Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' Manual Examples

1

CodeOcean

#Text Editors #IDE #Programming 3 social mentions

2

Photo AI

To upload photos, then I manually dl'd the photos and uploaded them to the GPU Pic 2 is current version as a web app after 1Y: 100% automated, 1850 customers @ $79K MRR, renamed to http://photoai.com.

#Profile Picture Generator #Image Generator #AI 14 social mentions

3

Bootify.io

For Spring I find https://bootify.io does a great job of generating DB, models, CRUD frontend+backend. Not open source but the basic variant is free (and I mean really free to use, no registration, just use it) and the code generated is reasonable for further development.

#Application Generator #SaaS #Spring Boot 16 social mentions

4

Lugg

At Lugg (https://lugg.com) we did a few things that would not scale. - My co-founder and I did all the Luggs ourselves in trucks we rented through GetAround for the first 4 months - My co-founder and I's names, pictures, and phone numbers were hard coded into the app as the crew to fulfill the Lugg before we had crews or proper dispatching - We launched without payments and would charge customers with a Square reader at the door - Most mornings we would camp out in the IKEA parking lot in Emeryville, CA and approach their customers that were struggling to get their purchases in their cars and pitched them that we would deliver their items if they downloaded the app and made a request - In the early days we didn't have operating ours and anyone could request a Lugg at anytime and my co-founder and I would hope in our rented truck and do it A few months in we did a Lugg for someone that new Sam Altman and made an intro to him for us. We met him for coffee, shortly after had a YC interview, and was later accepted in the S15 batch.

#Transportation #Home #On-Demand Delivery 24 social mentions

5

Enchant

At Enchant (https://enchant.com): - We launched without billing. Early customers used the product for free until we eventually built out billing - We offer data imports from competitors. It's a semi-automated process - sometimes there's existing working code, sometimes it needs tweaking, sometimes it gets written as part of the process. Either way, it's a win if it helps someone make a purchase decision. - We manually reach out to customers when a feature they voted for is released. This is also a great opportunity to gather further feedback.

#Help Desk #Customer Support #Customer Service 4 social mentions

6

Label LIVE

I bought a hundred different label printers off eBay/amazon so I could reverse engineer and test all the different protocols. Now my app works with most label printers on the market and manufacturer’s send new models to me without even asking. I personally answer every support email. My wife once asked me how many customers I had. Then she asked how many email support emails I’ve handled over the same time period. They were about equal (5 figures over 5 years)! https://label.live/.

#Design Tools #Office & Productivity #Image Marketplace 15 social mentions