HN user

makeee

740 karma

Engineer at Lexica.art

Building divjoy.com for React devs

https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland

gabe.ragland@gmail.com

Posts18
Comments253
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tallsandwiches.com 2y ago

Show HN: Tall Sandwiches

makeee
24pts10
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Show HN: Chrome extension that adds ChatGPT to every website

makeee
2pts1
divjoy.com 5y ago

Show HN: Divjoy 2.0 – Build a SaaS app in minutes

makeee
70pts24
drew.tech 6y ago

How to build side projects while employed full-time

makeee
5pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Has Coronavirus affected your online sales?

makeee
6pts2
dev.to 6y ago

Divjoy Year in Review

makeee
1pts0
divjoy.com 6y ago

Show HN: Divjoy – React Codebase and UI Generator

makeee
511pts131
usehooks.com 7y ago

Show HN: UseHooks() – One new React Hook recipe every day

makeee
4pts0
launched.app 7y ago

The Journey of Sidekiq from Open Source Tool to Over $1M Annual Revenue

makeee
4pts0
launched.app 7y ago

How a Solo Founder Bootstrapped an Open Source Tool to Over $1M ARR

makeee
3pts0
medium.com 11y ago

Choose Your Chicken. Picking Your Next Startup Idea

makeee
3pts0
medium.com 12y ago

The True Economics of Uber’s Surge Pricing

makeee
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: Shared work spaces in Portland OR?

makeee
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Advice on finding big brands to advertise on my site.

makeee
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: How can I scale up quickly? Thinking about trying EC2.

makeee
7pts22
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Review my startup - Snapza.com

makeee
6pts4
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Firefox extension for real-time notifications. Where do I start?

makeee
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Anyone want to work on this project with me? (imgfave.com)

makeee
17pts3

Oooh yes just one long connected sandwich would be amazing. You could do that with outpainting in theory but there would be some load time. Maybe for v2 lol.

I wasn't expecting this level of critique, but dammit you're right. I removed the puppy one. I'm keeping Biden though: tallsandwiches.com/biden

The value is the network and it's hard to get a person's entire network to move over at once. You're right that most people don't care about "decentralization", but they really care about not losing access to their account, avoiding hate/bullying, and many other things. A Mastodon type decentralized platform where you join the server that best aligns best with your interests/needs is one way to solve this. More friction though, so not sure on what will win out.

I built something that I wanted and knew I would have paid for: https://divjoy.com ($5-10k/month)

If I was looking for a side hustle now I'd 100% be playing with GPT-3/ChatGPT and building small tools. There's a good chance your first few experiments won't catch on, but that you'll end up being in the right place at the right time, see an opportunity, and already have the code/knowledge to get an MVP out quickly.

I run https://divjoy.com, a react codebase generator. Essentially a boilerplate you can customize before exporting your code. It's been a nice business for me over the past few years. As always, the challenge is marketing and differentiating yourself from the numerous free options. Good luck!

Found early adopters for https://divjoy.com by tweeting out some screenshots of the private beta to my ~1k or so followers at the time and asking if anyone wanted early access. Also started writing some short blog posts about React.js (related to my product) and tweeted those out as well + cross-promoted from the blog to my product.

You're going to need to get 1000+ people to hit your site to get 100 beta users so just try to get some exposure in any relevant community you can. Asking for advice is a great way to share your product without coming off as too spammy, so I'd update your post with a link to your product ASAP!

Stripe Crypto 4 years ago

Would you consider an artist who sells a series of limited edition prints to be morally bankrupt? How is doing this via the blockchain any different (besides catering to a customer base who prefers a digital format)?

Charge more! My product[1] was originally free, then $49, then after a year I started to bump up the price more aggressively. It's now $249 and I probably should have started with that. Devs either aren't willing to pay for boilerplate code (happy with open-source options) or $249 is nothing to them if it saves a week of dev time. Last year I hit my goal of $100k in revenue :)

1. https://divjoy.com

Why Web3? 5 years ago

This isn't any different than an artist offering a limited run of physical prints and then going back on their word. There's generally some level of trust between the buyer and the artist and if they break that trust then they hurt demand for their work. I've been following the NFT space for years and I haven't seen this issue crop up much at all.

Svelte Cubed 5 years ago

I'm sure its nice to have that glue code written for you

I think you answered your own question there. There aren't any rules dictating how many lines of code must be written before it counts as "creating something".

Founder of https://divjoy.com here. There's a lot of good options mentioned in this thread. Divjoy offers a fair amount of customizability prior to code export, allowing you to pick CRA or Next.js, specific CSS framework, Auth0 or Firebase, and other technical options. Give it a try if that sound appealing :)

I made https://divjoy.com, which was mentioned by the other commenter. I'm obviously biased, but I'd say about 95% of users I talk to say they feel it saved them significant time. Of the people that request a refund, the issue is generally that they aren't happy with the UI kit (I give them Bootstrap, Bulma, or Material UI, they want Tailwind instead) or the database integration (I give them Firestore, they really want something relational). So basically, boilerplates can save you time but make sure you're still using the appropriate tech given your project and pre-existing knowledge. Happy to answer any questions.

I was doing some contract work on the side while building the MVP, but switched to full-time right after launching it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that though.. basically burnt through all my savings over 4 months. Right as I was starting too look for more contract work I ended up winning a $15k grant from YC [0] which bridged the gap until I got to profitability. Now at around $6k - $10k/m (not recurring, so it varies).

[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...

I've been a solo-founder for the past 12 years (currently: https://divjoy.com). I use a kanban board in Notion and work about 4-6 productive hours a day on average. Some days it's 2, some days it's 12, but I don't force myself to a super strict schedule because that has led to burnout in the past.

I try to take a day off every week, but often it's random based on whether friends/wife want to do something fun on a given day.

The only exception is if I'm leading up to a big product launch and need to grind through that "last 10%". In that case switching into hyper planning mode seems to help me a lot. AMA!

I think you can validate a market exists by talking to people and looking at existing products, but you can't validate product market fit without building the product and seeing if people will pay.

I built a dev tool that helps people jump-start React development projects (think boilerplate, but way more customizable). As soon as it hit $2k/month, where I could barely live off the revenue, I felt that was product market fit for me. It was solving a problem for some amount of people and I could continue to work on it full-time. Now doing ~$6k/month.

My project is https://divjoy.com, a React codebase generator that gives you a complete web app with UI, auth, database, subscription payments, and many other small details that are annoying to build yourself.

You can customize your tech stack and play around with the built-in "low code" editor by clicking a template on the homepage (no login needed).

Feedback much appreciated!

Spent a couple years working on a Patreon competitor that did some cool things with the Instagram and Twitter APIs to unlock premium content (you pay then auto-follow their secondary private account with premium content). API changes screwed me over. Should have bailed then, but I kept trying as an undifferentiated Patreon competitor for another year without much luck. Lesson: If you have a unique twist stop trying if that twist doesn't pan out. Also beware of social network APIs.

I'm building https://divjoy.com, which gives you everything you list as part of a Node/React/Firebase/Stripe codebase. It's fairly lightweight. You handle admin stuff through your Firebase and Stripe console directly. It integrates with Stripe's hosted Checkout [0] and Customer Portal [1], so all that user-facing UI is handled by Stripe.

[0] https://stripe.com/payments/checkout

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-porta...