[gnicholas]

I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time.

We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare, and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4].

I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are (didn't realize how big edu would be).

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

2: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-yo...

3: http://www.beelinereader.com

4: see https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc

[updated to add press and award links]

[hussfelt]

1. Took the test. 2. Was impressed 3. Thought to test for a while 4. Installed Chrome plugin 5. Opened facebook for some random reason 6. Page flickering!? Facebook bug? 7. Scrolled 2 times 8. Got smashed in the face by a full-page ad from Beelinereader 9. Removed plugin and will probably never install again

You really caught me. This is something I could pay for after trying out for a while. Do yourself a favour for christmas and investigate if there is any other way than smashing just recently onboarded users with an ad to raise the awareness of the fact that this is not free.

Thanks though, really, impressive tech.

[gnicholas]

We're in the middle of completely replacing our UI/UX. Last month we finally got our preferences in the right place (within the B icon instead of in a gear that floats on top of every page), and we're re-doing the onboarding. Now that we've figured out how to get things popping down from the B icon, we won't be taking up the full page anymore.

And just FYI, we don't bombard users with messages all the time—you saw the instructions and upgrade option, and there is only one other message we show this way, which is after the 30-day free trial expires. We know our UI sucks on this, which is why we don't use it to send messages or upsell all the time. Appreciate the feedback, and hope you'll try us again on Chrome, iOS, or Android (which is free, BTW).

[anexprogrammer]

Tried this and it looked really interesting, but I didn't keep it because there was no Android support. Do you have an android version yet?

I remember it styled links as well as body text which I found pretty annoying.

[gnicholas]

We do! Our Firefox/Fennec plugin is now available [1] and is free. It's not quite as polished as iOS, since it's our first version.

There's also an epub reader that has integrated BeeLine into their app. It's called ReadMe! [2] and it works with any DRM-free epubs. It's available on Android/iOS.

We do color all body text, including links. To make it clear what is a link, we always underline them. If we reverted links to a fixed color, it would be very distracting—if you've got another idea (or if I'm misunderstanding the question) let me know!

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/beeline-reade...

2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.readmei.re...

[anexprogrammer]

Neat, I'll give them a go and take another look. It'll take a miracle to get me off MoonReaderPro though!

I can't remember why it bugged me that links were being styled too, just that I was. So I'll drop something in the forum or whatever after I've had another go! :)

[gnicholas]

we'd love to work with MoonReader also!

[anexprogrammer]

I'll drop him a mail to suggest the feature. Might need a lot suggesting with the amount downloaded the app!

He's at moondownload.com if you want to start talking - it gets an amazing amount of updates for an app I thought feature complete about 4 years ago!

[samstave]

I remember this when it happened - and forgot about it... I just took the challenge and love it. Installed. Thank you

[gnicholas]

Awesome! When we did the Show HN post we only had a lowly bookmarklet, so it was easy to forget. There's now a full-fledged browser plugin, PDF plugin, iOS app, and Android (Firefox) plugin. Our most popular tool, the Chrome extension, will be getting a big update in the next couple weeks, which will enable it to run on many, many more websites automatically. Stay tuned!

[criddell]

I wish Amazon would add something like this to the e-ink Kindles.

[gnicholas]

yep, it could be done in grayscale, or they could use color e-ink (which exists but hasn't been adopted because it isn't good enough for image reproduction or fast enough for video).

In the meantime, our iPad app [1] and browser plugins [2] integrate with the Kindle Cloud Reader.

1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beeline-reader/id938026867?m...

2: http://www.beelinereader.com/install