I started with the idea of making a website builder based on text editor, and this mvp version allows you to make websites using just text editor. It's like Notion, except you can only use text and links (in the future also images and buttons), you don't need to have a title at the beginning of each page, and you can select various combinations of fonts for each web page. It's free to use, and if you don't like it, it's easy to delete an account. :) When there is more features, there might be a premium plan, but for now, just testing with users who need to create pages using only text, e.g. Careers and Job Posts pages, documents, ideas, whitepapers, privacy policies, writing drafts and publications, resumes, etc.
Elon Musk profile is just something as an example for no particular reason except that it's someone who has a biography on Wikipedia, there was no intention to make a parody of Twitter's new policy.
I'm OP and an author of this website. I don't know you, but thank you for sharing your thoughts and findings.
songy.design was a website domain I used for my UI/UX design portfolio, but now I use a personal name for it: adishasanic.com
typen.co was a writing app, basically a Notion competitor, which I founded, designed and bootstrapped to develop in 2016 and discontinued it 6 months after launch. There were 2000 users registered, but very few were using it, due to concerns about keeping notes in it and it was hard to compete with Notion and iA writer, which had also iOS and Android apps.
You can check what those websites were using Internet Archive: https://archive.org
I don't know how long a life Veonid will have, but I have much more experience now in product design and Veonid is more for publishing than for writing and storing content, so it does not have the same obstacles as Typen. It's not a development exercise, my goal is to keep working on it for years because I believe there should be a way for anyone to create their own space from which to present themselves and publish anything, without their content being branded by platform and restricted for anyone who didn't sign up to platform.
It's not perfect, but this was after only 10 hours of development by someone who is very busy, and who told me there are ways to make it faster, but the goal for launch was to just make it work, make it accessible and keep improving.
"Stupidity" and "incompetence" is unnecessary IMO, but it's nice to know that you're enthusiastic about development.
> but this was after only 10 hours of development by someone who is very busy
I usually access HN through my RSS Reader. Sometimes I go through a very busy stage in life where I don't have time to read the article or save pertinent information on my offline organizer. So I save the article on my RSS Reader for when I have time.
I just recently went through about a year and a half of saved stuff. It isn't the first time I've saved stuff for later viewing.
What I've found (and very much to my surprise) are the number of projects that hit the front page of HN and cease to exist a year later, 6 months later, a month later... sometimes just weeks later. Poof! Gone.
This is just the stuff I've saved and not representative of all projects that make HN's front page.
I say all of this because the quoted line above has convinced me that this project will probably not be around for very long. It's not a criticism. It's just an observation from many years of following up on links.
I'd be curious to see how many new projects that make HN's front page are still around. Free vs Paid, Open Source vs Closed, one-person development vs team, etc... I wonder if someone has attempted to put this data together.
No bots were used for this post, admins can check the profiles of upvoters.
Thank you all for upvoting, there are now 100 new users registered after 6 hours of publishing on HackerNews, hope you all find it useful and please share any feedback.
Interesting flow, but I disagree — I think there are too many steps until user gets some reward from it.
I think a website is essentially a way to share content and communicate, so the first step, after signing up, should be to write content and immediately see it live at some subdomain. Everything after that is just editing/customization. So it'd be as it is in Veonid:
1. Read a landing page and click "Sign up"
2. Enter email address and sign up via magic link (no need to worry about providing password which you maybe use somewhere else)
2. "You've signed up!" (already some reward and feedback about what happened)
3. Click "Create a website" button
4. Write content and click "Publish" when ready
5. Done! Your website is live at a domain: startup.com/123456789 (another reward)
I made up the word from random letters making sure it contains the letters "id" and has .com domain, which is not easy to find these days for 1 short word.
Thank you for your additional feedback. I replied to your comment below, but to reply to your additional feedback here:
There is no organization behind Veonid — it's just me who designed UI/UX and bootstrapped development of it. Currently, Veonid costs me $0 per month because services like Vercel, Hasura and Clerk are completely free to a certain extent. If there is more than 5000 monthly active users, it will cost just $25 per month for Clerk, and that price I can easily pay for 1-2 years without regretting. I plan to try to include some premium features in the next few months with a goal for Veonid make at least enough monthly income to pay for itself.
Of course, there is a risk of any app shutting and no guarantee that anything will remain for years and decades, but what I can say is I intend to keep Veonid hosting up for at least the next 12 months even if almost noone uses it. With more users, and especially if there are premium users at some point, I intend to keep it much longer.
You could look at getting out of the hosting game by providing a "bring your own hosting option". Then everyone is happy. If you have a good tool that doesn't resonate with individuals, you then have the option to pivot to providing a premium version for bigger businesses that is hosting-agnostic.
Notion is an all-in-one notetaking platform with an ability to share a page, so any page you share is nested within all your notes, and pages shared with Notion have a Notion logo on it. It's a different purpose and direction, but technically yes, at this point, you can create the same page with Notion, and I encourage you to use Notion because I think it is one of the best products there is.
Problem with Notion to create a personal website is it doesn't guide you to it from the landing page and it offers a lot which just misleads someone who is not so tech savvy and just wants to put together a simple personal website. At this point, the goal for Veonid is not to compete with Notion as a page-builder, but just to be the fastest way to create a personal website for those who need to share just a name, bio and a few links.
