How We Built and Launched Mod For $22,450
In this technical retrospective (2014), @j0ncc shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 71 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 31 comments
One thing I'd say that's missing is the rough amount of time it takes to ship. I was looking at getting one of these for my GF for her birthday (she has a box full of used up notebooks in her garage, so this sounds perfect for her), but without knowing whether or not it would arrive on time, it made me hesitant to get one for her.
That said, love the idea and execution otherwise. It's great to get some insight into the beginnings of a product/startup. Even for those of us with experience in earlier-stage companies, unless you've founded it yourself, you don't usually see the beginnings like you've been presenting on your blog.
I love the idea of this.
I currently take all my notes on cheap A4 squared pads, once it's full I tear of each page into a pile and feed them through my scanner and output as a PDF, it takes about 5 minutes to convert an 80 page A4 pad to PDF.
Then I recycle the pad.
Apropos of nothing your video on your home page at video http://modnotebooks.com/ ↗ doesn't display on FF27/Linux though the audio plays, while I was noseying as to why (amazing what you learn by wondering why stuff is broken) I noticed you have an unclosed span tag in your dev.l-footer-copyright.
I never knew Mod was Draft until I read this linked article. http://needwant.com/p/cancelled-kickstarter-campaign-funded-project-ourselves/ ↗
While reading that I was wondering, and not accusing Mod team here but just a thought, what is stopping people from using Kickstarter this way (to gauge demand) deliberately? Launch a campaign and yank when it is successful to pursue larger profits?
You can already do this with the Moleskine Smart Notebook, except you don't have to mail your private notebook to a 3rd party company for scanning - you can scan them directly into Evernote with the free Evernote app.
tl;dr
The exact same thing exists by Moleskine at http://shop.moleskine.com/en-us/notebooks-journals/evernote/ ↗
The only problem i see, the personal paper notebook I have, has 'confidential - do not open' written on its front cover. And on a second thought, is scanning a notebook a technological maneuver in our times? I am sorry for a little harsh review, but I was expecting something modern and exciting when I thought these notebooks can be stored in the cloud, at least not manual scanning of pages.