I’m building Sink It for Reddit (https://gosinkit.com), a browser extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES with broader support for all the different Reddit UIs (there are 4).
It’s mostly free with only old Reddit features gated behind a one time $5 fee. The app has a few hundred thousand users on the Apple platforms but recently it was invited to join Mozilla’s Recommended Extensions program so I’m hoping to grow the non-Apple user base.
I’m building Sink It for Reddit (https://gosinkit.com), a Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES (Reddit enhancement suite) but supports all of Reddit’s designs and is being actively developed with around 300k users, mainly on the Apple platforms.
It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is making four figures a month. 99% of the app’s feature are free with the money coming from a premium (dark mode etc) for old Reddit and donations.
Have a few high five figure/low six figure acquisition offers already but I’m afraid it’ll be turned into malware so haven’t gone through with it.
I suspect you can increase your conversion rate to paid quite easily. I've been using the free version for sometime. And I have no idea if the paid version gives me the improvements that I care about. I'm sure a 7 day trial, or an explainer video that walks through the differences would go a long way.
For what it's worth, there's a lot of functionality that I want removed from reddit. I've never crossposted, yet often click that link because it's next to 'hide'. I hate the hide link and would rather have 'hide everything above'. On old.reddit.com many of the links are too small, so increasing their size would be nice. Just a few things off the top of my head.
How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.
It's a premade design that I edited quite a bit. The landing page is important but at the start of a project, spending a ton of time on it isn't worth it. I used to work at an Australian (unofficial) unicorn where we sold these designs so I just bought one directly.
Chrome on Android, unfortunately, doesn’t support extensions. I have a Firefox version for Android and I reckon Brave should pick up and install the desktop version for Chrome too.
Pretty much. The Chrome versions are only a few months old while the Apple platform ones are much older. Plus, honestly, I don’t nag users to leave ratings/reviews within the app.
Dark mode on old reddit is gated behind premium at this moment. That's the only monetization I have.
I'm probably not explaining what's behind premium correctly though. Happy to send over a free AppStore code and chat about the onboarding experience if you're so inclined. :)
Ha, that was a stressful yet funny read. The self flagellation bit hits too close to home though. I run a somewhat successful iOS/MacOS app and pushed a release that completely broke about 350k+ installations. Not entirely my fault but doesn't matter as it's my product.
The cold sweats and shame I felt, man... Plus it's on the App Store so there's the review process to deal with which extends the timeline for a fix. Thankfully, they picked it up for review 30 minutes after submission and approved it in a few minutes.
My first employer as a developer, due to their incompetence, not intelligence, ‘let’ me break our customers’ shit from a young age. As I’ve progressed through my career, and through my transition to leadership, I’ve realised that it was a very valuable experience. I may have stressed about it in the past, but those memories are too distant for me to even reach now. I certainly don’t stress about it now.
I’ll, maybe controversially, sometimes allow my (early-career) team members to break prod, if I can see it happening ahead of time, but am confident that we’ll be able to recover quickly. It’s common knowledge that being given room to fail is important. But many leaders draw the line at failures that actually hit customers. If one finds oneself in the very common and very fortunate position to be building software that isn’t in charge of landing planes or anything similarly important, they should definitely let their team experience prod failures, even if it’s at the expense of so-and-so from Spokane Washington not being able to use their product for a few minutes.
Within my first 6 months at a FAANG, I accidentally took down our service for half the world for 30-60 minutes.
That was honestly one of the best things that could’ve happened to me and I still use the story for new hires to this day. It’s a very humbling reminder that nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes. And I’m still here, so it’s never the end of the world.
If I were a betting man, I'd probably say either a pocket typing sort of situation (for the latter two) or a kid or animal gallivanting on/around the keyboard for the first.
Etymologically, Deepavali is a Sanskrit word meaning row of lamps (Deepa means lamp). Diwali is a colloquial form used in Northern states of India, as the word in their language for a lamp is Diva/Diwa.
Ultimately, there’s no difference as every Indian state has its own language so it’s all nitpicking. Because I’m a bum, I like to point out that South Indian (where I’m from) and East Indian states use the etymologically correct name, Deepavali.
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