I'm not sure I agree with 'minimal ads'. On a 27" monitor, 3 banners and an ads privacy pop-up don't take up much screen real estate, but visually some pages have as much ad as content. It's not a great experience when you're competing with other free (or OSS) products. If you're really only looking for feedback, you might have better luck if you aren't trying to monetising the people giving up their time!
Congrats on building this for yourself, I can certainly see the benefit of building writing tools to suit your own needs.
I think the majority of the problem stems from the ads and I totally understand it — even if “minimal” sounds fine on a large screen, I see how visually some pages can feel crowded, especially compared to free or open-source alternatives. Google does sometimes adjust the number of ads depending on screen size, so I’ll look into optimizing that so it feels less intrusive.
Also, the privacy pop-up is actually the default from Google, and it varies by region — users in the U.S. see a slightly smaller version than in the EU. Still, I understand it can disrupt the experience, so I’ll explore ways to make it smoother.
I wish you the best, but you do not have a product to monetise yet.
IMO: if your goal is to attract users or to make money, you have too many strong free competitors to be using ads like this, especially if your audience read Hacker News. It's not the right business model. Any amount of time spent making these ads 'smoother' is better spent on the product, because you won't earn enough ad revenue to make it worth it.
If you need revenue to pay for hosting, you'd be better off making it open source or self-hostable.
If your goal is getting feedback, you have to recognise that people are doing it for you, not for them. Don't make them pay you to do it.
Thanks a lot for your kind wishes and detailed feedback!
I’m a bit unsure what you mean by not having a “product” — I do have an online notepad and a Cornell notes tool; I just shared the homepage, not the specific tools (there are currently two, and I plan to expand gradually). Do you mean a large product or so?
I really appreciate your thoughts on monetization. I’ll definitely keep improving the notepad, Cornell notes, and other productivity tools to be added to the website to be as smooth and distraction-free as possible.
About making it open source or self-hostable, I might consider that later as more people suggest it instead of the current model.
I'm not clear on the timeline - did the patient use a tool to help doc get to a diagnosis, or did this happen in retrospect? My read is the medical profession did, but it took longer to get there. The tool is redeemed in this case because it landed on the same (correct) diagnosis as the rheumatologist, using the test results, notes and diagnostic journey that resulted from $100K and 30 hospital visits.
This is super cool, but maybe it's important to distinguish projects like this from frontier medical AI research (i.e. new models). This however does exactly what lots of health advocates and even pharma companies have been getting at for decades: informed doctor-patient discussion and patient self-advocacy. Organising and interpreting medical records is an awesome use case.
I imagine any potential user of a tool in this state would know what be wary of, but I do worry a little that LLMs have been trained on bad health advice or misinfo, and there will be very limited training data from real patient diagnoses. Even if dangerous data is minuscule in training terms, can good prompting de-risk dangerously bad advice?
I had the same thing happen in my city. After I had been waiting for 20-30 minutes, I was attacked by a stranger and left unconscious and bloody in a nearby alleyway. After explaining this to Uber, they informed me that the 'no-show' fee I was charged would stand. It wasn't their fault I was attacked, but I will never use Uber again.
As I get closer to thirty years old, the idea of a person or machine asking for a grown-up to verify my identity gives me feelings that are more mixed than I expected.
I think this is the better question - will teens stop participating in grown-up spaces just because there's a 'safe' version just for them?
However, for younger kids (say, 5-11) I think a separate environment is the best solution. Up to a certain point, parents have more influence on what their child does. For all its problems, most parents I know are comfortable with YouTube Kids because it's the lesser of two evils. I know that my child is going to participate in social media either way, so I want them to do it in a sandbox until the day I don't get a say.
I think you'd find some evidence for historical poverty being one factor of several in cultural practices of bed sharing. Japan would be a notable exception (plenty of co-sleeping, unremarkable poverty rate).
I also don't think it has become much less common in communities where poverty levels have fallen. Anecdotally, my SO is part of a community originally displaced from India and now settled all over the world, where members have disproportionately become very wealthy. Bed sharing is absolutely the norm in those households, much to my distress when we visit her family!
I was trying to say that this is common in Japan, where poverty is almost certainly not the major factor. A counter to the parent comment's assertion. Should have been clearer.
Congrats on building this for yourself, I can certainly see the benefit of building writing tools to suit your own needs.