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.
2,200 solutions
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
Hey HN, we are Mahmoud and Hammad, co-founders of Play.ht, a text-to-speech synthesis platform. We're building Large Language Speech Models across all languages with a focus on voice expressiveness and control. Today, we are excited to share beta access to our latest model, Parrot, that is capable of cloning any voice with a few seconds of audio and generating expressive speech from text. You can try it out here: https://playground.play.ht . And there are demo videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL_hmxTLHiM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdEEoODd6Kk . The model also captures accents well and is able to speak in all English accents. Even more interesting, it can make non-English speakers speak English while preserving their original accent. Just upload a non-English speaker clip and try it yourself. Existing text to speech models eit
Why it failed: Hey HN, we are Mahmoud and Hammad, co-founders of Play.ht, a text-to-speech synthesis platform. We're building Large Language Speech Models across all languages with a focus on voice expressiveness and control. Today, we are excited to share beta access to our latest model,
hammadh
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator
Hey HN, we are Remen, Ben, and Nick, the founders of Propify ( https://getpropify.com ), an API aggregator for residential property management. We abstract over archaic APIs and merge them into a single modern API for the real estate industry, giving companies access to multiple property management systems (PMSs) via a REST API. Think merge.dev or Plaid for real estate. Property managers nowadays use software to operate residential rental properties. Our customers are not these property managers directly, but companies who provide services to both property managers and renters. Our customers are solving problems around resident screening, security, parking, maintenance, etc., which property managers typically outsource. Compared to most other industries in 2023, property management still runs on old tech with bad/wrong/absent API documentation. Creating and maintainin
Why it failed: Hey HN, we are Remen, Ben, and Nick, the founders of Propify ( https://getpropify.com ), an API aggregator for residential property management. We abstract over archaic APIs and merge them into a single modern API for the real estate industry, giving companies access to
kole78
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Bloop (YC S21) – Code Search with GPT-4
Hey HN, we’re the cofounders of bloop ( https://bloop.ai/ ), a code search engine which combines semantic search with GPT-4 to answer questions. We let you search your private codebases either the traditional way (regex or literal) or via semantic search, ask questions in natural language thanks to GPT-4, and jump between refs/defs with precise code navigation. Here’s a quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8e9d59b88dd2409482ec02cdda5b9185 Traditional code search tools match the terms in your query against the codebase, but often you don’t know the right terms to start with, e.g. ‘Which library do we use for model inference?’ (These types of questions are particularly common when you’re learning a new codebase.) bloop uses a combination of neural semantic code search (comparing the meaning - encoded in vector representations - of queries and code
Why it failed: Hey HN, we’re the cofounders of bloop ( https://bloop.ai/ ), a code search engine which combines semantic search with GPT-4 to answer questions. We let you search your private codebases either the traditional way (regex or literal) or via semantic search, ask quest
louiskw
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds
Hey HN, I’m Surya and I’m excited to show you WarpBuild! WarpBuild provides fast, secure `x86-64` and `arm64` Github actions runners. This speeds up your workloads by 30%, at half the cost, and takes ~2mins to get started. We’ve been seeing pretty good results since we opened up signups a week ago and I’ve shared some numbers publicly here [1]. Currently, we support linux runners for Github organizations (not personal accounts) and MacOS support is coming soon (~Jan). The way the runners work is deceptively simple: Runners are assigned to hardware that is ideal for build workloads with fast NVMe disks and high single-core performance. The runners are allocated on VMs, not containers. This provides faster performance and enables use cases requiring (1) nested virtualization for running firecracker and other hypervisors, (2) k8s without relying on kind, and (3) Android emulators on `arm64`
Why it failed: Hey HN, I’m Surya and I’m excited to show you WarpBuild! WarpBuild provides fast, secure `x86-64` and `arm64` Github actions runners. This speeds up your workloads by 30%, at half the cost, and takes ~2mins to get started. We’ve been seeing pretty good results since we opened up
suryao
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: Sorbay – Open-source alternative to Loom
Hey HN, we're excited to introduce Sorbay - an open source alternative to Loom for creating and sharing screen recordings. With Sorbay, you can easily record your screen, camera, and microphone all at once. It is a complete solution that comes with its own backend service, allowing you to instantly share a link of your recording as soon as it is finished. The video is streamed directly to the backend service as the recording happens to make this possible. With both founders based in different countries, we needed a tool to quickly share screen recordings to keep us up to date or to ask for feedback. Meetings are cool if you need to discuss something deeply, but for almost everything else a quick recording works better. We had to settle for one of the proprietary solutions because none of the open source tools allowed us to quickly share something with each other. Doing the recording
Why it failed: Hey HN, we're excited to introduce Sorbay - an open source alternative to Loom for creating and sharing screen recordings. With Sorbay, you can easily record your screen, camera, and microphone all at once. It is a complete solution that comes with its own backend service, a
jayfk
- startupShut down2023
Show HN: A murder mystery game built on an open-source gen-AI agent framework
Hey HN, Michael and Scott here. We’re open-sourcing an interactive murder mystery featuring LLM-driven character agents. Solve the mystery by finding clues, taking notes, and interrogating agents. They all have distinct motives, personality, and can impact the game in different ways (attacking you, running away, etc). Try it out, it’s pretty fun! We’re also open-sourcing the framework that we used to make and refine the agents. The goal is to create an intuitive interface for storytellers to create, debug, and test game agents. We then take those game agents and expose an API beyond just chat - such as actions, player guardrails, emotional queries, etc. We’re not done yet - there are a lot more features coming on the way: scenario-based agent evals, agent-storyline consistency management, automatic agent generation, etc. We would love to hear your feedback. Thanks! [0] https://
Why it failed: Hey HN, Michael and Scott here. We’re open-sourcing an interactive murder mystery featuring LLM-driven character agents. Solve the mystery by finding clues, taking notes, and interrogating agents. They all have distinct motives, personality, and can impact the game in different w
broken_clock
- startupShut down2023
Launch HN: Clearspace (YC W23) – Cut back on screen time
Hey HN, we're Royce and Oliver, the founders of Clearspace ( https://www.getclearspace.com ). We make an iPhone app that helps you reduce compulsive phone use. It regulates your social media experiences and app usage, saving you from impulse opens and mindless scrolls. Here’s a demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zXLYvtG1zZ6ZRq01eGc8jlsn70v... During the pandemic, we found ourselves spending more and more of our lives on digital content. Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, even HN were always right there, and the impulse to open and consume became stronger than ever. We realized how much of our technology use was compulsive rather than intentional. Willpower alone was not enough to solve the problem. Most of these products have been designed to activate dopamine feedback loops and, to be blunt, keep users hooked [1]. Not wanting to be addicted, we star
Why it failed: Hey HN, we're Royce and Oliver, the founders of Clearspace ( https://www.getclearspace.com ). We make an iPhone app that helps you reduce compulsive phone use. It regulates your social media experiences and app usage, saving you from impulse opens and mindless scro
anteloper
- 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: 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: 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
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: 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
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
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: 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
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
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: 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
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: 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