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: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js
Hi HN! We are Charly and Bryan, founders of Defer ( https://www.defer.run/ ). Defer is a zero-infrastructure background jobs platform for Node.js developers. As a managed platform that brings modern development standards to background jobs (ex: multi-env support, zero-API design), we enable Node.js developers to build products faster and scale without effort and infrastructure knowledge. Background jobs, while being used in all web applications (processing webhooks, interacting with 3rd party APIs, or powering core features), did not benefit from the developer experience improvements that arose in all other layers of the Node.js API stack: quick and reliable databases with Supabase or easy Serverless deployment with Vercel. Today, even for simple use cases, working with background jobs in Node.js necessarily requires some infrastructure knowledge—either by deploying and sc
Why it failed: Hi HN! We are Charly and Bryan, founders of Defer ( https://www.defer.run/ ). Defer is a zero-infrastructure background jobs platform for Node.js developers. As a managed platform that brings modern development standards to background jobs (ex: multi-env support, z
wittydeveloper
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Should I give up trying to be a founder?
Hi HN! Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I left my high-paying FAANG job 10 years ago to become a founder. I've started 2 companies since then. I have yet to have an exit. The first one was VC backed. The company wasn't doing great after raising our series A, so the investors replaced me with a "professional" CEO. A year later they invested more money into the company at a $1 valuation and erased all my equity. I went several years with no salary, and then lost all my stock. The second one is a bootstrapped, tech-enabled services company. We've been barely profitable since we started almost 5 years ago. The economic slowdown hit my company hard. Revenue is down 40% this year. We've been running at a loss for a few months. I now have $200K in debt on the business. We've been trying hard to turn things around, and things have improved, but I'm n
Why it failed: Hi HN! Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I left my high-paying FAANG job 10 years ago to become a founder. I've started 2 companies since then. I have yet to have an exit. The first one was VC backed. The company wasn't doing great after raising our series A, so th
throwawayU4ueMC
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Reduce Ops by Managing oncalls, tickets, incidents over Slack
Hi HN! In all the organisations, we have worked, SDEs and EMs spend a lot of time on on-call, incident operations, ticket operations - Constantly updating everyone on the current status of an incident, figuring out who is the current Oncall in Slack threads like @dev-oncall, Missing following up on Action Items post-incident, creating a post-mortem RCA document, Spending time on creating and analysing oncall reports For each of these tasks, there is a Developer who doesn't like to spend time on these tasks and an Engineering leader who stresses maintaining this culture. This is why we started Pagerly. : We believe Slack is the best place for collaboration, and many of these tasks can be done there effectively given the right workflows. Ex - Sync your Pagerduty/Opsgenie schedule with Slack UserGroup like @dev-on-call - Round Robin rotations on Slack for non-oncall work say @scru
Why it failed: Hi HN! In all the organisations, we have worked, SDEs and EMs spend a lot of time on on-call, incident operations, ticket operations - Constantly updating everyone on the current status of an incident, figuring out who is the current Oncall in Slack threads like @dev-oncall, Miss
gaurav_goel
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: OutSail (YC W23) – Wingsails to reduce cargo ship fuel consumption
Hi HN! I’m Joseph, and along with Arpan and Bailey we are the founders of OutSail Shipping ( https://outsailshipping.com/ ). We’re building a sail the size of a 747 that rolls up into a shipping container. When deployed, it will generate thrust from the wind to reduce the fuel consumption of a cargo ship. An array of these devices will reduce fuel consumption on ships by up to 20%. These sails are easily stowed and removed to cause no interference with cargo operations. Here’s a short video showing our prototype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUpVqzpym54 . Sails powered ships for millennia; but then the convenience of energy-dense fuels displaced sails. As ship speeds eventually exceeded wind speeds, the consensus became that sails had no place in shipping and were relegated to hobbyists and sport. Fast forward a century and a half, and maritime shipping,
Why it failed: Hi HN! I’m Joseph, and along with Arpan and Bailey we are the founders of OutSail Shipping ( https://outsailshipping.com/ ). We’re building a sail the size of a 747 that rolls up into a shipping container. When deployed, it will generate thrust from the wind to red
jmoorebeek
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners
Hi HN! I’m Chris Mui, founder of Electric Air ( https://electricair.io ). We’re building a residential heat pump system. This will be an all-electric replacement for your home’s furnace and air conditioner that enables more centrally ducted installs, manages your indoor air quality, and saves you money on monthly energy bills. We also streamline purchase, finance and install by selling directly to homeowners. You can place a preorder today at https://electricair.io . Heat pumps work by using refrigerant and a compressor to move energy against a temperature gradient. If you put 1 kWh of energy into a heat pump, you get 3-5 kWh of heating in your home. But this isn’t breaking the laws of physics because heat pumps don’t make heat, they move it around. The extra 2-4kWh gets absorbed from the outdoors, even when it is cold outside. The low pressure refrigerant in the outd
Why it failed: Hi HN! I’m Chris Mui, founder of Electric Air ( https://electricair.io ). We’re building a residential heat pump system. This will be an all-electric replacement for your home’s furnace and air conditioner that enables more centrally ducted installs, manages your indoor
cmui
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React
Hi HN! I'm Zeno, founder of Resend ( https://resend.com ). We're building a modern email sending platform focused on providing the best developer experience. Why? When you look at all the biggest competitors like Sendgrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and SparkPost, you'll notice that they were all founded around 2009/2010, and they all have been acquired by now. Because of that, it's common to see them only prioritizing enterprise requirements and optimizing for sales-led growth. Nobody is building an exceptional developer experience. Nobody is trying to innovate. There isn't a single developer-first email platform in the market today. We want to change that. Email sending is the kind of thing that you should integrate and forget, but instead, you have… - Templates that are hard to build: Typically, you can only send emails using HTML or plain text. Althoug
Why it failed: Hi HN! I'm Zeno, founder of Resend ( https://resend.com ). We're building a modern email sending platform focused on providing the best developer experience. Why? When you look at all the biggest competitors like Sendgrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and SparkPost, you
zenorocha
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Ollama – Run LLMs on your Mac
Hi HN A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something similar needed to exist for large language models too. While not exactly the same as running linux containers, running LLMs shares quite a few of the same challenges. There are "base layers" (e.g. models like Llama 2), specific configuration to run correctly (parameters, temperature, context window sizes etc). There's also embeddings that a model can use at runtime to look up data – we don't support this yet but it's something we're looking at doing soon. It's an early project, and there's still lots to do!
Why it failed: Hi HN A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something s
jmorgan
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Vellum (YC W23) – Dev Platform for LLM Apps
Hi HN – Noa, Akash, and Sidd here. We’re building Vellum ( https://www.vellum.ai ), a developer platform for building on LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Anthropic’s Claude. We provide tools for efficient prompt engineering, semantic search, performance monitoring, and fine-tuning, helping you bring LLM-powered features from prototype to production. The MLOps industry has matured rapidly for traditional ML (typically open-source models hosted in-house), but companies using LLMs are suffering from a lack of tooling to support things like experimentation, version control, and monitoring. They’re forced to build these tools themselves, taking valuable engineering time away from their core product. There are 4 main pain points. (1) Prompt engineering is tedious and time consuming. People iterate on prompts in playgrounds of individual model providers and store results in spreadsheets o
Why it failed: Hi HN – Noa, Akash, and Sidd here. We’re building Vellum ( https://www.vellum.ai ), a developer platform for building on LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Anthropic’s Claude. We provide tools for efficient prompt engineering, semantic search, performance monitoring, and fine
noaflaherty
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Dittofeed (YC S22) – open-source customer engagement platform
Hi HN - we’re Max and Chandler, and we’re building Dittofeed https://dittofeed.com . We make it easy for growth and marketing teams to message their customers across multiple channels. We're an open source alternative to platforms like Iterable, http://customer.io/ , Braze, and OneSignal. Here’s a short demo video showing how to run the platform locally, and use it to automate a customer onboarding journey: https://www.loom.com/share/0f7b67170b3a4205add00c22844ca06f We created Dittofeed to tackle some commonly felt pains with customer engagement platforms: First, existing platforms make it difficult to keep imported user data accurate and up to date with your primary user datastore. To solve this, we’re building first-class support for importing data from your data warehouse, for better data consistency. Second, graphical “journey builder
Why it failed: Hi HN - we’re Max and Chandler, and we’re building Dittofeed https://dittofeed.com . We make it easy for growth and marketing teams to message their customers across multiple channels. We're an open source alternative to platforms like Iterable, http://cu
maxthegeek1
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Helicone.ai (YC W23) – Open-source logging for OpenAI
Hi HN - Justin, Scott, and Barak here. We're excited to introduce Helicone ( https://www.helicone.ai ) an open-source logging solution for OpenAi applications. Helicone's one-line integration logs the prompts, completions, latencies, and costs of your OpenAI requests. It currently works with GPT, and can be integrated with one line of code. There’s a demo at https://www.helicone.ai/video . Helicone's core technology is a proxy that routes all your OpenAI requests through our edge-deployed Cloudflare Workers. These workers are incredibly reliable and cause no discernible latency impact in production environments. As a proxy, we offer more than just observability: we provide caching and prompt formatting, and we'll soon add user rate limiting and model provider back off to make sure your app is still up when OpenAI is down. Our web application t
Why it failed: Hi HN - Justin, Scott, and Barak here. We're excited to introduce Helicone ( https://www.helicone.ai ) an open-source logging solution for OpenAi applications. Helicone's one-line integration logs the prompts, completions, latencies, and costs of your OpenAI r
justintorre75
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Credal.ai (YC W23) – Data Safety for Enterprise AI
Hi Hacker News! We’re Ravin and Jack, the founders of Credal.ai ( https://www.credal.ai/ ). We provide a Chat UI and APIs that enforce PII redaction, audit logging, and data access controls for companies that want to use LLMs with their corporate data from Google Docs, Slack, or Confluence. There’s a demo video here: https://www.loom.com/share/2b5409fd64464dc9b5b6277f2be4e90f?... . One big thing enterprises and businesses are worried about with LLMs is “what’s happening to my data”? The way we see it, there are three big security and privacy barriers companies need to solve: 1. Controlling what data goes to whom: the basic stuff is just putting controls in place around customer and employee PII, but it can get trickier when you also want to be putting controls in place around business secrets, so companies can ensure the Coca Cola recipe doesn’t acciden
Why it failed: Hi Hacker News! We’re Ravin and Jack, the founders of Credal.ai ( https://www.credal.ai/ ). We provide a Chat UI and APIs that enforce PII redaction, audit logging, and data access controls for companies that want to use LLMs with their corporate data from Google D
r_thambapillai
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: A tool to design and run user state machines
Hi everyone, I’m Joe, CTO at Dopt. We’re building a tool that lets you design user state machines and an SDK so that you can run them in your product. We offer a React SDK that lets you create instances of those machines for any user of your product and exposes methods for transitioning the state of the user—effectively moving them through the machine. Dopt then acts as a persistence layer for the users’ machine state. We call our machines “flows”. Dopt lets you send in data about your users (identify calls/properties) and lets non-devs define rules based on that data for which users should enter the flows. Non-devs can also update content and other custom properties that can be referenced via the SDK. For example, with Dopt’s SDK you can build: - a multi-step, interactive product walkthrough that helps users learn how to use a product by using it ( https://www.dopt.com&#x
Why it failed: Hi everyone, I’m Joe, CTO at Dopt. We’re building a tool that lets you design user state machines and an SDK so that you can run them in your product. We offer a React SDK that lets you create instances of those machines for any user of your product and exposes methods for transi
joemckenney
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App
Hi everyone I'm a Notion-addicted person and love to build my own template to cover different aspects of my life, either work or personal stuff. Once, I wanted to build a habit tracker template, and I realized Notion was not the best solution. You can organize it in a much more efficient way just with a pen and a piece of paper. However, the best tool should live on your devices and have a correct structure. Then, I decided to try to build an app using SwiftUI and SwiftData. The goal was to make it a very basic version in one month. But it took me two months. I tried to add only the core features for MVP and see if it works for others. On Twitter, it already received some love, and I'm very excited to share the app here to get even more feedback. Let me know what you think
Why it failed: Hi everyone I'm a Notion-addicted person and love to build my own template to cover different aspects of my life, either work or personal stuff. Once, I wanted to build a habit tracker template, and I realized Notion was not the best solution. You can organize it in a much m
degisner
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Dev-Docs – A tool that helps you document as you code
Hi all, Super excited to share that I am building Dev-Docs, and I wanted to create a post to get other developers' thoughts. Background: Developers know how important it is to document their codebases, but often, it's an afterthought that ends up taking a lot of time and effort. That's where Dev-Docs comes in - a solution that helps developers document as they code, making the process easier and more efficient. Features: Dev-Docs handles both internal documentation for teams and external documentation around APIs and codebases for customers and partners. Internal Documentation: Dev-Docs makes it easy for engineers to document their code, right within their editor. This way, they can easily document the code they're working on, without having to switch between multiple tools. Think of it as a mini local notion that lives within vs code. External API and Codebase Docume
Why it failed: Hi all, Super excited to share that I am building Dev-Docs, and I wanted to create a post to get other developers' thoughts. Background: Developers know how important it is to document their codebases, but often, it's an afterthought that ends up taking a lot of time an
andrewdevdocs
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: G-Script – Visual Scripting for the Web
Hi all, I'm a PM by day who taught themselves to code over COVID. One of the things I enjoyed during that process was learning how to make basic games in Unreal Engine using Blueprints. I found visual scripting was such an intuitive way to express what I call "mid-tier complexity" logic and I felt there really wasn't a great equivalent for the web - so I built one over the last few months and this is my MVP. Tools like Zapier etc are great and easy to use, but they're heavily limited when it comes to expressing any kind of complex logic or trying to follow coding principles like DRY. On the other end of the spectrum, serverless setups like Cloudflare workers or Firebase functions give you all the power of code, but there's atleast 20-30 minutes of additional overhead involved in just getting the things live. G-Script is designed to land exactly in the middle
Why it failed: Hi all, I'm a PM by day who taught themselves to code over COVID. One of the things I enjoyed during that process was learning how to make basic games in Unreal Engine using Blueprints. I found visual scripting was such an intuitive way to express what I call "mid-tier
llamaLord
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Artie (YC S23) – Real time data replication to data warehouses
Hey, I’m Robin and I’m the founder/CTO at Artie ( https://www.artie.so/ ). We solve the problem of stale production data in the data warehouse. We’re open source, and you can try it for free here: https://github.com/artie-labs/transfer . Specifically, we do real time data replication from databases to data warehouses. We leverage change data capture (CDC) and stream processing to perform data transfers efficiently, enabling sub-minute latency and significant cost savings. Here’s a quick demo (jumping straight to the important part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAi1tm4gd9U#t=81s . I encountered this problem when I was a heavy data warehouse user at prior jobs. The data in our data warehouse was super lagged and analytics were always stale. Imagine a fintech company performing anti-fraud/transaction monitoring with batched ETL
Why it failed: Hey, I’m Robin and I’m the founder/CTO at Artie ( https://www.artie.so/ ). We solve the problem of stale production data in the data warehouse. We’re open source, and you can try it for free here: https://github.com/artie-labs/transfer . Sp
tang8330
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
Hey, HN! We're James and Cyriel, co-founders of Radical. We're making an autonomous solar-powered aircraft designed for continuous flight in the stratosphere. Our 20 ft. prototype recently flew nonstop for over 24 hours, which you can see in this video: https://youtu.be/E6oDxQYEksc (edit—warning, there are rapidly flashing lights starting just after 1m, in case you're sensitive to that). Our website is at https://www.radicalaero.com/ , but it's pretty bare. If you use LinkedIn, we have a few more posts at https://www.linkedin.com/company/radicalaero . Our aircraft is designed to fly over specific areas for months, carrying various payloads for tasks like imagery, sensing, and telecommunications. What we’re building behaves like a drone in some ways, and like a satellite in other ways. Much like satellites, we’re able t
Why it failed: Hey, HN! We're James and Cyriel, co-founders of Radical. We're making an autonomous solar-powered aircraft designed for continuous flight in the stratosphere. Our 20 ft. prototype recently flew nonstop for over 24 hours, which you can see in this video: https:/
jthomaslm
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Usage 2.0 – Cut AWS Spend by 57% in 5 Minutes
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched on Hacker News for the first time early last year, and we've made a lot of progress since then. We've saved tens of millions of dollars for companies, and we are even more excited to announce the launch of a new product: insured reservations for RDS! We worked closely with AWS on this feature and are excited to finally make it generally available. We help companies drive down AWS EC2 & RDS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs and reservations rather than focusing on business problems. In the early days, we saw horror stories of customers with millions of dollars in monthly on-demand spend simply because their finance team didn't want them committing to AWS. Worst yet, we've seen AWS users who end
Why it failed: Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched on Hacker News for the first time early last year, and we've made a lot of progress since then. We've saved tens of millions of dollars for companies, and we are even more excited to ann
kavehkhorram
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
Hi! We’re Nikhil and Alek, founders of Pynecone ( https://pynecone.io ), an open source framework to build web apps in pure Python. This can be anything from a small data science/internal app to a large multi-page web app. Once your app is built, you can deploy your app with a single command to our hosting service (coming soon!), or self-host with your preferred provider. Our Github is: https://github.com/pynecone-io/pynecone Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Webdev is one of the most popular applications of programming. So why can’t we make full-stack web apps using just Python? We worked in the AI/infra space and saw that even skilled engineers who wanted to make web apps but didn’t know traditional frontend tools like Javascript or React found it overwhelming and time consuming to learn. On the other hand, no
Why it failed: Hi! We’re Nikhil and Alek, founders of Pynecone ( https://pynecone.io ), an open source framework to build web apps in pure Python. This can be anything from a small data science/internal app to a large multi-page web app. Once your app is built, you can deploy you
picklelo
- startupShut down2023
Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer
Hi, small SaaS founder here (tardis.dev) - I've been heavy Cloudflare Workers user (currently 4 billions requests & 1PB of data per month) for about 4 years already and today at 00:00 UTC without any warning my account was restricted, both website and APIs are down or very very slow to respond/time out, customers are angry obviously. I confirmed with support that "hmm, I see that your zone seems like being restricted due to 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content, see that there's high JSON data transfer". - which is bit strange as I'm using workers which have different terms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660 (confirmed by their CTO)...anyways I get it, perhaps I pay too little and should be on enterprise plan already, but when I got approached by Cloudflare sales team I explicitly asked if I can still be on pay as you go&
Why it failed: Hi, small SaaS founder here (tardis.dev) - I've been heavy Cloudflare Workers user (currently 4 billions requests & 1PB of data per month) for about 4 years already and today at 00:00 UTC without any warning my account was restricted, both website and APIs are down or ve
tardis_thad
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Chainloop, A Software Supply Chain Attestation solution devs won't hate
Hi, my name is Miguel and I am very happy to share what's been months worth of work :) The project has rough edges for sure, but any early feedback, comments or concerns are appreciated! === The Problem === You work on the Security and Operations (SecOps) team in charge of your organization's Software Supply Chain Security. You feel pretty good about the state of things already, your developer teams are signing their commits, deliverables, scanning for vulnerabilities,… Life is good! Then you realize that you are not compliant with the latest security requirements. You get referred to slsa.dev and are told that you need to be at least level 3, whatever that means! Aha! I “just” need to implement an attestation and artifact layer in our Software Supply Chain, which you complete after a couple of months of work. Now to the easy part (or what you think). To make the developer team
Why it failed: Hi, my name is Miguel and I am very happy to share what's been months worth of work :) The project has rough edges for sure, but any early feedback, comments or concerns are appreciated! === The Problem === You work on the Security and Operations (SecOps) team in charge of y
migmartri
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Quadratic – Open-Source Spreadsheet with Python, AI (WASM and WebGL)
Hi, I am David Kircos. The Founder of Quadratic ( https://QuadraticHQ.com ), an open-source spreadsheet application that supports Python, SQL (coming soon), AI Prompts, and classic Formulas. Unlike other spreadsheets, Quadratic has an infinite canvas (like Figma). As a result, you can pinch and zoom to navigate large data sets, and everything renders smoothly at 60fps. Our vision is to build a place where your team can collaborate on data analysis. You can write Python, AI Prompts, and Formulas in one spreadsheet feeding each other data and updating automatically. Quadratic is built using WebGL and Rust WASM. To render a large grid of cells smoothly, we tile the spreadsheet similar to google maps. If you are interested in the technical details, check us out on GitHub ( https://github.com/quadratichq/quadratic/ ) You can use AI to help you write Python a
Why it failed: Hi, I am David Kircos. The Founder of Quadratic ( https://QuadraticHQ.com ), an open-source spreadsheet application that supports Python, SQL (coming soon), AI Prompts, and classic Formulas. Unlike other spreadsheets, Quadratic has an infinite canvas (like Figma). As a
davidkircos
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Cptn.io – open-source integration platform
Hi, I am Krishna Thota. I am building an open source integration and data platform( https://cptn.io ). The product is MIT licensed and the repo is at https://github.com/cptn-io/el-cptn . I have started on my startup journey an year ago and launched a monitoring platform called DevRaven. Unfortunately the product did not takeoff as expected. That story is for another day. But during the course of building the product, I have built several integrations leveraging MQs and Cloud Functions. While building and deploying Cloud Functions for happy paths is easy, I had to monitor logs for failures, build retry mechanisms or manually process failed events, keep instances running to prevent cold start timeouts. It can also get expensive with charges for MQs, server time for running cloud functions etc and costs can be unpredictable. I thought of building a platform whe
Why it failed: Hi, I am Krishna Thota. I am building an open source integration and data platform( https://cptn.io ). The product is MIT licensed and the repo is at https://github.com/cptn-io/el-cptn . I have started on my startup journey an year ago and launched a
kc10
- startupShut down2023
Ask HN: Should I sign a pay cut agreement?
Hi! My employer recently announced a 10% pay cut across the board. Where I live(South Africa), employee consent is required. The company sent out a document asking us to sign in agreement. ---- This is the state of things now: * Company laid an unknown number of employees off, and laid them off without letting employees know until a week later in a meeting where they announced pay cuts * The company is pretty much full remote and the office is a nice-to-have. It is in a very expensive part of town. * Lunches once a week are catered at the office * I asked what happens if one were not to sign, and the response was "Oh, we haven't thought about that. We're hoping that everyone pulls together." * The situation will be reviewed quarterly * Company says they don't expect it to last very long, also citing this for why they kept the office ---- A few things stand out to
Why it failed: Hi! My employer recently announced a 10% pay cut across the board. Where I live(South Africa), employee consent is required. The company sent out a document asking us to sign in agreement. ---- This is the state of things now: * Company laid an unknown number of employees off, an
folivore