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Kitify, my first Rails project. And some advice for non-tech founders

Hacker News

Kitify, my first Rails project. And some advice for non-tech founders

http://kitify.com I'd love to get HN's feedback on Kitify (http://kitify.com), a new service I built. Kitify makes it easy for DIY project writers to document, share and sell kits for their projects. I built Kitify because DIY is fun and a great way to learn, but actually getting the parts together for many projects is a pain; I want to solve that. This is my first Rails project. I knew how to write simple PHP scripts before this, but I had no exposure to Rails - or MVC or, actually, anything meaningfully involving objects. I had the idea for Kitify months ago, but wasn't able to move it forward with the knowledge I had. What really helped was finding a great, smart developer and asking him to write just the basic outline of the app and answer questions about it. I don't mean "rails new", I mean a working version with almost no features but with Bootstrap, useful gems, JS utility functions, models/views/controllers in the general direction of what I would eventually need. (Thank you @reedlauber!) This was affordable and time-efficient, and gave me enough momentum to start learning and building. I highly recommend this approach for non-dev founders who are intimidated by modern web frameworks but who are having trouble finding a technical cofounder. My bonus advice for people in b-school is that, if you are working on an idea that may be perceived as "niche", you will probably have to build version 1 yourself, even if you don't know anything about coding. HTML, CSS and basic JS / PHP can be learned quickly, and you definitely have time to do this. Then you should follow the advice I outlined above. Thanks for reading! I'd love hear any feedback on the idea, where I should go with it, user experience, etc.

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Hacker NewsStrong engagement from HN community · Strong signals: ide, io · Missing: https docs, excited, just released
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Product HuntOn track for Day 1 leaderboard · Strong signals: model, user, new · Missing: mac, agents, macos
57%57% predicted probability of success on Product Hunt, based on ML models trained on real launch data.
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32%32% predicted probability of success on AppSumo, based on ML models trained on real launch data.
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Acquire.comPre-revenue stage for this audience · Missing: arr, mrr, revenue
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BetaListMay not resonate with beta-testers · Strong signals: smart · Missing: web3, chat, crypto
0%0% predicted probability of success on BetaList, based on ML models trained on real launch data.

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