On the more prosaic end of the scale:

Bingo Card Creator, circa early 2007: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/old-site/index.htm

It doesn't exactly scream "This will certainly sell a quarter million of software, allow you to quit your day job, and fund your software business."

You'd find similar things floating around if you were to look at the early history of most companies which are widely idolized in our space. Nobody ships perfection on day 1. Luckily, customers are happy to pay for imperfect things.

"sell a quarter million [dollars] of software [over 7 years], allow you to quit your day job, and fund your software business"

Glad for you that your product has given you that freedom, but I don't think there are many devs who would be comfortable quitting a day job for circa $35K gross ARR...

Edit to say: I see from the link elsewhere that you publish your numbers (kudos), and that gross mean ARR for the last 4 years is $51K, which is a passive income I wouldn't say no to! Doesn't change my position on quitting the day job however.

Honestly, BCC is kind of a mistery around here.

Old people, man. And the people who take care of old people. I know it's not typically HN target demographic, but old people need improvements in their lives, too.

Not old people. Teachers. The distinction is vitally important. BCC solves a professional problem that teachers will pay money for. It's not about entertainment.

I thought BCC was aimed at teachers? Various implementations of bingo are commonly used as teaching aids, test review games, etc.

Though I agree I'm amazed at its success. It's one of those ideas I'd have dismissed as "you could never make money doing that."

has Bingo Card Creator in fact sold 250,000 pcs.?

I meant that quote to read as "dollars." My bad. It's at somewhere north of $250k lifetime -- you can probably find it here http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month . (I don't keep tabs on it very often anymore.)

For those wondering, the relevant line: "All time $277,447.49"

While glancing at the data though, it appears something must have shifted about 12 months ago and you're on track to make a lot less than you had up through 2012.

Saturation maybe?

Search engine ranking changes is more like it. Mostly due to Google algorithm changes.

Initially, it doesn't matter how your product looks if people want it. It would be cool to see early screenshots of other popular services like LinkedIn and Dropbox. Proper credit goes to reddit user, cmdrNacho, as the link was found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1y1f3n/if_you_coul...

Personally I really enjoy reading the first entry on wikipedia for now famous sites. Especially I think facebooks first entry is charming.

Facebook: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Facebook&oldid=338...

Twitter: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Twitter&oldid=1074...

Tumblr: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tumblr&oldid=27832...

Oh whoa, I didn't realize Facebook let you see other students in your classes. I wrote a program to do that my freshmen year for your Facebook friends.

Thank you, those posts are awesome!

Google, circa 1998 (I think it was actually mid-1999):

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998

Two observations:

1. How's simple (one could say crude) these looked back in the day - yet that didn't prevent people from signing up.

2. How quickly things age online - it only takes a few years for your UI to look ancient.

Note the prominence of the Invite button on each. On Twitter it's in bright red in the header, Facebook also in the header and for Tumblr it's right below the profile.

I regret not taking a screenshot of http://skimfeed.com at the start. Then I made some DB changes and now I can't remember the colors I used. So it's all weird and orange.

Tip for startups: save! And get that DB right first time.

archive.org can help with this, too. The earliest for your site is: https://web.archive.org/web/20120908180933/http://skimfeed.c..., which is within a day of when your twitter account was created.

(although this might not be early enough and generally people shouldn't rely on archive.org caching their site.)

Yeah i've seen the archive, but that was around iteration 3. Is there anything that snapshots or caches websites that hit HN?

Couldn't find anything during a quick search.

If you do a Google image search for 'skimfeed' you'll find screenshots for when it was written up on various sites. (although images might not be as ideal as HTML the screenshots might not include what you are looking for).

Never thought to do that! Thanks.

Do you not use version control?

I started using version control later in the process. First few iterations, were live coding/happy-hacking.

yeah I'm starting to think that mkdir should be 'mkdir + cd + git init'

Why not just make mkdir an alias for git init?

Because I never read the manual and thus never used git init without being in a fresh dir, so you're right.

    alias mkdir='git init' # or mkprj, mkp, mkdirp ... ?