What's the story or motivation that led you start your company?

the story is still on-going... but, it started with just my brother and i fucking around on youtube. true story.

this snowballed into a venture-funded project... which i'm still running today.

It's really hard to start a company and make it succeed. But it seems that all the stories published on social media are from successful startups, which makes no sense. Where are the stories about people who tried and failed? Aren't all the learnings from failed experiences valuable enough? Are successful stories the only ones that can teach us how to start a company?

That's why I started working on Phoenix Down to showcase real stories from failed projects to help other makers like us to succeed.

Stackprint:
I started Stackprint as a result of a previous venture with a partner that failed after 2 years and investing hundreds of hours with nothing to show for.
After shaking off the dust I started a deeper analysis on what went wrong on my side. Going through my time logs I noticed that I spent a lot of time implementing very basic functionality like CRUD APIs, permission checks and matching client code for our web application.
Looking into existing solutions for generating APIs I found that none of them were easy to setup, fully managed and/or supported generating type-safe client code which is just a necessity for me as it makes the frontend and other backend code so much easier to write and a lot less error-prone.
With these requirements in hand I started writing my first lines of code for Stackprint about a year ago :)

Over the past few years, I've been dabbling in quite a few ideas, but I always ran into the same roadblocks - any new app I want to create has the same basic functionality that I have to write every time. Sometimes I can crib from previous apps (if I had been careful enough when writing the user auth for example) but for the most part, I was re-implementing the wheel every time.

Around the same time, I started hearing a common theme in the bootstrapper podcasts I listen to: they had finally reached a level of success where they had to go back and fix up all the shortcuts they took, adding basic functionality like user-initiated subscription cancellation or password resets instead of working on their core business.

Absolutely, you should focus your initial time on your core business, but I'm a strong proponent of the Minimum Loveable Product over the MVP, and presenting your first users with a bare-bones experience isn't a great way to be loved.

The "final straw" was that I had just left a job where I had taken a Node.js project and refactored it to within an inch of its life to use modern standards, modern libraries, and modern techniques. I had a lot of recent experience about what makes a Node.js app pleasant to work with (and what makes it unpleasant as well!) Rather than rebuild the same bare-bones skeleton every time, I could build a solid, well-implemented framework to start new SaaS apps from, and it would both scratch my itch as well as hopefully other founders as well.

Thus, Nodewood was born. I'm still finishing up the development of the beta version, but I aim to leverage the benefit of running JavaScript on the browser and the back-end to really speed up your initial time to market as well as your time developing and maintaining ongoing features.

The Problem with Meetup.com and My Vision

I believe social meetup groups are incredibly powerful to individuals and communities. I've attended and help run multiple groups over the last decade and feel like the available web tools are not as good as they can be.

Many groups turn to Meetup.com to help host a group website, but Meetup.com's execution has left many group organizers wanting more.

Meetup.com's behavior is hostile:

• Blocking organizers from accessing member data.
• Sharing member data with third party trackers.
• Allowing strangers to claim your group should you miss a payment.

In short, the tools and platform they provide are built for their interests and not your own.

We can do better. I think we can build a new platform that allows:

• A group’s website to be hosted at a domain you own and control.
• The member list to be available to the organizers and never sold to third parties.
• Modern tools that expand past the needs of a simple event calendar and truly help you execute and build a successful community.

https://blog.clubhouse.host/

I watch a lot of gaming content on twitch and youtube, and I noticed that the past couple of years there was a growing sentiment from creators that they were getting bored of games quicker and more often (the reasoning is up for debate).

This however, led to interesting innovation such as continuing to play older games but adding their own challenges to it (play through a game without using certain mechanics for example).

In the past challenges like this were often integrated into games through achievements (xbox, steam), but I also noticed fewer and fewer games were releasing with interesting or creative achievements.

So I came up with an idea where you could create your own gaming challenges, by posting a clip of you doing something and challenging others to try and do it as well (sort of a hybrid between a classic gaming achievement and a social media challenge).

I think it's a fun way to have a goal to strive for outside of the built in features of a game, and make use of the social features built into a lot of modern gaming platforms (many consoles are even adding a 'record a clip' button right onto the controller).

So about a week or so ago I finally deployed a MVP for trofy.io.

Given the amount of manpower sank into something as mundane as building and maintaining crawlers at my former job, I tried to implement and develop a more automated solution. I presented an MVP but my initiative had to navigate a lot of bureaucracy and didn t end up implemented. That's how Crawlify came to be. I wasn t keen to join the hyped-up entrepreneur life, but i knew how to solve a problem - which eventually turned me into an indie hacker :)

Lakebed.io
I built a data lake for a large insurance company. The parent company owned 14 similar sized insurance companies and mine was the only that had the analysis and dashboard capabilities and that was because of my work.
At the same time I was volunteering on government open data. The local government had paid for Tableau but was struggling to use it. They also told me it takes a full day to clean up each open data set before uploading it to the webserver as a text file.
I realized I can solve all of those problems with turnkey software and no code for the end customer. So here we are, I have a data lake solution but can't do in person demo's b/c of the pandemic lockdown.

Applicant.Fit
My wife worked for a local university and posted a part-time research assistant job. She got 100+ applications and at least 50% were foreign workers. She had no resources for easily filtering out those junk applications.
At the same time, applying for jobs I found that no one actually reads cover letters any more but they still ask you to upload one. The quality of applications is initially being judged solely on the keywords in the actual resume. There are YouTube videos out there showing you how to stuff keywords into your resume and then make the text white in order to get past these keyword filters.
I realized, let's do away with cover letters and instead ask applicants to answer first round interview questions as text input. Then we can perform AI/ML/NLP analysis in the answers to truly find the best fit.

Thanks for the opportunity to share.