The graveyard of good ideas
Solutions that were tried, and what stopped them.
Patents that were rejected or abandoned, products that shut down, projects that went quiet. Borrow the idea, avoid the dead end.
1,900 solutions
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Frigade (YC W23) – Faster, better product onboarding
Hey HN, we’re Eric and Christian, cofounders of Frigade ( https://www.frigade.com ), a developer tool for building high-quality product onboarding. Here’s a demo video: https://frigade.com/video/demo.mp4 . Also, the “Frigade demo checklist” on our home page ( https://frigade.com/#demo ) was built using Frigade itself, if you want to give it a spin. Onboarding is a critical first experience for software products. It makes a big difference for customer activation and retention. However, onboarding experiences often do not get the attention they deserve because, without good tooling, they’re a pain to build. At a previous startup, Christian and I were surprised at how hard it was to get right. It took a ton of time that would otherwise have gone to our core product. We also knew that much better tooling was possible because we had experienced it
Why it failed: Hey HN, we’re Eric and Christian, cofounders of Frigade ( https://www.frigade.com ), a developer tool for building high-quality product onboarding. Here’s a demo video: https://frigade.com/video/demo.mp4 . Also, the “Frigade demo checklist” on our ho
brownrout
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Inngest – Developer platform for background jobs and workflows
Hi HN! We’re Dan and Tony - founders of Inngest ( https://www.inngest.com/ ). Inngest is a developer platform and toolchain for developing, testing and running background jobs, and workflows. Inngest invokes your jobs via HTTP, wherever you want to deploy your code. Shipping reliable background jobs and workflows is a time suck for any software team. They’re painful to develop locally and getting into production is a tedious experience of configuring infra. When you want to add scheduling, orchestrate multi-step workflows or handle concurrency or idempotency, you spend even more time building bespoke systems - not your actual product. Software engineers spend a ton of duplicated effort building and rebuilding this at every company. It shouldn’t be this way. We’ve taken our experience building and scaling reliable, secure queueing systems across Healthcare, B2B SaaS, and de
Why it failed: Hi HN! We’re Dan and Tony - founders of Inngest ( https://www.inngest.com/ ). Inngest is a developer platform and toolchain for developing, testing and running background jobs, and workflows. Inngest invokes your jobs via HTTP, wherever you want to deploy your code
danfarrelly
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: HyLight (YC S23) – Hydrogen airships to inspect energy infrastructure
Hi HN, we’re Thomas, Martin, Théo, and Josef, cofounders at HyLight ( https://www.hylight.aero ). We build and operate autonomous hydrogen airships to inspect energy infrastructure like pipelines and power lines. Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuW5ur8ER7A . Energy infrastructure operators (utility companies) struggle with conducting precise inspections of their assets. It is extremely important for them because they need to make sure that the network is in good condition to avoid outages and leaks. This infrastructure has big impacts when it is malfunctioning. For instance, methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure represent 4% of global carbon emissions every year (and approx. $7B worth of losses in Northern America and Europe). Gas and power networks are physically so large (more than 47M miles globally) that millions of miles of inspection
Why it failed: Hi HN, we’re Thomas, Martin, Théo, and Josef, cofounders at HyLight ( https://www.hylight.aero ). We build and operate autonomous hydrogen airships to inspect energy infrastructure like pipelines and power lines. Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/wa
ThomasLaporte
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Infisical (YC W23) – Open-source secrets manager for developers
Hi HN, we’re the co-founders of Infisical ( https://infisical.com ), an open-source platform to sync application secrets and configs across your engineering team and infrastructure. We enable teams to store their secrets in a centralized location and distribute them anywhere from local development processes to staging/production environments. Our Github is at https://github.com/infisical/infisical . We previously worked at AWS, Figma, and another startup, where we frequently ran into problems dealing with secret management. For example, many companies used .env files to maintain their development secrets and struggled to keep secrets in sync amongst their teams (this routinely posed security and efficiency issues — secrets can get leaked or go missing). Some companies (especially bigger ones) used solutions like Vault which can be difficult to set up, m
Why it failed: Hi HN, we’re the co-founders of Infisical ( https://infisical.com ), an open-source platform to sync application secrets and configs across your engineering team and infrastructure. We enable teams to store their secrets in a centralized location and distribute them any
vmatsiiako
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Codeparrot (YC W23) – Automated API testing using production traffic
Hi HN, we’re Royal and Vedant, co-founders of CodeParrot ( https://www.codeparrot.ai/ ). CodeParrot automates API testing so developers can speed up release cycles and increase test coverage. It captures production traffic and database state to generate test cases that update with every release. Here’s a short video that shows how it works: https://www.loom.com/share/dd6c12e23ceb43f587814a2fbc165c1f . As managers of engineering teams (I was CTO of an ed-tech startup, Vedant was the founding engineer of a unicorn company) both of us faced challenges in enforcing high test coverage. We ended up relying a lot on manual testing but it became hard to scale, and led to reduced velocity and higher production bugs. This motivated us to build CodeParrot. How it works: we auto-instrument backend services to capture production traffic. Requests and responses comin
Why it failed: Hi HN, we’re Royal and Vedant, co-founders of CodeParrot ( https://www.codeparrot.ai/ ). CodeParrot automates API testing so developers can speed up release cycles and increase test coverage. It captures production traffic and database state to generate test cases
royal0203
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps
Hi HN, we’re Max and James, co-founders of Needl ( https://www.needl.tech ). Needl is a single search bar for all your apps that lets you find any document, message, or file you need. Here’s a demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/652ae56c8ee34bc2a84b8aacf479a9f4 . We’ve all struggled to find information and couldn’t remember if it was shared over Gmail or Slack or Notion. Most of us have hundreds of thousands of emails, documents, messages, etc., and only a small fraction are actually useful. Internal search is even harder than web search in some ways: with web search, there are dozens of right answers and millions of previous searches to train ranking models, but internally (i.e. on your own data), there is only one right answer and limited training data. Needl’s value prop is twofold: it unifies all of your information together and provides better search
Why it failed: Hi HN, we’re Max and James, co-founders of Needl ( https://www.needl.tech ). Needl is a single search bar for all your apps that lets you find any document, message, or file you need. Here’s a demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/652ae56c8ee34bc2a8
MaxKeenan
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Safe Data Changes in PostgreSQL
Hi HN, we're excited to share our open source tool with the community! We previously posted here with the tagline “real-time events for Postgres” [0]. But after feedback from early users and the community, we’ve shifted our focus to working on tooling for manual database changes. We've consistently heard teams describe challenges with the way manual data updates are handled. Seemingly every engineer we spoke with had examples of errant queries that ended up causing significant harm in production environments (data loss/service interruptions). We’ve seen a few different approaches to how changes to production databases occur today: Option 1: all engineers have production write access (highest speed, highest risk) Option 2: one or a few engineers have write access (medium speed, high risk) Option 3: engineers request temporary access to make changes (low speed, medium risk)
Why it failed: Hi HN, we're excited to share our open source tool with the community! We previously posted here with the tagline “real-time events for Postgres” [0]. But after feedback from early users and the community, we’ve shifted our focus to working on tooling for manual database cha
ciminelli
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Axilla – Open-source TypeScript framework for LLM apps
Hi HN, we are Nick and Ben, creators of Axilla - an open source TypeScript framework to develop LLM applications. It’s in the early stages but you can use it today: we’ve already published 2 modules and have more coming soon. Ben and I met while working at Cruise on the ML platform for self-driving cars. We spent many years there and learned the hard way that shipping AI is not quite the same as shipping regular code. There are many parts of the ML lifecycle, e.g., mining, processing, and labeling data and training, evaluating, and deploying models. Although none of them are rocket science, most of the inefficiencies tend to come from integrating them together. At Cruise, we built an integrated framework that accelerated the speed of shipping models to the car by 80%. With the explosion of generative AI, we are seeing software teams building applications and features with the same ineffi
Why it failed: Hi HN, we are Nick and Ben, creators of Axilla - an open source TypeScript framework to develop LLM applications. It’s in the early stages but you can use it today: we’ve already published 2 modules and have more coming soon. Ben and I met while working at Cruise on the ML platfo
nichochar
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Meltano Cloud (GitLab spinout) – Managed infra for open source ELT
Hi HN, this is Douwe, founder & CEO of Meltano ( https://meltano.com ), an open source EL tool that came out of GitLab (YC W15), so perhaps I should be saying "Meltano CEO here" :) Today is a big day for me and our team, as the SaaS edition of our product is now in Public Beta! Meltano Cloud has all the flexibility of Meltano, but none of the hassle of self-managed infra. (Sign up now to claim your 100 free credits!) It's been quite a journey: 5 years ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667399 ), the GitLab data team realized that their UI-based workflows were years behind the software development workflows practiced by the rest of the org. So to boost their own efficiency and confidence (and follow other teams in dogfooding GitLab: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#dogfooding ), they started buildin
Why it failed: Hi HN, this is Douwe, founder & CEO of Meltano ( https://meltano.com ), an open source EL tool that came out of GitLab (YC W15), so perhaps I should be saying "Meltano CEO here" :) Today is a big day for me and our team, as the SaaS edition of our product
DouweM
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Fern, a language for defining REST APIs that compiles into OpenAPI
Hi HN, this is Danny, Deep, and Zach. We built Fern after our previous ed tech startup failed. We were frustrated with how much time we spent writing “API code” instead of working on the actual product. We tried to use OpenAPI but we were underwhelmed - the generated code wasn’t idiomatic and it still required manual work (custom templates, scripts, manually publishing SDKs to registries). The Fern compiler takes your API as input and invokes generators that output things like: SDKs, server code, a Postman collection, and an OpenAPI spec. Some technical highlights about the compiler + generators: - The compiler (available as a CLI) handles syntactic + semantic validation. It also includes a linter that encodes best practices. If your API Definition compiles, you can have high confidence that the SDKs will generate correctly. - After all the parsing and validation, the compiler outputs an
Why it failed: Hi HN, this is Danny, Deep, and Zach. We built Fern after our previous ed tech startup failed. We were frustrated with how much time we spent writing “API code” instead of working on the actual product. We tried to use OpenAPI but we were underwhelmed - the generated code wasn’t
zachkirsch
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: I Think I Need a New Calendar App
Hi HN, Sorry for posting this here, but since reddit meltdown I can't post there. Here is the deal: I am working freelance with a very flexible schedule, and I also live in the woods and have two young kids. As a result, I have both things I normally do every day (driving kids to school, working, preparing lunch, etc) -- and a ton of non-work stuff to do that often need to interrupt what I normally do (doctors appointments, do stuff in the garden, etc.). Now, I have a very hard time staying on top of it all. To the point where I am finding it difficult planning a time to go to the hairdresser. Since my freelance job pays me by the hour, I set myself to work x hours in the day (on average per week) to ensure a fairly constant salary. But with all the other stuff I need to do, I always need to catch up on work I skipped and end up getting confused about how much work I did and how muc
Why it failed: Hi HN, Sorry for posting this here, but since reddit meltdown I can't post there. Here is the deal: I am working freelance with a very flexible schedule, and I also live in the woods and have two young kids. As a result, I have both things I normally do every day (driving ki
d--b
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Grai (YC S22) – Open-Source Data Observability Platform
Hi HN, my name is Ian. My co-founder Edward and I started Grai ( https://grai.io ), an open-source data observability platform. It helps prevent production data outages by evaluating changes to your data pipelines in CI, rather than at runtime. Ever experienced a production outage due to changes in upstream data sources? That's a problem we regularly encountered whether deploying machine learning or keeping a datawarehouse operational and it led us to create Grai. Systematically testing the impact of data changes on the rest of your stack turns out to be quite difficult when the same data is copied and used across many different services and applications. Simple changes like renaming a column in a database can result in broken BI dashboards, incorrect training data for ML models, and data pipeline failure. For example, business users regularly deal with questions like &quo
Why it failed: Hi HN, my name is Ian. My co-founder Edward and I started Grai ( https://grai.io ), an open-source data observability platform. It helps prevent production data outages by evaluating changes to your data pipelines in CI, rather than at runtime. Ever experienced a produc
ersatz_username
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Whataaabout.com – unique activity ideas for the holiday break
Hi HN, I’ve been working on whataaabout.com with a friend, while learning to code. It's a fun little website for those short on time but seeking new experiences. It started from a question, "when was the last time you did an experience you had never done before?". As human beings we need some degree of novelty, to expose ourselves to the unfamiliar and keep learning throughout our lives. So to add a spark to my daily routine and keep novelty coming my way, I started collecting ideas of interesting and unusual activities I’d like to try out sooner or later. The main selection criteria is things that take a short amount of time and are not too demanding, nor location-specific. I organized them based on categories like uniqueness, humans involved, location, price, time required, and others. I hope you like it, and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts, as well as any cool activi
Why it failed: Hi HN, I’ve been working on whataaabout.com with a friend, while learning to code. It's a fun little website for those short on time but seeking new experiences. It started from a question, "when was the last time you did an experience you had never done before?".
erkjs
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Wave – Modern Open-Source Terminal (macOS and Linux)
Hi HN, I’m Mike, the founder and creator of Wave, a cross-platform open-source terminal that supports inline rendering, modern UI, and persistent sessions. I love the command line; I’ve been using it for over 25 years, starting with a Linux box I made with spare parts in my college dorm room. But while other devtools have been modernized, the terminal has been stuck, with the same basic functionality for over 40-years. What if your command line terminal could display more than just text? That’s crazy right (I can hear the screams of thousands of graybeard sysadmins). Not all the time, but maybe just when you want it to. Like displaying Markdown, Images, ChatGPT output, or CSVs (that you can copy from and paste directly into Excel). Or running a VSCode style editor inline in your terminal that has mouse support, copy/paste, indentation, and syntax highlighting support right out of th
Why it failed: Hi HN, I’m Mike, the founder and creator of Wave, a cross-platform open-source terminal that supports inline rendering, modern UI, and persistent sessions. I love the command line; I’ve been using it for over 25 years, starting with a Linux box I made with spare parts in my colle
sawka
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: What should a stuck dev do?
Hi HN, I am struggling with finding work and having thoughts about whether or not I should keep going or start thinking about switching careers. Any advice/perspective is appreciated. I am a 40+ year old self-taught software developer. I've been doing front-end/full stack development for most of my 10+ year career. I was also struggling heavily with undiagnosed ADHD and the emotional dysregulation that comes with it for most of my life. I finally discovered it 3+ years ago after around 5 years in therapy and have put in an incredible amount of work since then to learn how to manage it all effectively. Through this process, I've also come to find a real joy in my work. Now I just need a good job to get my life back on track. I have been interviewing since December or so and have realized that I do not approach this work in my head the same as engineers that have gone t
Why it failed: Hi HN, I am struggling with finding work and having thoughts about whether or not I should keep going or start thinking about switching careers. Any advice/perspective is appreciated. I am a 40+ year old self-taught software developer. I've been doing front-end/ful
throwaway0129u4
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Gentrace – evaluation and observability for generative AI
Hi HN, Gentrace is our new evaluation and observability tool for generative AI (open beta). Generative pipelines are hard to evaluate because outputs are subjective. Lots of developers end up just doing “gut checks” on a few inputs before shipping changes, or they build up a spreadsheet of test cases that they manually run through the pipeline. Some companies outsource filling out the spreadsheet. However, in any of these cases, you end up with a very slow and expensive process for evaluation. At one point, we did this too. Gentrace is the result of a pivot; it was an internal tool we used to automatically grade new PRs as developers shipped changes to generative pipelines that other people thought might be useful. Gentrace makes pre-production testing of generative pipelines continuous and nearly instantaneous. In Gentrace, you: - Import and/or construct suites of test data - Use a
Why it failed: Hi HN, Gentrace is our new evaluation and observability tool for generative AI (open beta). Generative pipelines are hard to evaluate because outputs are subjective. Lots of developers end up just doing “gut checks” on a few inputs before shipping changes, or they build up a spre
dsaffy
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Google Code Jam Archive
Hi HN, As many of you already know, Google has discontinued their coding competitions and is shutting down the competitions website. Before it's gone forever, I've scraped everything I could from their website and set up my own archive. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Google besides participating in these contests years ago) While the initial version was ready back in March, today I'm rolling out big and hopefully the final update, so this might be a good time to share it with the HN community. Everything is static HTML and SQLite archives (with a very minimal backend to serve files directly from SQLite), so you can easily grab your own copy. May these 3.5 million source files be a nice training dataset for some fancy future AI! Some useless stats: Tabs or spaces? 28% tabs vs 72% spaces for the whole dataset, but quite unexpectedly, 66% tabs vs 34% spaces if we c
Why it failed: Hi HN, As many of you already know, Google has discontinued their coding competitions and is shutting down the competitions website. Before it's gone forever, I've scraped everything I could from their website and set up my own archive. (Disclaimer: I'm not affilia
zibada
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Google Analytics alternative with the most generous free tier
Hi HN, As an indie hacker, the new Google Analytics (GA4) coming motivated me to look for a straightforward alternative that would also be affordable. I had a few basic product requirements and didn’t want to spend too much to replace a free product. There are a lot of great Google Analytics alternatives out there, but the pricing didn’t seem right. As someone who likes to just build things, many of which aren’t businesses yet, it didn’t make sense to pay for options like Plausible and Fathom out of the gate. So I joined with a friend to build Beam Analytics. Beam gives you all the standard web analytics. It also comes with easy to create funnels so you can see how users move through your site. And we have a great proxy for cohort retention that doesn’t need you to log any data with us. It’s cookie-less and GDPR compliant. The free tier is 100k page views per month so hopefully you’ll gi
Why it failed: Hi HN, As an indie hacker, the new Google Analytics (GA4) coming motivated me to look for a straightforward alternative that would also be affordable. I had a few basic product requirements and didn’t want to spend too much to replace a free product. There are a lot of great Goog
flurly
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
Hi HN! We’re the co-founders of Refine ( https://github.com/refinedev/refine ), an open-source platform for developing enterprise web applications rapidly. In one year since launch we have 15K active developers each month, and over 5K projects in production. Among the 5,000+ projects deployed to production, we see a lot of admin panels, dashboards, B2B portals and SAAS interfaces. Check out our online generator at ( https://refine.dev/#playground ) to create a custom Refine application and download it. Before starting refine, we spent five years as a consultancy company building internal-facing applications for enterprise clients. We have seen many complex use cases where the demanded flexibility was much higher than what existing low-code/no-code solutions provide. Moving away from rigid architectures and pre-made components that are difficult to
Why it failed: Hi HN! We’re the co-founders of Refine ( https://github.com/refinedev/refine ), an open-source platform for developing enterprise web applications rapidly. In one year since launch we have 15K active developers each month, and over 5K projects in production. A
civan
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Nucleus (YC S22) – Kubernetes platform for both devs and ops
Hi HN! We’re Evis and Nick and we’re the founders of Nucleus ( https://nucleuscloud.com ), a Kubernetes developer platform. We automate infrastructure, security, integrations, and more, helping developers ship faster while also automating a lot of repetitive tasks for devops and platform teams. Here’s a demo: https://www.loom.com/share/95265177704346c7b379e981978cd8c5 . It's expensive, time-consuming, and technically difficult to build a secure, scalable Kubernetes platform. Yet many companies that do this spend 6+ months building it themselves and then hire an expensive platform team to manage it. We've talked to customers who have spent $1.5M to build something that isn't their core product. On the technology side, you have to solve for authentication, authorization, service registry and discovery, scalability, observability, infrastructure
Why it failed: Hi HN! We’re Evis and Nick and we’re the founders of Nucleus ( https://nucleuscloud.com ), a Kubernetes developer platform. We automate infrastructure, security, integrations, and more, helping developers ship faster while also automating a lot of repetitive tasks for d
edrenova
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases
Hi HN! We just released the public alpha version of Mathesar ( https://mathesar.org/ , code: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar ). Mathesar is an open source tool that provides a spreadsheet-like interface to a PostgreSQL database. I was originally inspired by wanting to build something like Dabble DB. I was in awe of their user experience for working with relational data. There’s plenty of “relational spreadsheet” software out there, but I haven’t been able to find anything with a comparable UX since Twitter shut Dabble DB down. We're a non-profit project. The core team is based out of a US 501(c)(3). Features: * Built on Postgres : Connect to an existing Postgres database or set one up from scratch. * Utilizes Postgres Features : Mathesar’s UI uses Postgres features. e.g. "Links" in the UI are foreign keys in the database. * Set up
Why it failed: Hi HN! We just released the public alpha version of Mathesar ( https://mathesar.org/ , code: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar ). Mathesar is an open source tool that provides a spreadsheet-like interface to a PostgreSQL database. I was ori
kgodey
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Version code, models, & datasets together in GitHub
Hi HN! We just launched a GitHub integration that scales your Git repos to handle 100 terabytes of files in a single repo. XetData enables data scientists and machine learning engineers to version code, models, and datasets together. Most teams have glued together clunky workflows using S3, DVC, Git, Git LFS, and other tools and make true reproducibility difficult: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37694701 We instead embrace and extend Git so end-users don’t need to learn a new tool and a new set of commands. Our implementation is similar to Git LFS, where we take over the .gitattributes file, push pointers to large files in GitHub, and push the raw, large files to us. We have a few distinct features that we’re proud of that improve the user experience: - Our XetData bot comments on your pull requests to provide links to useful dataset views and model diffs. We’re work
Why it failed: Hi HN! We just launched a GitHub integration that scales your Git repos to handle 100 terabytes of files in a single repo. XetData enables data scientists and machine learning engineers to version code, models, and datasets together. Most teams have glued together clunky workflow
skadamat
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Bucket – From feature launch to customer satisfaction, consistently
Hi HN! We have put A LOT of effort and soul into crafting this product. It’s something we’ve wanted to have ourselves for so long. We hope you like it! Many tech companies end up as feature factories. Bucket is here to help product teams consistently evaluate features, so they can double down on the features that matter - and cut their losses on the ones that never hit home. We do this based on engagement data and on qualitative feedback. We use the STARS framework, starsframework.org, to combine this data into a consistent feature satisfaction score. We then report the feature satisfaction and live customer feedback to you and your team on Slack until you make a decision: Looks good or needs another iteration. Engineers, PMs and designers: We’d love to hear your feedback!
Why it failed: Hi HN! We have put A LOT of effort and soul into crafting this product. It’s something we’ve wanted to have ourselves for so long. We hope you like it! Many tech companies end up as feature factories. Bucket is here to help product teams consistently evaluate features, so they ca
makwarth
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Openexus – Building blocks for the internet
Hi HN! We are thrilled to share a sneak peek of https://openexus.com after months of work. You can try out the cool demos on the front page! The idea is to build a platform and community for composable building blocks where anyone can easily create, find and connect different modules to create dynamic and interactive apps, sites, dashboards, and docs. This can be done without using a single line of code. Key principles of what we are building: 1) True composability that enables infinite possibilities — Modules today are either too complex to be used only by developers (e.g. NPM packages) or too simplistic where they are usually used as an embed in isolation. We are establishing a modularization foundation that is powerful enough for developers to express functionalities, simple enough for anyone (even kids) to use, and flexible enough to build sophisticated creations. 2) Smart
Why it failed: Hi HN! We are thrilled to share a sneak peek of https://openexus.com after months of work. You can try out the cool demos on the front page! The idea is to build a platform and community for composable building blocks where anyone can easily create, find and connect dif
lominming