I founded logotournament.com in 2007 when I didn't even know what a two-sided marketplace was. I only learned many years later that this was considered hard[1]. Luckily, as a self-funded, solo-founder I had no idea it was hard, so I launched my side project anyways. It's done roughly $25,000,000+ USD in sales since.
At the time I was a partner in an ecom firm (few guys and a small warehouse), and I needed a new logo every week or two, so I had the initial demand covered. Acquiring customers is at least 3 orders of magnitude more difficult than acquiring designers.
I launched a private vbulletin forum and invited about two dozen designers from a handful of forums. I posted my first logo contest with a prize of $200 IIRC. I offered $25 each to the first 4-5 people that submitted, to get the ball rolling and building some initial trust. And just like that I had my first successful logo contest. Over a few months I would host a contest 1-2 times a month, and would manually message each designer when there was a new one.
In parallel I started development of the actual site. When it was time to launch, I manually imported the vbulletin logo contests, and kicked things off with a single contest that I was hosting. That site still wasn't a living breathing thing yet, until I had an actual customer that wasn't me. So I burned about $1800 on adwords over a month, and received 3 customers where I made maybe $100 in fees. A rough start, but running nevertheless. After that I was able to get Facebook ads working after lots of trial and error which led to the first 100 customers.
[1] It's not that the actions were hard, it's that a successful result had a low probability.
I’m working on a name generation tool that uses 83 structured naming methods. Examples: React (Verb-based), Vue (Obsolete English), Facebook (Compound), Netflix (Portmanteau), Lyft (Creative Misspelling), Alexa (Personal First Name), etc.
I wasn’t happy with the slop generated by the overly general name generators or my own prompting/brainstorming. I went on a tangent and read the top (5) books on naming from Amazon. From there I was able to create very specific and detailed prompts which started producing consistently good names, the odd great one, and a small amount of crud.
Eventually this escalated from a large spreadsheet of detailed prompts to a side project.
Please give it a try, I’d be happy for any feedback on this early version. (I recommend the options tabs for some granular tweaking)
(The name was inspired digital music samplers where there is a lot of rapid experimentation and tweaking similar to this app)
Mid 40s and I can do short tests on Monkeytype at about 145+ WPM with 100% accuracy when conditions line up. My regular daily typing speed is quite a bit lower though.
I use a split ergo keyboard, blank key caps, and correct fingers for every key. I highly recommend all three.
My ideal keyboard would be taking a Magic keyboard (in black or space gray) and splitting it into two. This is the closest I have seen. I'm too committed to a standard layout to go ortho linear at this point, but I admit it looks the most sleek and modern for sure.
> My ideal keyboard would be taking a Magic keyboard (in black or space gray) and splitting it into two.
Me, too. I feel there's a lot of us who want precisely this. I want every key that's on the Magic Keyboard. I already have a number of other Karabiner bindings, like the Hyper key, so I'm adding "layers" that way.
It's being used to this day (or until very recently, at least) in some countries, generally running under dosbox because DOS software can no longer run natively in modern PC OS's.
At the time I was a partner in an ecom firm (few guys and a small warehouse), and I needed a new logo every week or two, so I had the initial demand covered. Acquiring customers is at least 3 orders of magnitude more difficult than acquiring designers.
I launched a private vbulletin forum and invited about two dozen designers from a handful of forums. I posted my first logo contest with a prize of $200 IIRC. I offered $25 each to the first 4-5 people that submitted, to get the ball rolling and building some initial trust. And just like that I had my first successful logo contest. Over a few months I would host a contest 1-2 times a month, and would manually message each designer when there was a new one.
In parallel I started development of the actual site. When it was time to launch, I manually imported the vbulletin logo contests, and kicked things off with a single contest that I was hosting. That site still wasn't a living breathing thing yet, until I had an actual customer that wasn't me. So I burned about $1800 on adwords over a month, and received 3 customers where I made maybe $100 in fees. A rough start, but running nevertheless. After that I was able to get Facebook ads working after lots of trial and error which led to the first 100 customers.
[1] It's not that the actions were hard, it's that a successful result had a low probability.