Show HN: Latest news from over 100 countries in one single place

Clickable

https://www.tello.app

sideprojecton Open Decision-Making (2014)

“Oh Concensus - The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?'” - Margaret Thatcher

sideprojecton Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain purchase

I use Domainy

https://www.domainy.io

to monitor interesting domains being expired and to also find interesting domains that are available.

twitter.accountant? what about twitter.beauty?

Domains are not exactly available when they expire, but this helps me to check if any of them become available.

sideprojecton Focus vs Coordination

Nicely captured and well thought out. As an engineering manager with 30 engineers in a 120-people company working on a social marketplace, our company requires an extraordinary amount of coordination, while engineers also need to focus.

I do feel like the post speaks quite a bit about extremes - focus, coordination, perfect, unproductive etc etc, while most of the teams sit somewhere in between trying to find that balance the author is referring to.

Also, the position of where they are changes on a daily basis depending on what work is being done and who is joining and who is leaving.

Wearing my engineer hat on, I'd love to, just get the requirements and tell everyone to go away while I focus on my work, but I also understand the whole coordination part. It's absolutely critical to making the team efficient & productive, which often go unnoticed and unappreciated.

sideprojecton Tiny Acquisitions

https://www.sideprojectors.com

Disclaimer : I run it. :)

sideprojecton Nacker Hews

Thank you for a good laugh. :)

sideprojecton Selling Tiny Internet Projects for Fun and Profit

I do see an increasing number of projects being posted on my little website too

https://www.sideprojectors.com

The original premise of SideProjectors was to buy and sell small indie projects. Over the years, I've seen many many of these small projects (often ecommerce shops, dropshipping businesses, but at times quite interesting ones too) being submitted.

As a side note (pun intended) - I've been also watching out for off-the-shelf template softwares that are being posted and making sure they are filtered out. As an example, you can buy a "Privacy respecting Google Analytics Alternative, launch your own SaaS" from themeforest for $49, repackaged and being sold in many places. Their pitches are usually similar.. "hey, I developed this, but haven't had time to do marketing, it has so much potential, just need someone to take over and start making that passive income".

sideprojecton Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

I had so many domain names being un-used and I hated all domain parking solutions, so I created a tool to build an automatic content aggregator. Of course along the way, I found people who had the same need.

https://www.newsy.co

sideprojecton How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

I worked in a small startup company (~20) with a horrible founder. As a lead, she would ask me why some people are taking their lunch time after 2pm. I didn't know how to answer. Our standup would last 45 minutes where she would interrogate each person. As a lead, I didn't have the guts to fix it. I stayed for a year. There are many things I should've done and I could've done. That was a truly toxic place.

sideprojecton How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

If only things were as easy as you stated. I don't mind the ideals, but for many, life realities are far from the ideals. And ideals remain just that for many.

sideprojecton Show HN: I made a Hacker News for the automotive industry

For anyone who are interested, I created a small project awhile ago called HelloBox to help those who want to create "HackerNews for XYZ".

https://www.hellobox.co

sideprojecton I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

For anyone who is going down the impulse-buying of many domains (me!) and then finding yourself having too many unused domains, I created a little tool to make use of those unused domains (and maybe even monetize them)

https://www.newsy.co

sideprojecton Show HN: Buy My Side Project

I run this one.

https://www.sideprojectors.com

sideprojecton Ask HN: What is your current side-project?

Building a tool to make use of un-used domain names.

https://www.newsy.co

I had about ~30 domain names which were not doing anything. I got tired of them. But I didn't want to spend time working on them.

So I built Newsy, which converts your domain name into a fully functional & automated content site. It finds niche contents and display them like Reddit.

Over the months, I've built membership, newsletters, comments, social sharing, widgets, RSS, API and even sending email using your domain name via GMail.

Finally, I've started to letting these domain names to monetize via adding your own ads.

Got any un-used domain names? Would love to hear your feedback!

sideprojecton Ask HN: How to get first 10 paying customers?

As a practical tip, I find posting on Betalist helpful. On average, I would say you will get around 100-300 sign-ups.

Out of those sign-ups, you may be able to convert ~20% to actually register for your product.

And out of those, you may be able to convert some to paying customers.

That's exactly what I did with my product Newsy - https://www.newsy.co

sideprojecton Ask HN: How to convert high traffic to money?

Would love for you to consider Newsy - https://www.newsy.co

sideprojecton I Still Use RSS

Love RSS - it's too simple. :) I run a small tool called Newsy

https://www.newsy.co

Which converts your un-used domain into a content aggregator. Originally I wasn't planning to do RSS and instead offer an API access. But none of my users ever asked for an API access, but they all wanted RSS feeds.

sideprojecton Ask HN: What are you working on?

I've been working on Newsy for the past ~8 months.

https://www.newsy.co

Problem - I had lots of domains I've bought over the years which I never used!

Solution - I created a tool to automatically turn these un-used domains into a Reddit-like content aggregator. I wanted it to be fully automated with lots of content + social features (voting, members, newsletters).

It's been super fun creating it and also sharing with people who are also using it.

Some examples

https://www.faithfulnews.com

https://www.getinfosec.news

https://www.heystartup.com

sideprojecton Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

Sure thing! hello@newsy.co look forward to talking to you!

sideprojecton Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

Well, vendor lock-ins are everywhere almost right? We can allow some data export, but currently this isn't available - not necessarily a feature frequently asked for either, so we don't really have an immediate plan for this yet.

sideprojecton Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

It varies.. some ad platforms are quite poor in terms of their payout (definitely not in AdSense league), but we are working on various features for more monetization options (e.g. direct advertising)