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I created and sold Stickonspy (http://stickonspy.com) just after mid last year. The initial month I launched it did pretty well as the NSA news was still a pretty big deal. All in all it's made me < £1k but it's been great fun to build and ship a product from scratch. I've shipped to around 12 countries too which is cool. I also spent no money on marketing.

I'd say my time - which was evenings after work - investment was around 3-4 days initially and then fulfilling orders is simply writing a customers address and posting the stickers - which if the demand was bigger I'd probably outsource.

It's been great. I've learnt a shit tonne & the conversations it started has given me an idea for a similar product which I'll be focusing on very soon!


Great idea. Just wondering that if you didn't spend any money on marketing, how did you get the word out, SEO?


I started out by merely tweeting a link to the site and asking my friends to do the same. I did publish HN but it got took down pretty sharpish.

My main win was cold-emailing tech blogs. I got featured on BoingBoing - http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/stickonspy-sticker-reminder... - through emailing and also managed to sell directly to Cory ;).


I like this - it made me chuckle :) Can I ask who you used to print the stickers?


This is great work


Your code should always win the battles.

I've had a stammer all my life, it's one the most frustrating things ever. Here's a few things I'd do/did;

- Make a portfolio of the dev work you've done. - When you start speaking with an employer, mention your stammer before the interview so they know what to expect. I think this will also help you mentally prepare as well, there will be 'no' surprises. - Stay calm & good luck!


I agree those colours don't work the best together, but I chose them to demonstrate the parts of the design that are easily updatable. I think the worst crime I committed was having the orange links on the green background, but again, that was to keep it as simple as possible.


Currently, it has no pagination and the posts will just list out one after another. The title is permalink to an individual blog post for sharing etc.

I thought that was the simplest route to go down.


It's the same info you'd give Dabblet or CodePen.


Well I wouldn't give it to them either.

Seriously, you would give a 3rd party full commit access to all your repos? That's crazy talk.


Unfortunately, there isn't a scope to give access to read/write just issues.


GitHub needs to fix that...


That's nasty. Sounds like a surefire road to compromised projects.


I would recommend Highcharts - http://www.highcharts.com/. Their api is great, really simple to use with a shit load of graph options.


Nice work, this is pretty cool! I've been working on a similar approach but using Github (mainly because I host my blog there using Jekyll). I'll try and get it released tonight :)


Wow, never knew Tom created Gravatar. Really like these sort of posts but maybe the title of 'overnight success' is wrong? Great article though!


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