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Ask HN: Need an advice – continue with the project or open source the code?
1 points by AlexLa 4369 days ago
Hi Guys,

I need your advice. Some time ago I built myself a boomarking webapp. It wasn't feature rich. Just something which helps to save a link from my phone and open it on my laptop later. The problem for me where solved.

Later I saw the pocket app came out, read a post about pinboard.in and I though, if people actually paying for these services, I could add some features to my app and release it. I redesigned it( you know what happens when dev is trying to design :) ) and wrote some. But now reading about all the stuff people building I don't see this project is valuable anymore.

It's now at the point where it saves your links via a browser bookmarklet, downloads the page in background on the server and uploads saved pages to the google cloud storage. Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/kfmc0

The question is: what do you think I should do with the project? Do you see some potential in it? I mean, how do you think, can I add some functionality, put a monthly price on it and get some customers (Note: My marketing skills are even worse than my english), or should I just open source the potentially useful modules ( for example, full page download ) and release them on github and NPM ( the whole thing is written in node.js btw)?

1 comments

figure out what you want out of it first, then it'll be obvious what you should do.

From the little info you provide it seems it might be a great test for learning a little marketing.

Thanks, you gave me some food for thought