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: 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
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
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: 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
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: 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: 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: 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
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
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: 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
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: 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: 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: 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
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
- 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: 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
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: 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: 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