from Hacker News

Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched

by notsahil on 10/16/23, 5:46 PM with 98 comments

• by Exuma on 10/16/23, 9:51 PM

  The multi-year project that never sees usage is... almost a bit of a badge of honor. I feel and know the deep pain. It's definitely not a WISE badge of honor, but I feel it's an almost much-needed lesson for the type of developer, like myself, who just becomes hyper focused and consumed... in a good way.

  When I speak about some of my past experiences, and the pain they bring, I feel like people's eyes glaze over.

  I dont think until you've spent upwards of a year on something at 10+ hours a day.... you could ever really relate.... thousands of hours, almost HALF the time they say it takes to master something, and then nothing comes of it...

  I can just say I look back on those times of my life with appreciation but also, damn does it hurt. The pain never really fades too much either. Despite all my successful projects, all my fingers in many pies, all my current success... I can't get back those multi-year projects. They were certainly required for learning, but I just feel sad and melancholy when I think back.

• by dimmke on 10/16/23, 9:21 PM

  This is an excellent blog post and the conclusion makes me feel sad. Because there are so many apps that I feel that way about. Where I just wish there was a version that was crap free. The amount of work that went into this is awe inspiring.

  I launched a much simpler iOS app, and eventually got up to around 1000 DAU organically, but ultimately closed it down because I had 1 IAP to remove ads for like $1.99 or $2.99. I was making maybe $70 a month or something, and dealing with bug reports. SwiftUI was not mature enough yet to use, so I was still using UIKit and I would constantly run into really hard to fix edge cases.

  The thing that made me throw in the towel was when Google claimed I was clicking my own ads and stopped serving them, effectively cutting off all revenue. It made me realize I'd worked so hard to build this thing, and it was all at the whims of these tech giants. Apple gets a 30% cut (this was before they dropped it to 15% if you are doing under x amount per year "because COVID") of every IAP, I make peanuts from ads and Google can turn those off for no reason with no way to appeal.

  I also wasn't trying to make a bunch of money off the app, but I needed to justify spending my time and energy on it and I just couldn't.

• by crtified on 10/16/23, 10:11 PM

  So too might think the bedroom musician of 20 years, who never performs or releases, or the childhood sportsperson who never touches a ball again after age 18. The runner who never races, the intellect which never teaches. Perhaps ultimately, under that same precept of "external production = merit", the human being who lives many decades and never reproduces. (not my belief! merely a reasoning)

  But I think such judgements are human constructs, mirrors of the biological imperative to put 'our offspring' out there in the world, these things we have gestated so long. Why should they not acquire a life of their own?? - we ask - gaining us ongoing wins in their own right, and contributing their threads to the future?

  Is serving that imperative the moral, the ethical, even the simply enjoyable pinnacle of endeavour? For some of us, yes. I'm not judging it. But for some of us .... strangely, no.

• by jollyjerry on 10/16/23, 9:33 PM

  Would you be interested in selling this project? I love the concept, and it sounds like you have customers interested in it, but aren't interested in taking on the burden of support and figuring out a business for it.

  I'm about a year in building an asset tracker (https://jch.app), but it's nowhere close in functionality or ux.

  Incredible work, amazing dive into the journey, and excited to see what comes next in rewind.ai too ;)

• by Brian_K_White on 10/17/23, 8:23 AM

  It's not all that different from the countless hours countless infinite people have spend on infinite projects that never meant much to anyone else. Like hacking on bicycles or model trains or something.

  It's just that an app can be published, documented, and archived easily like this while "all that time I spent cutting and welding weird bike parts" can't, unless you do it all on youtube, which a lot of people do, and that does serve some purpose but does also kind of miss the point a bit trying to turn a passtime and personal persuit into some kind of product with a goal other than itself.

  Anyway, I don't mean to suggest there is anything wrong with a post like this. You don't sound like you're complaining or upset, just what you said at the top "I just want to document this somewhere somehow". Most of my own github is just the same.

• by bicx on 10/16/23, 10:25 PM

  This post scares me because I see so much of myself in it. I can get really wrapped up in the building of a great product, deeply absorbed in the identity of being a craftsman, and grossed out by the “soulless” approach of quick-and-dirty MVPs and iterative market testing. If you’ve ever visited the r/SaaS subreddit, it is the antithesis of what I enjoy about being a software developer. However, if I can manage to change my mentality about market testing and quick, dirty iteration, I know that provides a much better foundation for letting loose and focusing on the craft.

• by mndgs on 10/16/23, 8:59 PM

  I feel you... I'm still building a banking backend(core, accouting, clients, accounts, payments (sepa + cards), notifications (servicenow-like), sanctions screening, risk/monitoring engine, event flow, reporting), 5 years and counting... Beginning to wonder if I'm crazy or stupid to take on this gygantic undertaking.. and we're yet to design a landing page. With smth like 150k LOC...

• by mromanuk on 10/17/23, 12:27 PM

  Recently I read that Leonardo DaVinci was a huge procrastinator, with an enormous queue of unfinished projects. I always admired him for being so successful on so many things and different areas, but after knowing this, it changed my perspective that procrastinating is a part of us, the creative people. You can frame it is a failure, but it's also possible to reframe it as part of the process. In the end, we enjoy building stuff.

• by paxys on 10/16/23, 11:18 PM

  He basically took the conventional advice – build an MVP, launch quickly, iterate – and did the exact opposite.

• by catoc on 10/16/23, 8:56 PM

  What a great blog about a fantastic looking side project! Engaged I went on reading, and stumbled on rewind.ai, that too looks great! Privacy obviously being a crucial issue for something as potentially invasive - continuous automatic screen and audio recording - questions came up browsing the ‘Privacy first’ section:

  “Encrypt your data using FileVault - Apple FileVault works with Rewind. With it enabled your data is encrypted.”

  Is there anything Rewind does to make Apple FileVault ‘work with Rewind’? Or is this the general disk encryption that works for everything and anything? Serious question. I want to use rewind but this may be interpreted as gratuitous.

  Same feeling when reading “only relevant text-based data is sent to the cloud and is encrypted in transit.”

  Does ‘Encrypted in transit’ refer to standard TLS encryption? Again, serious question. Rewind looks great, I just need to be able to trust it.

• by corentin88 on 10/16/23, 9:36 PM

  I thought at first that this guy was more focused on building vs shipping. And that was likely the main reason why he stopped yet another side project.

  But this guy is now behind Rewind.AI so he probably knows a bit about shipping! Kudos for sharing your journey

• by teacpde on 10/16/23, 9:06 PM

  The blog post speaks quality, but what's truly great is that the author knows when/why to stop the adventure.

• by htk on 10/17/23, 4:13 PM

  I joined the first batch of TestFlight betas for this app. The UI was interesting if a bit over engineered, I understood that it was sort of a playground for the creator to experiment with UI interactions and animations.

  I reported a handful of bugs/suggestions. Never heard back from the developer.

• by silenced_trope on 10/17/23, 3:55 AM

  Damn - as a dev who hates doing UI and animation this app looks amazing, something I would never have the patience to build.

  Congrats on the project! Even if not launched!

• by xavi on 10/16/23, 10:47 PM

  There’s a lot of work there! I’ve also developed a portfolio tracker as a side project ( https://finarky.com/ ). It’s much simpler, minimalistic (that’s how I like it), and at the same time provides the Personal Rate of Return, which I miss in other more-featured and cluttered apps (with features that i don’t need).

• by swingingFlyFish on 10/17/23, 8:52 PM

  Feel proud of this man! This is really a great way to learn. You get to tinker and make mistakes and not be stressed with deadlines and management. Plus, you learn so much. I have my own multi-year project that I tinker with in between jobs and every now and then.

  I'm a backend dev so I've focused on that mostly and haven't created an app but I can honestly say that things I've learned have not only made me a better programmer but allowed me to shine at some jobs where others didn't have a clue.

  Keep going - if that's what you want - but wear your accomplishment as a badge of honour. Feel free to connect with me as well.

• by quickthrower2 on 10/16/23, 8:56 PM

  Qudos to the author for putting so much effort and polish into the original project. Amazing how they kept motivated for all that time without it being out there and being used.

• by webworker on 10/17/23, 1:23 AM

  Relatable.

  I built a working concept of a mobile app and pitched it with a friend to FUTO for one of their grants. Project got declined, and the 2 months I spent developing it in every spare moment ended up going nowhere.

  The failing to land a grant kind of killed enthusiasm. Project still builds, and oddly it’s still a viable concept. But it remains locked away in the confines of my SSD. :|

• by habosa on 10/17/23, 5:04 AM

  That’s an exceptionally beautiful app and you should be proud to have built it. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a business or not.

• by phendrenad2 on 10/17/23, 4:48 PM

  I also looked into creating a stock tracking app. I wanted to let people simulate what their gains would have been if they had sold/held/bought at a certain point in time. But... yes, the publicly-available APIs are dogshit, and the paid versions are out of reach of mortals.

• by flashback2199 on 10/17/23, 6:09 AM

  There is this belief out there that there is an either-or relationship between quality and time, but it isn't so. The quality-time tradeoff is not a straight line and there is in fact an optimal point between the two. I wish more people embraced this. There is so much bad software.

• by SergeAx on 10/17/23, 8:15 PM

  My goodness. The guy put in at least a man-year of design, product management and software engineering, which is no less than $250k US market value, and somehow dumped it because of 499 USD/month bill for the finance data, the foundation of the service.

• by pgraf on 10/17/23, 9:51 AM

  Really impressive for a side project! However, it also feels wasteful to just let go of it after so many work hours invested… How about open-sourcing it? Even if only one person picks it up for personal use it’s better than just rotting-bits on your hard drive

• by roberdam on 10/18/23, 11:45 AM

  One of the best posts I've seen in a while presenting a product , the details of the smartphone appearing on the right, and the "interactive" video header makes the post a template to present products. Kuddos!

• by m3kw9 on 10/17/23, 12:59 AM

  Man I thought as soon as you went custom UI modules, you are screwed because it’d take 10x longer than to leverage what Apple have built. But it looks like a Herculean effort to get the entire app and back end out all on your own.

• by m3kw9 on 10/17/23, 2:10 PM

  Just had an idea you could use. 1. Have your app allow people to Bring their own data source, if thats possible. 2. Just release it as is but just limit it to Nasdaq, SP500, Amex, and main indexes. (80/20).

• by peter_retief on 10/17/23, 8:04 AM

  Good looking app, I am guilty of the same crime,in fact I am a serial offender in not getting my apps to market, always get busy with something else when it is time for the critical phase of launching. Maybe this time?

• by shantnutiwari on 10/17/23, 1:22 PM

  >Overall, it feels like no one in this cares to cater to the developer and startup crowd, or they believe there's not much money for them to pursue there.

  Is this then a good idea for a VC or YC funded company?

• by Fauntleroy on 10/16/23, 9:43 PM

  This is a bit off topic, but I feel like I need to appeal to the author—please do not spam my browser history just for scrolling down the page. This effectively "breaks" the back button in the browser.

• by al_be_back on 10/17/23, 1:59 PM

  perhaps the author is being a little cheeky with us, but he did launch his app and website, he even got ~1000 users, it's just that it didn't pick-up and grow, so he decided to tank it; sensible move. most projects die early on, it's better to close it sooner than later in cases like this.

  From a startup project point of view, this project has way too much functionality (ui activity), without much user-base. No doubt a cool engineering project though - nicely done.

  p.s. I never wrote this message :P

• by RockyMcNuts on 10/17/23, 2:41 AM

  kudos!

  I was wondering if maybe the state of data feeds has changed, seems like there are so many competing data feeds now - https://docs.openbb.co/terminal/usage/guides/api-keys

  but one does wonder if they are same quality as expensive professional feeds like bloomberg, keeping up with splits and ticker changes etc.

• by umitkaanusta on 10/18/23, 5:46 PM

  I remember Stocketa - it was an awesome app. A few people even try to simplify portfolio tracking while the demand is huge

• by cyral on 10/16/23, 11:37 PM

  Seriously some of the best UI I've ever seen. The animations just feel so satisfying.

  Market data is extremely complicated and I've seen so many get fooled into thinking it's easy. It's understandable, if you can google any stock and get the price, you'd assume the data is free or public domain or something like that right? Maybe a small fee at most to power an API to get it. For those wondering, it tends to go like this:

  You look into it and it's not quite so simple... the exchanges, like most financial services, are stuck in the past... but theres a cool website called IEX that is "revolutionizing" market data and can provide stock data for fairly cheap.

  It looks like your idea might work, until you realize something is off with IEX's data. The prices aren't very accurate. Well it is accurate actually, only for stock trades that take place on IEX. Not NASDAQ. Not NYSE. Turns out the price of a stock that users expect is actually the last trade across ALL of the major stock exchanges.

  Surely there is a way to get the "consolidated" price that reflects all exchanges? Not just IEX's measly 2% of volume? There's what is called the "consolidated tape" which is just that. Wait just kidding. It's "consolidated" but requires you enter into agreements with two separate organizations called CTA and UTP, also known as SIPs (security information processors). These are the only companies allowed to license the data, so they set the prices extremely high, starting at thousands of dollars per month.

  Well, maybe you could deal with that if your app gets enough traction. There's more though... you can't actually get the data from CTA or UTP. You have to have a "vendor" do it for you, and pass on the data. The vendor is essentially a wrapper around the SIP that handles distributing the data to end-companies (not end-users, because realistically very little individuals can afford this, and vendors aren't too interested in dealing with individuals). Since the vendor focuses on the distribution, you'd assume their API would be top-notch. Instead you can tell it's built upon layers and layers of technical debt and edge cases. Oh well.

  So, you then pay for the licenses from the SIPs, and the data from the vendor. You are now burning at least 10k a month. You get your first user, and they complain they can't find "SPX", the largest stock index in the world. Oops. It turns out indices, futures, options, and other securities, are all separate SIPs. You have to deal with even more backwards organizations to get licenses for each type of security. Don't forget the vendor wants another couple thousand for each SIP, more if you need realtime streaming or historical charting. Maybe just get indexes since they are popular? Indexes are once again spread across tens of organizations, depending on who owns the IP for the index. At this point you give up and just focus on U.S. stocks for now, until you get more funding.

  Then one day, you are selected for a "random" audit by the SIP. They ask for personal information on every user you have, and claim that some users are actually financial professionals (such as a CFA or stock broker). They try to fine you 50x the price you expected because some users happen to have the same names as professional traders. (They charge a massive amount per professional trader vs per "ordinary" person) You have to deal with explaining what that even means and why it's important to your users to try to avoid this fine. Maybe your application was used on TV, or over the phone, or even on an elevator. There are different licenses for that. Ridiculous? Well, the SIP is authorized by the SEC to distribute the data, and enforce it. You have no upper hand in any negotiation.

  To be continued in blog post someday maybe

  FWIW, your new project already has some good traction. I've heard about it before (not sure where, but I 100% remember seeing it)

• by webninja on 10/18/23, 5:32 PM

  I think you can get free stock data from Tradier after creating an account.

• by bgdkbtv on 10/17/23, 1:05 AM

  If you release this app, I will buy it as soon as it is available.

• by cchance on 10/18/23, 3:21 AM

  Holy crap thats a sharp looking app and blog post