Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
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Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#2Would it be possible to include google spreadsheets as an input source?
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#3Would it be possible to include google spreadsheets as an input source?
Yes, certainly. Consider it added to the todo list. It wasn't a priority for a prototype, as the users I'm targeting are generally not Google Docs users anyway (at least in my own experience).
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#4Would it be possible to include google spreadsheets as an input source?
Yes, certainly. Consider it added to the todo list. It wasn't a priority for a prototype, as the users I'm targeting are generally not Google Docs users anyway (at least in my own experience).
Interesting. I thought the opposite. Anyone who deals with APIs are likely gdoc users. Like us :) Anyway, adding google docs would open up a lot of cool things, like tapping into IFTTT recipes that already output there. You are providing the glue that removes a lot of grunt work.
This is awesome, btw. Could you talk about how you came about the idea?
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#5Would it be possible to include google spreadsheets as an input source?
Yes, certainly. Consider it added to the todo list. It wasn't a priority for a prototype, as the users I'm targeting are generally not Google Docs users anyway (at least in my own experience).
What type of users are you targeting? I'm curious what sort of use-case there is for such a thing.
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, certainly. Consider it added to the todo list. It wasn't a priority for a prototype, as the users I'm targeting are generally not Google Docs users anyway (at least in my own experience).
Interesting. I thought the opposite. Anyone who deals with APIs are likely gdoc users. Like us :) Anyway, adding google docs would open up a lot of cool things, like tapping into IFTTT recipes that already output there. You are providing the glue that removes a lot of grunt work. This is awesome, btw. Could you talk about how you came about the idea?
Ah, agreed that the end-users of the APIs this builds would very likely also be Docs users. But the people who're turning their spreadsheets into APIs (i.e. the publishers) likely are not, in my experience.
Thanks for the compliment. As a developer working on a lot of systems that integrate service coverage data I'm constantly being sent spreadsheets that contain zip code / postcode level information, and I need to import this into my database or my client's databases. And normally my apps only want to lookup one or two values per day - but the third party is sending me their entire 100MB spreadsheet, as they don't have an API to publish it via. It's time consuming, error prone, and clunky. But they don't have the skill or resources to create an API, so I'm hoping something like this might remove some barriers.
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I thought the opposite. Anyone who deals with APIs are likely gdoc users. Like us :) Anyway, adding google docs would open up a lot of cool things, like tapping into IFTTT recipes that already output there. You are providing the glue that removes a lot of grunt work. This is awesome, btw. Could you talk about how you came about the idea?
Ah, agreed that the end-users of the APIs this builds would very likely also be Docs users. But the people who're turning their spreadsheets into APIs (i.e. the publishers) likely are not, in my experience. Thanks for the compliment. As a developer working on a lot of systems that integrate service coverage data I'm constantly being sent spreadsheets that contain zip code / postcode level information, and I need to i…
Very interesting. So you may want to experiment with the messaging like "clients still doing things with excel spreadsheets?" for example, targeting developers who deal with excel dependent or decades old reporting clients. There are so many of those I'm sure.
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, certainly. Consider it added to the todo list. It wasn't a priority for a prototype, as the users I'm targeting are generally not Google Docs users anyway (at least in my own experience).
What type of users are you targeting? I'm curious what sort of use-case there is for such a thing.
There's two types of user here that go hand-in-hand:
The publisher, who cannot / will not create an API from their spreadsheets, but would like to (either to ease their own pain, or because their end users are asking for it, or because they don't want to share their entire dataset so often).
The consumer, who wants to access a little bit of their publisher's data without having to import spreadsheets en-masse regularly.
The publisher is the customer of the service ultimately, but the consumer will quite likely be the one driving the publisher to adopt it. Being self-critical, I'd say this makes it a bit of a tough sell (you're one step removed from the actual customer).
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#9This looks great. Now if you could only turn websites into a spreadsheet using http://scrape.ly and then turn it into an API using Sheetlabs, that would be awesome.
Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs
#10Very interesting idea: one possibility for driving demand would be to provide free API hosting for public-domain spreadsheet data (essentially anything published by the government) and charge heavy usage users for access (they could eventually just import the source data if they cared that much, but it could help get the word out).