Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

• newscatcher

  20 2,895 0.0 Python

  Programmatically collect normalized news from (almost) any website.

We’re ~17k MRR right now. Being doing it for almost 2 years.

What made us take off is I and my cofounder running through our savings. I did it for ~15 months.

One thing I had to start doing earlier is not trying to get everyone buy our product (we sell news articles published online as a source of data for insight mining) [0]

I’ve lost so much time on people who’d never be able to use what we have unless we completely change our product.

And yeah, marketing is super important. And, it’s going to take some time.

[0] https://newscatcherapi.com

• imba

  45 6,230 9.5 JavaScript

  🐤 The friendly full-stack language

  

On a side-note, thank you very much for creating and releasing Imba! It's a joy to write apps with it and I can put things out so much faster.

https://imba.io

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• Next.js

  2,041 120,572 10.0 JavaScript

  The React Framework

  

Not exactly correct or incorrect. Some projects built as a single page app (SPA), using a fancy framework like React or Angular with little configuration, end up loading all DOM content client side via javascript which has a number of drawbacks on performance and SEO.

It doesn't have to be that way though. If you want to use React, there are tools to help you easily make something like a static site generator (SSG) which will transform your React code down into pre-rendered HTML pages. Two popular ones are Gatsby (https://gatsby.dev/) and Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) which also supports Server Side Rendering (SSR).

So out of the box plain HTML / CSS might be more optimized than a fresh create-react-app repo, but if you prefer to use the toolset provided by React to build your site (or Vue or Angular, etc), there are plenty of options to make that equally performant.

Suggest a related project