Nick’s Blog
- Post-Mortem: Hockey Campus App Tuesday, October 1, 2024
After the Hockey Messenger, I built another product called Hockey. Nicknamed “hyperlocal,” the Hockey Campus App was a modern spin on Yik Yak. I always pitched Hockey as Yik Yak 3.0. Why 3.0 and not 2.0? I attributed the interim step to Jodel. A German social app whose founder I first met in 2020. Yik Yak Yik Yak was an app in 2013. It was the golden age of consumer social. They pulled all the stops and launched their campus-based social app with a bus, an electric Yak that people could ride, and branded socks. Peak 2013. The app was a school-focused clone of Twitter that came with two twists: 1. You could only see posts from people within a campus-sized radius, about 1 mile. 2. Everyone was anonymous, and there were no accounts or usernames. This unique combination of features fostered a
- About Subscriptions Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Everyone loves to hate subscription pricing for software. I did, too, for the longest time. My opinion has changed, though. Now, I’m launching my first subscription-based product, and I do so with a good conscience. In this post, I want to explain why. I built the Unlimited Clipboard History App because I had previously purchased a competing product. That product had a single-time payment for purchase, and users celebrated it in the app store for that fact. So many people wrote a review, saying they love the fact that they can buy this product instead of subscribing to a different app—presumably Paste. But here lies the problem. I bought this app and have used it for about two years. I ran into a handful of issues, and I reported all of them to the developer. Some got fixed, some didn’t. S
- Post-Mortem: Hockey (Messenger) Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Image: Our competitor gets a nice pay day. I used the brand name Hockey for three things: a messenger I started building in 2022, the C-Corp that’s the legal vehicle for my freelancing, and a social app I built in early 2023. This post is about the first one: the Hockey messenger. Before leaving Pineapple in September 2022, I had a Zoom call with Eric Migicovsky. Former founder of the Pebble smartwatch, YC partner, and now CEO and founder of Beeper. Beeper is an app I didn’t believe was possible until I saw their landing page. A messenger app for your phone that combines all of your texts and inboxes into one app. They were compatible with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Signal, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin All your texts in one inbox. It sounded like magic! Eri
- Post-Mortem: Späti Guide Sunday, September 15, 2024
After all the interpersonal drama, we’ll have something more light-hearted today. Späti Guide is a compass that always points its needle to the closest “Späti” still open. According to Wikipedia, a Späti is an East German convenience shop in cities like Berlin, known to operate late at night past the usual shopping hours. As such, it’s frequented by Berliners like myself in 2021 to grab a late-night snack or drink. I recommend Sterni, which offers insane value at 0.50€ for 17oz in 2021. Mileage after COVID-19 inflation may vary. Product Learnings I decided to build this app because Google Maps had terrible information on all the Spätis in Berlin at the time. You had to search through five different search terms to find all the stores that might fall under the term Späti, and even then, the
- Post-Mortem: Pineapple Thursday, September 12, 2024
My work on Pineapple started as a contractor writing the iOS app. Over time, we talked more about my becoming a full-on co-founder. Even though my equity never vested and I left the project before becoming a shareholder, my work on Pineapple was substantial enough to include in this list. I think Jared would agree. The Product Pineapple is a way to have an honest face-to-face conversation with four strangers. It pairs you into a room with four other people to discuss topics and answer questions. There’s a feed of conversation starters, and as soon as you answer the question, your answer becomes a part of a group of five total strangers. Now, the five of you are on a journey to discuss and answer more questions together. All answers are recorded as selfie videos of you talking to the camera
- Post-Mortem: Bubble Tuesday, September 10, 2024
I wish I had more of a break to reflect on the traumatic experience of getting kicked out of my startup before Bubble happened. Julius and Frank were looking for a technical founder for their startup less than three months after the previous breakup. That made it a rushed decision to determine if I was done with startups because of this negative experience or if I wanted to give it another shot. Luckily, even under time pressure, I made the right call and decided to become Bubble’s third founder. Bubble was a video reaction app that allowed you to create picture-in-picture reaction videos. It sounds like a carbon copy of Dub, and it’s close, but the core functionality worked a little differently. Bubble lets you post a social media video to places like TikTok, where you see your face as a
- Post-Mortem: School Night Tuesday, September 10, 2024
After building Dub and Knok together, School Night was the most extensive app my then co-founder and I worked on together. The product idea came straight from our advisor, NYC-based entrepreneur and sports expert John Brennan. He had most of the core idea written down in a document, and we followed it to a tee. It was the time of ClubHouse’s over-subscribed TestFlight launch with over 10,000 active users. All of Silicon Valley was wasting the first three months of the pandemic away on this app, and it seemed that for a brief moment, serendipity was back on the menu. You ran into people in ClubHouse rooms you hadn’t spoken to in decades, and it became a highly active third-place online. The community was pre-filtered for an interest in emerging tech and new apps. Many founders, builders, an
- Post-Mortem: Knok Monday, September 9, 2024
The second product I worked on in 2019 was Knok. Knok grew out of believing that how we use our phones to talk to the most important people in our lives is deeply flawed. It all started when my co-founder and I walked through Midtown to get something to eat. He had a product idea: “We should build a social media network for your own family,” he said. What a stupid idea, I thought. One week later, this product idea made some ex-Facebook engineers very rich. They built Cocoon and raised quite a bit of VC money for it. It was exactly what my friend had proposed: a private social media network just for you and your closest people. With this newfound belief in our ability to predict the future and generate ideas that reflect the spirit of the times, we built Knok, a text-based messenger that fi
- Post-Mortem: Dub Sunday, September 8, 2024
It is the job of the entrepreneur to build many unsuccessful products. That is until one of them turns out to capture an audience and work out. Work out in a way where it’s both a financially and spiritually sound decision to keep working on one thing and to give this thing your all. Until then, however, it’s all about iterating. It’s all about throwing things at the wall until something sticks. I’m sure there are tons of people out there who will say otherwise. People who work on the same products for years and years until they’ve perfected them and turned them into something that works well enough. I’m not that kind of entrepreneur. I am very attached to all of my ideas—until I’m not, And until I move on and find the next thing to obsess over. This post is the beginning of a series of po
- Why strand.spreen.co is Now Offline Thursday, June 20, 2024
Thank you for navigating to strand.spreen.co I appreciate everyone who got some use out of this archive for the short time it existed. The TL;DR of this post is that the NYT sent me a copyright notice that I will comply with. The website is now shut down. Keep on reading for a bit of a backstory, drama, and some lessons. I want to take a moment to discuss three things: the developments that I suspect has lead to the NYT shutting this site down, what you might be able to learn from it, and what’s next. Copy Cats Only a week after I finished this passion project and made it free for everyone on the internet to use and play, I realized that at least three domains were popping up on Google. All being called something along the lines of new-york-times-strands-archive.to I was not affiliated wit
- Building a Stunning Portfolio Website with AI-Powered Tools Monday, May 6, 2024
As a developer, having a compelling portfolio website is crucial for showcasing your skills and attracting potential clients or employers. In the past, creating a visually appealing and informative portfolio required significant time and effort. However, with the advent of AI-powered tools and innovative platforms, the process has become much more streamlined and accessible. In this article, I’ll share my experience building a stunning portfolio website using a combination of cutting-edge tools. The first step in creating my portfolio was to gather all my projects and decide on a visually appealing layout. That’s where Bento came in. Bento.me is a fantastic platform that allows you to create a grid-based layout for your projects, making it easy to showcase your work in an organized and aes
- Introducing JSON.swift Sunday, April 21, 2024
TL;DR: Link To GitHub A Streamlined JSON Parsing Library for Swift Developers As a Swift developer, you’ve likely encountered the challenges of working with JSON data in your projects. While Swift is a powerful and expressive language, its built-in JSON parsing capabilities leave much to be desired. That’s why I’m excited to introduce JSON.swift, a hobby project that aims to simplify JSON parsing in Swift and make your development experience more enjoyable. JSON.swift is a lightweight library that provides a clean and intuitive way to access parsed JSON values. With JSON.swift, you can say goodbye to the cumbersome and error-prone process of navigating through nested dictionaries and arrays. Instead, you can access JSON values using a simple and expressive syntax. One of the key features o
- @spreen/dynamo-objects: Type-Safe DynamoDB Objects in TypeScript to Write Code Faster and Safer Monday, March 18, 2024
TL;DR: Link To GitHub DynamoDB DynamoDB, an AWS-managed NoSQL database, excels in delivering fast, scalable performance ideal for modern serverless architectures. It supports diverse applications, from mobile to IoT, with its capability to manage high-velocity data workloads efficiently. Its serverless approach allows developers to concentrate on application development, free from infrastructure concerns. With robust access control and AWS integration, DynamoDB stands out as a top choice for building scalable, modern serverless applications. Using string-based commands for DynamoDB poses risks to code quality due to the lack of type safety, increasing the likelihood of typos and logic errors that go undetected until runtime. This approach undermines TypeScript’s benefits, such as compile-t
- Get started with Fargate on AWS: HTTPS Ingress Monday, August 8, 2022
We recently made the switch from GKE to EKS. While both use Kubernetes under the hood, the experience is vastly different. GKE offers more visual interface guidance while Amazon seems to provide more documentation resources like their new video show ‘containers from the couch’. One of the first challenges you’ll come across with either platform is the experience of linking your domain to your k8s cluster. Ideally, you don’t want to deal with any certificates and SSL traffic yourself, and in theory, there’s always a fully hosted solution by your cloud provider. In reality, you might struggle with load balancers on either the network or the application layer, you might have difficulties getting any higher-level protocols like HTTP2 and WebSockets to work, and getting the cloud provider to ac
- Can Computers Think? Wednesday, May 10, 2017
1 Introduction The question of whether a machine - specifically a computer - can think is older than computers themselves. Especially in the mid-20th century, as the possibilities for programming artificial intelligence flourished, many voices emerged who believed they had found the answer to the question. In this essay, I would like to provide a brief historical outline of the discussion and then draw some personal conclusions. Since the scope here is by no means sufficient to provide even a glimpse, the reader is encouraged to pursue a more comprehensive examination of the subject in [7]. 2 The Beginning ”I PROPOSE to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?‘” — [9, p. 433] This is how A.M. Turing begins in 1950. Subsequently, the question is defined by Turing in various ways and the