I'm working with a game studio that's self-hosting their most recent game (Cyber Knights: Flashpoint)'s wiki for the first time: https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/

It's going well content-wise, but it's insane how hard it's been to get it ranking in search results at all, much less outrank Fandom.

I canceled Soylent a couple of years ago after two silently-failing billing errors within a year and a rude customer service response. Looking for replacements, I ended up going with Huel.

It's been fine; I have had a couple of bad batches (too salty / bitter), but they replaced them. Switching from Soylent's ready-made drinks to Huel's mix-with-water powder was a small adjustment, but Huel's shaker bottle makes it easy. Soylent was fine unflavored for me (I'd describe it as "cheerio milk"), but with Huel their "original" flavor wasn't doing it for me so I've been ordering the chocolate. It's 1g of sugar, which doesn't bother me.

I'm just using it for a daily breakfast shake. I've never been that hungry in the mornings so can't comment on if you'll feel sated by it, but it works for me as a way to get some easy nutrition.

I'd encourage you to expand the book-promoting paragraph to include a bit more info / some interest-generating hooks about what the book offers that the article itself hasn't already provided.

If you really want to make this model sustainable long-term I might even make the recommendation paragraph dynamically customized based on referring source (here's a WordPress plugin that would let you do this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/if-so/). History enthusiasts are likely to be intrigued by a different set of things from the book than HN's business & systems-thinkers or an RPG community interested in world-building inspiration.

Lots of people will read a general-interest article (quick & no cost), but to get conversions to an actual sale, you need to target specific interests.

Great, thank you for the tips.

Well for one, the trend is hugely toward people consuming media on mobile devices, where resources like processor power and battery life are much more limited and unsuited to effective crypto mining than even a standard PC is.

Why do you feel it didn't really generate revenue?

What would you do differently if you were going to do it again?

Neither my business partner nor I are any good at marketing. And we didn't like how most sites put so much pressure on their users to buy things, click ads, share with friends, send out marketing emails, etc...so the things we DID put in were kind of halfhearted, and always out of the way.

We tried selling the data (amazing data if you think about it!!). Anonymous of course! And/or selling the recommendations (easy enough since everything was organized by UPC/ISBN). But that's something it seems like you need to know people -- CEO's/CTO's of bigger companies. We just didn't have the connections, nor the personalities to kiss that much ass. But we tried for several years. I think they're all of the mindset that they've got "good enough" data on their own...or two guys in their garage are too small peanuts to trust. It's funny that just this week Amazon had a post here about it's 20th year of recommendation engine, ~yey~ -- and they still can't get it right (sour grapes? yeah...).

If we were to do it again, we'd probably focus on core functions (the site did A LOT). And seriously work on marketing aspects. Not dark patterns (https://darkpatterns.org/) but more organized and focused efforts.

Honestly though, if we did it again, it would not be for the money - it would be for a cool product and for our own fun...maybe integrate with Kodi...

We'd be smarter on hosting. We were at Rackspace first for $30k/mo...then realized we were being hoodwinked and found PEER1 for $1200/mo...then realized we could get away with a $300/mo DO droplet by converting everything to open source and optimizing -- granted over the course of the 8-10 years, tech improved. But, no more MSSQL, no paid search engine (we ended up on Solr -- AMAZING!), no Windows and just all open-source. I ran our recommendation engine on my computers at home and uploaded results from there. As with hosting, I think the open source stack has improved a lot.

Smarter on who we hire for PR - I got all our serious PR (Mashable, LifeHacker, Makeuseof, etc). We spend about $30k on snake-oil PR companies. Our first PR company took $20k and literally did nothing (not even a press release blast or PDF) - but suing would cost us way too much time/money so we ate it and went to another referral - who did the job, but it ended up more or less a pointless exercise.

After all that time, going into personal debt -- with creditors calling at all hours, no income in sight, thousands of hours devoted to it, alienating friends and family borrowing from them to survive, we finally decided to call it quits.

Could you talk a bit about what you've done to promote it? Or has it been a hands-off, 'whatever traffic the marketplace provides organically' kinda thing?

I'm curious if other assistive software solves this need at the OS level, or if you other similar tools are already known to the community that it would be useful for.

Windows has built-in speech control that lets you scroll and click, doesn't it?

Would you be able to spend four weeks in Boston?

We have an EdTech accelerator here, LearnLaunch, with a program specifically for scaling startups that are already growing after achieving product-market fit: http://learnlaunch.com/x/#programs

The Name of the Wind, and The Wise Man's Fear -- great fantasy books by Patrick Rothfuss.

I just finished reading these for the first time and am disappointed to learn that the 3rd book was at the finished manuscript stage 4 years ago, but still no 3rd book :[

Hey team, it'd be nice if the landing page actually explained what the software is, not just the benefits of it. Is it an embeddable video player (and if so what am I being asked to download) or is it a desktop video player (and if so how is it different from VLC?).

Mostly I just found the landing page confusing. It took a bit to see that the page wasn't scrolled down you just have half a screenshot, "video player that loves the internet" doesn't really tell me anything, and nope, that play button doesn't do anything either that's just part of the logo. =/

Good points (you're not the first trying to scroll up, we will fix that).

Maybe we made the mistake on focusing too much on the app itself and not enough on the website :)