HN user
Building tools for developers working with FHIR.
https://darrendevitt.com/
https://vanyalabs.com/
Canva - I used it for simple designs but ChatGPT is better
Grammarly - ChatGPT and Claude are way better, and much more customizable. If I were a human editor I'd be very worried.
On the flip side, using ChatGPT for diagrams made me pay for Mermaid. It might only be a one year subscription.
I don't know where the recent idea that em dashes are difficult to type came from. MS Word automates turning a hyphen into an em dash as you type in the same way that it converts "teh" into "the" and has done so for as long as I can remember.
I find the whole AI / em dash thing frustrating as I used to used them all the time. They have meaning that hyphens don't. I've now had to stop using them because they are seen as AI generated, and structure my sentences differently as a result.
Have you considered slashing features in order to speed up your MVP release? Our own "must have" features are often not must haves for users. I was in the same boat a few years back and released a cut down version missing what I thought were must have features. Many years and 1,000+ users later no one has ever requested the missing "key features."
I switched off sales of my last desktop app a couple of months ago. It was still bringing in sales of about $600 a month, but it felt like a weight hanging around my neck. Despite shutting it down I expect I'll still get a couple of support emails a month for the next 10 years.
We're building a desktop / SaaS app right now that we'll be selling using a SaaS model. A combination of desktop app built with Electron and a web app for managing accounts and teams. I'd never touch a "once off" pricing model again.
Despite being a dev of 20+ years, I use Wordpress as a non-technical user, hosted on a paid for plan on Wordpress.com. I never deploy, never have to upgrade, never have to troubleshoot issues. Whatever monolithic and legacy complexity is part of Wordpress I don't see it.
I use it regularly - 3 or more posts a week - and it's as fast as I could hope for. So easy to create and edit posts. So many plugins for just about everything I want to do. And professional templates - with support - are so cheap I'm almost embarrassed to be paying for it.
I think a lot of people see Wordpress as it was back in the early 2000s, when amateur bloggers were liking each others posts and getting comments was the goal. And fighting spam was a daily chore.
I see it as a simple publishing platform where I can focus on writing and not on infrastructure. I really don't care what's under the covers. If your better solution is any more complicated than me signing up, I'm not interested.
LinkedIn have an automated rater for applications. Any that their tool consider to not be a fit is automatically tagged "Not a fit" and color coded accordingly, making it very obvious. It's probably based on the location of the applicant Vs the location the job specifies and the skills on their LinkedIn profile.
My own experience when posting jobs was that 70%+ of applicants were rated "Not a fit" and that it was an accurate rating.
This means that when the ad poster goes in to look at the applicants they can discount a huge proportion from the start as the list is already triaged.
100s does not really mean 100s.
I'm building a developer tool for working with FHIR APIs called "Vanya Client".
FHIR is a data standard for sharing healthcare data. It's in use all around the world by healthcare, health insurance and medtech companies as well as researchers working with healthcare data.
Vanya grew out of my own frustrations as a developer working with FHIR. I wanted an easier way to see the data behind the APIs. To say Postman is not ideal for working with this data is a major understatement.
We're a few months away from a commercial release, and have an MVP available for download right now. We're very much building in public and have a strong user base already all around the world.
Just finished a Sunday morning release of the latest version. Looking forward to the next 6 months!
I don't have a great story, but from my own experience I see the key as being a willingness to step outside your comfort zone. Do (if not embrace) the things you tend to avoid doing as a lone developer.
An example: I never liked meetings with new people, but I knew I needed to talk to people in my industry about what I was building and about what their problems were.
So I set up "office hours". Zoom meetings where I talk to one or two people a week. Randomly, anyone in my industry who wants to talk to me can book a slot using Calendly.
I promote this occasionally on LinkedIn and on my website, and it's led to many interesting conversations and collaborations.
Same with making videos, giving presentations, putting yourself out there and telling people what you're working on.
Generally, do (some of) the things you don't want to do.
Fastspring or Paddle.
Keep it just for the email addresses and accounts you may have opened using those email addresses. If you don't, there'll be something you've missed and you won't find out for 6 months. But drop the website.
I have a number of zombie domains that I keep just for that reason.
- Zero to One, Peter Thiel
Always makes me feel that I’m not ambitious enough. And that too many smart people are in the wrong industry (finance).
- The Dip, Seth Godin
Don’t give up. Unless you’re in a cul-de-sac.
- Obviously Awesome, April Dunford
Your competitor is often not who you think it is.
I built one pre-Grammarly that functions as an add-in to Microsoft Word.
It's aimed at creative writers and never really took off, though it does have a cohort of die hard fans. Still sells a few copies a month after all these years - usually to romance writers.
https://smart-edit.com/Home/Creative/
Some screenshots: https://smart-edit.com/Gallery/
What industry do you work in? What sort of company and team do you work for?
Is there really nothing you can think of from a business or work perspective that you need, that could be better, that your colleagues or managers need?
Really?
A couple of hours ago I posted a list of 7 tools I wanted in my particular area. I'll be posting this to LinkedIn tomorrow where I expect some real debate to kick off amongst my followers.
https://darrendevitt.com/7-fhir-tools-businesses-need/
It took me 5 minutes to write this list and every one of them is a product that companies I work with would pay money for.
It's not something I think about often - I'm already working on another app - but I'm active in my field and I ask questions, so seeing what's missing is not difficult.
What's missing in your field? It's that simple.
You need to use a reseller type company like Fastspring. There's no alternative - you either do the tax yourself or you make it so that you don't have to.
It's an extra 5% or so, but well worth it to avoid all the work and hassle of learning about and then paying sales tax in every country and region.
If you ever move beyond the "beer money" phase, you should be able to afford the experience required to do all this correctly using Stripe.
A variation of this post pops up here a lot. Reminds me of writers on writing forums looking for the perfect "light weight" word processor.
Problem being, everyone has one "must have" feature that they want along with the light-weight solution. And for every writer that "must have" feature is different.
When you join all the single, one-off "must haves" together you end up with Microsoft Word.
As for blogging platforms, I use wordpress.com. Paid, not free. No work at all on my end apart from writing. Haven't thought about the platform in a long while now.
use the proceeds from your day job to hire a developer to do the work
Interesting and timely. I'm close to doing this now - the time just isn't there to devote to the product and the day job, and the product needs an 8 hour a day developer for 6-12 months. Do you have any examples of where this worked to get something new off the ground.
Focused on a particular industry and domain instead of jumping between industries on each contract.
All of us can write code - that's not a hard skill to find. But combining code with strong domain knowledge and a deep understanding of a specific industry is what turns the ability to code into a super power.
I'm a couple of years into this now, but if I'd began 10 years ago I would be so much further ahead.
It's possible the University of Bedfordshire role at the top makes it look like you're a student - to a lazy recruiter who doesn't read. The first bullet point "as part of a research project" again suggests you might be back in college - again to a recruiter who doesn't read.
I may be wrong - just a suggestion.
I really don't see a problem with newsletters. If one starts getting too dull or is no longer of interest, I unsubscribe.
Functionally, they all work the same and all have the same unsubscribe link at the bottom. It's not like the bad old days anymore when you were signed up to lists you never signed up for.
Unless your use of newsletters is different to other people's, I don't see what problem you're trying to fix.
Why are you signing up to newsletters you don't want?
I need to find some signal from users
The clearest and most unambiguous signal from users is "I will pay you money for this" or "I will not pay you money for this."
There's no pricing on the website that I can find.
Are you really saying that you spent years of work and $1m+ of your own money building something that you love but that has no income and no path to income?
A free app?
You're very articulate and the comments have been interesting to read, but it all feels a bit like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
You need to go to your existing users and tell them that from next Monday the price is $x.
Unless you're independently wealthy and quite happy to continue building your perfect app and giving it away for free forever. In which case, carry on.
As a solo developer who has built B2C software in the past, 1600 sales in your first year is outstanding.
But I have to say your pricing is terrible - from all perspectives.
For you, unless you sell in the hundreds of thousands (which I've never heard of for B2C software) it's unlikely to ever be a day job replacement.
For the consumer, before they even decide to try your software you're telling them it has the lifetime value of a cup of coffee and a donut.
Price is one of the things consumers look at to determine something's value. You've priced your product so cheaply and many will view your product in the same way.
It's not much harder to sell a $99 product as it is to sell a $9 product to consumers. And the users you get at the higher price point will be better users.
But that 1600 user sales figure - for a one man shop in year one - is fantastic.
What would your yearly profits have been if your price was $49 or $79 or more?
I haven't done this, but am considering 3 months in Uruguay in the first half of next year (keeping the career).
Interested in any replies people might have.
A 700 page book on C++ for beginners back in 1999.
Followed by a box containing C++ Builder 4 and a project I was told to to start working on.
How much would you be willing to pay for it (0 is a valid answer)
That's not a good question to ask developers. Most of them undervalue software (because they're capable of building it themselves) and will give you a "cup of coffee and a donut" $ figure, when the actual market might pay $100s or $1000s per month.
Launching a series of apps, blog posts, or random ideas
This is too much. Do or create one thing. Just one thing. You can drop it and move on if it doesn't gain any kind of traction.
But if you start out by thinking of launching many different things, you won't launch anything as you'll over think, over analyze and over plan.
Also, there are three paths to getting something small off the ground: easy path, middle path and the hard path.
Developers almost always choose the hard path.
They code their own website from scratch because they know how.
They built a generic website creation tool because "Launching a series of apps" and it will make thinks easier in the long term.
Start with a single page static website. Use an off the shelf Bootstrap or other theme. If you want a logo, take a free icon from Canva and use that. Park it all on a $5 shared hosting plan.
Easy path, every time.
Put the one page website up today. Don't spend more than two hours on it.
Then do the next easy thing. One piece of content... etc.
FHIR data viewer (a healthcare data format if you're new to FHIR). I've been working on it for some time now, and just released the Mac build a couple of weeks ago.
Had a 'soft launch' on LinkedIn a week ago that was very well received by my followers.
Still a lot of work to do before a commercial release - huge features missing. But last week's launch was positive - a real boost.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7114844...
My Show HN was a flop. :)
“Tell me about a project you worked on” is a great question for the person being interviewed, because you can and should have a strong prepared answer.
It's basic story telling. You have the opportunity to tell an interesting story about something you did to the people interviewing you.
Chances are the interviewers are devs like you and don't want to be there any more than you do.
So you get to make their jobs easier by telling them a story that has lots of opportunities for them to ask you questions that you have good answers to.
- A few months ago I worked on a project that does ...
- It was a complicated project because of ...
- I was the lead X on the project, responsible for ...
- This is what I did ...
- These were the problems we encountered and this is how I approached those problems ...
Every developer should have a couple of good stories just like this. The entire interview can hang off a good story and can be repurposed to fit different variations of that question.
And best of all, it's YOUR story, which allows you to control the conversation.
LinkedIn.
But I don't post a link to the post on LinkedIn, I post the content as a text post and link from the blog to the LinkedIn post for comments.
This generates far more activity than a link to a blog post would.
LinkedIn has a very targeted audience (assuming you've built up the audience), which means posts there can gain traction and spread very quickly and lead to real world discussions with real people.
Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darrendevitt_fhir-hl7-azure-a...
Blog: https://benigninteroperability.com/theres-a-gap-in-the-fhir-...