easymode

kudos!

Location: Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Javascript, Node, Express, Cassandra, Mongo DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Memcache, REST, Cordova, Backbone, Angular, JQuery, Java, Android SDK, Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, AWS

Résumé/CV:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g2nUoA0PXgjuKeUilLL3YyyM...

Email: mridulc@gmail.com

Hi, I am MC. I am a full stack developer who has built tens of end to end systems. I get whatever problem thrown at me solved. Looking forward to jump into something exciting.

This is on Product Hunt now: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/guy-needs-gift

Please vote if you like it! <3

That's a great idea :) - A clear seperation will definitely make the recommendations better. I will work on this for next update. Thanks!

You are right, there are a lot of repitition. But you will see that what comes up as "Grandson" may come up as "Maybe not a good idea" in the "Best Guess" description.

I basically ranked each item from 0 (don't show) to 10 (Best match) for each relationship. So the more you scroll down, you may start seeing some meh results for that particular relationship.

Because every person is unique I have a hard time completely dismissing something (rank as 0) for a particular relationship.

I have plans to add a lot more products. When the total product count reaches more than 300, I think this problem of seeing duplicate results will reduce by a good margin.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

An amazon gift card, or cash or a good book is a safe bet for any occasion.

Thanks for the feedback!

You are right, now that I think about it, hitting back while you are browsing product should totally bring you back to the homepage, I just never thought of the scenario.

The fact that you mentioned awesome landing page makes me extra happy. I hand drew the pixel arts myself and had a lot of fun doing it :D

Thanks for the feedback. I planned to do an interest filter in the beginning but decided I would get the first batch of feedback without it while keeping UX as simple as possible.

I plan to roll it out eventually.

If this is worth the time investment, I would be happy to make a sister site :)

Thanks for the suggestion. Until now, I just went with my hunch the whole way. Now that it's launched, I can make some iterations based on actually learning from users.

Thanks for the kind words :). I am very happy to see that the care I put into the site is being noticed.

I used MEAN Stack to build this: Express / Node / Mongo / Angular.

I knew Express, Node and Mongo from before, I started this project in order to see what Angular was all about.

While learning a new technology, I always think about what to build while learning.

My wife had said that it's always hard for her to pick gift for guys. So I decided to build this for poeple like her, to make the process a little simpler.

The subscription modal comes up only once (for now) after you succesfuly paginate 3 times, (View about 60 items).

Thanks again!

Thought this may be related. If you think your side projects never got enough traffic to be validated, try this out: http://www.kickoffboost.com

Definitely. Getting feedback on ideas is one of my aim. Kickoffboost will feel much more complete within weeks. This launch was to validate that there is a need for this kind of product, and I think I have the green signal to now make it awesome :)

Hi Everyone,

The response to kickoff boost has been overwhelming and I'm in a bit of a struggle to keep up, but it's a great thing :)

I'm focusing the showcase algo right now so I can't comment or reply to everyone individually until later tonight, but I'll post some updates here.

I launched kickoffboost.com rather prematurely not having any idea that I would get this much traffic. I started coding for kickoff boost the day I read Paul Graham's post "Do things that do not scale" and basically just built a front page with DB hook to showcase products.

Right now, I am manually approving submissions. I'm working to implement a process where after approval, each product will have a "life" (say 300) and "age/clicks" (starting at 0).

When links are clicked, that product's age will be incremented, and the product will get front page space as long as age doesn't exceed life. The life/age bar will be publicly shown for each product. Once age exceeds life limit, the goes to "archived / older posts" and new products get front page view ( thinking about limiting front page to show 20 products at a time ). What do you guys think of this idea? I just want to optimize great new product's chance of discovery and I thought this would be a fair way to distribute the traffic love.

Like I said, I took Paul Graham's advice to heart and created something that really doesn't scale as of this moment. This has been extremely validating however, and now I am in overdrive to get things done. Please feel free to help me out by giving me ideas about how I can improve this.

I am really hopeful that I can turn this into something very helpful people like me who build things and often don't get the recognition they hope or deserve.

Thank's to everyone who pointed out bugs and optimization tips. I am getting to them one at a time. Thanks to everyone who submitted their products. Because of the premature launch, I cannot guarantee that I'll approve and showcase all the products just yet, but I feature all the submissions (as long as they are not troll submissions) in a just and fair way. Thank's to everyone who took the time to write to me and say that they see this as something useful. Thanks to everyone for checking it out. And thanks to PG for that essay "Do things that do not scale". I don;t know how, but the idea came to me within an hour of reading that essay.

Cheers! easymode

That's exactly what I'm working on :D

I'm planning to work all those stats into an algo that would reward better ideas.

Will keep you posted. Thanks!

Hi, I'm trying to manage lots of things right now. Kind of overwhelmed. But I just approved your request.

Would be real cool if you share what kind of traffic you got from there in a day. Thanks!

I just fixed it. Thanks so much for pointing it out!

I shared kickoffboost on hackernews just to see if anybody would be interested in this kind of thing. I'm getting so much traffic now and I was not prepared for it at all.

Thanks so much :D I'm trying to gather how many eyeballs each listing can gather, and I'm trying to optimize getting the traffic to the listings. I'll post the updates in this thread.

Thanks again :)

Hi. Thanks for checking it out :) In short, I have no idea how many eyeballs it's gonna get, but I have google analytics open and I've gotten 300+ visit since I linked it here already :D

I would love to feature your product though. I'm really glad you took the time to check it out. It'd be extra helpful to know back from you about how many eyeballs you got from kickoffboost.

You can submit your product on the site, or I can even put a posting up for you if you just give me your link :)

Cheers!

Hehe. Thank you :D. I did make the disclaimer "worst idea ever" ;)

I really like what you've done. Torrent sites never had a clean look, and you are making it first. You are trying to make the world suck less, and i dig that. keep up the good work, and I really hope you can establish a legitimate business model based on this.

Loved the info. Very informative. Thanks for sharing. We are building a web command prompt portal http://www.kaanzi.com/ . We have a working prototype out there. We've pitched the idea to a few investors, and as impressed as they are, everyone seem to have their eyes on traction. We are working to push our prototype to the next level, get real traction, and then hopefully raise money for this. Your post was very reassuring in that we are giving priority to the right problem at the moment.

Thats really great news. Just checked out the site and it's a good implementation. I'll provide more feedback.

We launched http://www.kaanzi.com/ and I shared in HN in hopes of getting some feedback. But it lasted about 10 minutes in the front page of "new" thread of HN and we only got about 30 visits total from HN.

I wonder how it works with HN :P

Anyways, it's great to see some success. Keep up the good work!

wow I really like it. We should have implemented this 404 for our startup http://www.kaanzi.com/ . Being a command prompt for the web, something like this would have blended in nicely.

Anyway, I love the concept. I think the app workfu is very interesting too. Best wishes!

I experienced this dilemma first hand. Thank you very much for explaining it clearly.

Hi.

First of all, I was wowed by the design of your app. very good job on that. I created an account and tried out some of the features. The features are great, and I think it can really help people.

Two things I would have liked to see as first time visitor:

1.) More info about what is cal, forcal, withcal, askcal. maybe in novice on planning stuff, but I am still not clear about what the differences are between these.

2.) This is not anything major but I'll give my 2 cents anyways. After signing up and clicking on the activation link, it again tells you to log in. Would be better if that extra step of logging in is avoided. As far as I know, on most sites, you are logged in after sign ups. These little things can potentially put off first timers.

Again, really good job. I'll tuning into plangr again. Don't take my advice as a must do, you clearly have put lot more thoughts into the product you are creating, and I am just a visitor. Just something to keep in mind. I am also trying to get some feedback on an app I am working on. I hope you get more quality feedback and make your already cool app a great success!

take it easy :) -easymode

Great words. I really loved reading it :) . What kind of stuff are you building?

yubnub redirects you to the services it provides. Our services gives you a true command line experience. You stay focused on the command prompt at kaanzi.

Hi jmsduran, your comment absolutely makes sense. Actually we are working to make the main shell (front page) default (no login required), and to also have a log in section integrated with FB, Twitter for optional added (settings customization) benefits.

Thanks so much for commenting on it. Maybe you can try it out again once we have the changes in place.

Hello world! Please check out our latest startup project.

http://www.kaanzi.com/

We are 3 developers from Dallas. The web has come across a long since its birth. Now we use it for so many purposes. We check emails, look for direction, check on our friends in facebook the possiblities are endless. However, all these perks come with a catch. All these information are still scattered and comes with a lot of noise.

We feel web can be browsed in a better way,with much more ease and much less noise. Kaanzi is our approach of interacting with the web. We have tried to bring many fun services under one umbrella through a bunch of fun commands. Use ‘flickr recent’ command to see all the recent uploaded pictured from Flickr. Direction command will give google direction . So, type away and let us know your thoughts, comments and concerns!!

Some of the commands in the site are still mockups.The site only supports firefox 3.6 above and chrome for now.

Interact With the web through a command shell. The product is far from finished, but we wanted to see what others thing about this project. It would mean a lot if you guys share your thoughts on this.

Thanks for trying it out. take it easy. -easymode

Thanks for sharing. I'm in a similar journey and this was very helpful and insipring to me. Wishing you success :)