I was working as a corporate lawyer, and I posted a Show HN [1] before going to lunch one day. I came back and it was at #1, and it stayed there for over 12 hours. This led to a feature in Fast Company [2] and press in over 20 different languages. After winning a couple startup competitions, I quit my day job and now do BeeLine Reader [3] full-time.<p>We have 70k users on our first-party tools, plus many more on our licensed products. Our tech is licensed by the CA Public Libraries, CNET, Bookshare, and others. Our funding comes from the Intel Edu Accelerator (ICAP) as well as various awards for education and social-impact entrepreneurship [4].<p>I really appreciate the feedback from the community, which helped me understand what the market opportunity was and what our customer segments are (didn't realize how big edu would be).<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784</a><p>2: <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-you-into-an-online-speed-reader" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcodesign.com/3018118/can-colored-text-turn-yo...</a><p>3: <a href="http://www.beelinereader.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.beelinereader.com</a><p>4: see <a href="https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/" rel="nofollow">https://stanfordbases.wordpress.com/tag/beeline-reader/</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9g4uy60oc</a><p>[updated to add press and award links]
Somewhat related, it wasn't Show HN but <i>show YC</i> that turned my side-project into a business. YC's Application has the question "what have you hacked that wasn't a computer". That question compelled me to create a hack that converted a cheap ($10 in some cases) bluetooth headset into a garage door opener compatible with any smartphone. It didn't even require an App. I posted a Youtube video and then submitted my eventually rejected YC application. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAtso2tzMo</a><p>So many people watched that video they started asking me to sell the fully assembled project. Soon a polite C & D -ish letter from Samsung forced me to stop selling until I made my own hardware which I did in November of 2014.<p>5 years later I still have growth and sales. Next year I hope to make an enterprise version that would allow shipping companies to leave packages in your garage when you aren't home. I'll be sure to post that on Show HN. Regardless I owe YC a lot of gratitude as just the process of applying changed my life.
This isn't exactly a software project, but I posted in a "What are you working on?" thread three years ago about my book, <i>Statistics Done Wrong</i>: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619796</a><p>Someone posted it on the front page soon after: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675843</a><p>Now it's a book published by No Starch, has sold 25,000 copies, and has been translated into German, Korean, and Chinese: <a href="https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/</a><p>I doubt I would have finished as soon as I did without that initial attention to spur me on, and wouldn't have been able to wrangle up as much attention without that chance post on HN blowing up and bringing me visitors. (It ended up posted on Boing Boing, Metafilter, and various other places too.)<p>Now I'm a year or two from finishing a PhD in statistics and wondering if there's another book I need to write, or perhaps a second edition -- doing actual statistical work with real scientists makes the points in my book even more clear to me, and the need even clearer.
I did a Show HN for Resumonk back in 2012: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370</a><p>I was in college then and found making a well-formatted resume a huge pain when I was applying for internships. I met my Co-Founder also via that particular post and went full time on it after passing out of college.<p>We are bootstrapped, pay ourselves well and work remotely. Not sure if that qualifies as a 'big' success, but we receive these kind of comments from our users that make us super happy - <a href="https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials" rel="nofollow">https://www.resumonk.com/testimonials</a><p>Related discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863</a>
I did a Show HN for Roll20 right after launching: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532754" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532754</a><p>We now have almost 2 million users and a small team working on it full-time. I definitely originally thought it would only be a side project...
Moqups: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4222992</a><p>We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
Not shure about your definition of big but <a href="https://www.ghostnoteapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ghostnoteapp.com</a> is doing pretty well. Living in NY with a family being the sole provider it doesent work, but had we moved somewhere less expensive it probably could and i am growing both rev, userbase and product<p>Here is the original Show HN.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145007</a>
I posted an Ask HN to review my side project PCPartPicker about six years ago. Got great feedback and things grew from there. I went full-time, had to hire employees, etc. Not big like Dropbox, but we made it over the hump self-funded and without taking investment.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883123</a>
Not a show hn, but 2048 went pretty big. I don't know if this was the starting point or not; <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566</a>
<a href="http://greaterskies.com" rel="nofollow">http://greaterskies.com</a>, back in 2011 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066684" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066684</a>), personalized high-resolution maps of the sky as seen from a place and at a time.<p>Amazing how time passes. It's been more than 10 years since I started, and it is still my side project and not big by HN standards. But it is making now many times over what I make in my day job as an engineer in Cambridge, and it's been featured in The Guardian Christmas gift list this year.
Fairly certain that Segment (<a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segment-io#/entity" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/segment-io#/entity</a>) debuted on HN. The original business was failing, but they decided to give it a last shot and posted their open-sourced code from v1.<p>You can hear Peter talk about it with Aaron Harris here: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode-39-segment-founder-peter-reinhardt-mattermark-ceo-danielle-morrill" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...</a>
In 2011 I did a Show HN for a project called StorageRoom (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616041</a>) and got some interesting feedback.<p>Five years, a name change and a complete rewrite later Contentful (<a href="https://www.contentful.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.contentful.com</a>) has raised a Series B (total funding close to $20m), got ~100 employees and customers ranging from Jack in the Box, over Nike to Urban Outfitters.<p>It's been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's going to be over anytime soon :)
Cloudcraft: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722942</a><p>Show HN was the first place I posted about it, almost exactly one year ago. Today it is doing very well, used by companies large and small to visualize their AWS environments.
Don't know what your definition of 'big' is, but my open source project webhook got some attention after posting Show HN: <a href="https://github.com/adnanh/webhook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/adnanh/webhook</a><p>Anything >0 is better than 0... :-)
Countly started as a hobby like 4 years ago and it was open source (still is, most parts). Now it tracks more than 11K Android apps according to Mobbo.com, which makes Countly #7 the most used mobile analytics platform. Team is still small (<15), bootstrapped and added a lot more features on top till then. Roughly 1900 stars pn Github. Not bad ;)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969254</a>
Don't know if we count as big yet, but we're doing very very well: <a href="https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com</a>
CertSimple was announced with a 'Show HN' post ( <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210908</a> ) that led to its first paying customer. We did around 12K GBP in revenue last month and have Travis CI, CrowdCube, and Motley Fool as customers.
Virwire: <a href="https://virwire.com" rel="nofollow">https://virwire.com</a><p>Did a Show HN a few months ago, got very little 'comment' attention but still got a ton of new mobile users who have grown into a solid base. This was the only promotion to date.<p>Small bootstrapped team, Virwire is PoC of crowd curated news for millennials.
itch.io: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445029</a><p>I don't know where the big cutoff is, but it's been going strong for the past 3.5 years. There are just under 50k games on it now <a href="https://itch.io" rel="nofollow">https://itch.io</a>
Yes, we immediately got picked up by an SF accelerator, then I was able to raise a seed round from billionaire investors Tim Draper and Marc Benioff of Salesforce. Then hired a team, got an MVP out to developers and gained a ton of traction, and now we're about to launch our stable/production-ready release!<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558</a>
For our Open Source Firebase: <a href="http://gun.js.org/" rel="nofollow">http://gun.js.org/</a> !