Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?
I spent 7 years building my own static site generator CMS.<p>I added drag and drop, Wordpress-like UI and lot of complex functionality based on studying extensively the existing systems like Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Originally, I started with a Wordpress theme I designed myself. It was great until it wasn&#x27;t - I tried to add E-Commerce to it and it was the most pathetic architecture for a CMS I&#x27;ve ever worked with. Although I made a successful theme with E-Commerce in it, I refused to use something as fragile. At the time, PHP wasn&#x27;t great to work with either and I was a Rails guy. So, I looked into Ruby based alternatives and found Middleman and Jekyll. Middleman was quite powerful, but not powerful enough for a travel website where people could sort content by certain criteria, discover new places to travel, etc. Again, I started hitting the limitations of the language itself and felt frustrated. I tried Jekyll, same story. Over the course of these trials, I would work every weekend religiously with meticulous detail. I would spend all my after work hours on this little project of mine.<p>During the course of these 7 years, many people left, I lost many friends around me because I couldn&#x27;t trade off the time for them with the time spent this project. I worked on it because I wanted to. It felt like I was going deep into unexplored territory, discovering so many possibilities with just what people would label as a simple CMS. And then, one day, I launched privately. Just to myself. It was a bliss to watch it in action. By then, I had ported it over to Elixir with a custom architecture that could support any business model you want. Data portability and export were one of my core requirements as I had painfully tried to migrate my content from free CDNs more than once after receiving terrabytes of traffic.<p>Finally, to test my CMS, I implemented it for a client who is still running their entire business on it. They spend barely 1&#x2F;5th of their competitors&#x27; cost and yet are able to serve 3 times the traffic. This was the biggest validation for me, personally. This thing ran by itself for 4 years without any hiccups or maintenance required on the cloud. It was a business unit on auto-pilot for me. 
I loved it and it was all because of immensely thanks to the architecture which I consciously disallowed Javascript to not be a part of the whole thing. The frontend was completely separated so deployments to the core&#x2F;backend wouldn&#x27;t fail because of some dumb sh*t change Babel made to their config file or Webpack is forcing you to upgrade something. In fact, the JS dependency even for the frontend was quite low and I used Phoenix&#x2F;LiveView where I could and just static CSS frameworks to make the UI look good and plain old refresh and reload for everything else. This still works well for me.<p>At its peak performance, the SSG CMS attracted a political party member&#x27;s attention who was running his own online news site at the time. I got a chance to speak to him over the phone and he was curious how the system worked. I politely told him I couldn&#x27;t sell him a clone of my system as that would be a betrayal for my client. I valued loyality and would never do something behind his back. He appreciated me for that and got some useful advice to upgrade his stack instead. I had never been more proud.<p>Finally, as with all good things coming to an end - the contract with my client has terminated and I am now doing Startup School to launch my SSG CMS as a Saas. I am also going to open source the core to enable developers to adopt and reap the benefits of my hard work. I know it is just a simple CMS to many, but I consider it my life&#x27;s work and I see it as much, much more.<p>In case you are interested, you can sign up on this page for updates, I plan to launch both the OSS version and Saas version before Q4 this year. Thank you, if you have read so far :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trystatic.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trystatic.com</a>