Startup Origin Story

Comments discuss the humble beginnings of a specific startup or project, often describing it as starting as a personal side project, hackathon build, internal tool, or inspired by Hacker News/Reddit feedback before gaining traction.

📉 Falling 0.4x Startups & Business
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Activity Over Time

2007
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Keywords

MS e.g TL GeoCities github.io PR codinghorror.com CONAD MaddieFans AI started project startup id inspiration handwriting wanted initially wanted use originally

Sample Comments

random123450987 Aug 31, 2021 View on HN

What was the original startup project ?

trollied Apr 16, 2025 View on HN

Given how they started... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30011965(Today I learned)

stingraycharles Aug 14, 2018 View on HN

Wasn’t that initially written for some kind of weekend “start your own startup” hackathon?

open Jun 5, 2011 View on HN

Neither. It was originally developed as a solution to solve my own problem. The intention was never to create a startup out of it. It wasn't until a few months later that someone pointed out that I should run with it as a startup. The rest is as they say, history...

jkodumal Oct 14, 2016 View on HN

Fun fact-- it was started by one the founders of HipChat.

unreal37 Oct 6, 2012 View on HN

It sounds like it wasn't launched yet. The founders say they built it for themselves and their friends to start. Someone discovered the URL and posted it to Hacker News.They probably should have shut it down or disabled registrations once it got out until it was tested.

pg May 1, 2008 View on HN

This was actually the first YC clone. They originally started it several years ago. I'm not sure what happened; maybe it didn't take then, and now they're relaunching it.

heelhook Apr 11, 2013 View on HN

Actually, read the history of how github got started, they started exactly the way you describe: a hack put together by developers that needed that and built it as a side project without thinking about releasing it as a product.

sgupta Jul 26, 2010 View on HN

Hey HN - we made this in our spare time, just because it was something we wanted to use. When we told some friends about the idea though they wanted to use it too, so we decided to release it. Many thanks for checking it out.

pjmlp Mar 30, 2018 View on HN

Me too, it was the foundation ground of our .com wave startup.