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Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

sheetlabs.com

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Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#41

Post by samcrawford »

Author here. Thanks for all the feedback, very much appreciated, I wasn't expecting this. Feel free to email me if you have questions you'd like to take off-list (email in profile).

Some stats, which may be useful for anyone doing a Show HN soon and wondering about volumes:

- 11k visits at the time of writing (3 hours in)

- 71% of hits so far are from the Americas (hit the California server), 29% from elsewhere (hit the London server). Given the time in Europe, there is significant bias here though.

- 6.7% of hits used IPv6

- 76% used Chrome, second place was FF at 11%

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#42

Post by robzyb »

samcrawford wrote: post #12
fomojola wrote: post #10

Very 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).

I've been thinking along very similar lines, but more along a Github-esque model: Host your data and APIs for free, providing you publish them publicly. If you take them private, you pay a little. Early days yet, today is mostly about gauging interest.

As someone who's stuck in overlap between programmer and business man, I'm not going to lie, I wish I had thought of this idea. Bravo.

I do think it will take some hard work to get it out there, though.

A Github-esque model sounds utterly fantastic. I would start using that today if it was available.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#45

Post by pkaye »

samcrawford wrote: post #41

Author here. Thanks for all the feedback, very much appreciated, I wasn't expecting this. Feel free to email me if you have questions you'd like to take off-list (email in profile). Some stats, which may be useful for anyone doing a Show HN soon and wondering about volumes: - 11k visits at the time of writing (3 hours in) - 71% of hits so far are from the Americas (hit the California server), 29% from elsewhere (hit…

You need to put up some examples of what can be done by this service. Something visitors can interact with without registering is ideal to convince them to register.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#46

Post by samcrawford »

pkaye wrote: post #45
samcrawford wrote: post #41

Author here. Thanks for all the feedback, very much appreciated, I wasn't expecting this. Feel free to email me if you have questions you'd like to take off-list (email in profile). Some stats, which may be useful for anyone doing a Show HN soon and wondering about volumes: - 11k visits at the time of writing (3 hours in) - 71% of hits so far are from the Americas (hit the California server), 29% from elsewhere (hit…

You need to put up some examples of what can be done by this service. Something visitors can interact with without registering is ideal to convince them to register.

There's an example API created with the service here: https://sheetlabs.com/#/services/doc/ACME/getDomain

This is linked off the front page, but could certainly be more prominent (as another commenter said)

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#49

Post by avalaunch »

malditojavi wrote: post #38

They (Ycombinator) should implement 'mark as favorite'. There are so many similar tools included in the comments that I'm writing this comment just to have a quick shortcut to find the thread in future references.

I'd like that too. I often don't upvote stories I otherwise would because I don't want to muddle up my 'saved stories' with non-favorites.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#50

Post by ams6110 »

eykanal wrote: post #26

I'm guessing I'm simply not considering the target audience, but so far as I know the groups (people who communicate primarily via spreadsheets) and (people who know what an API is) have a fairly small overlap. Maybe I'm just underestimating how widely used spreadsheets are for communicating programming information. I've never seen it, but hey, I've never seen a lot of things.

Pretty much what I wanted to say. The target seems to be "business" people who email spreadsheets around, and if you haven't seen this much, believe me it is done a LOT. But in my experience these people would have no idea what an API is and no idea why they would want one. I see these people gravitating to shared spreadsheets on Google Drive or SkyDrive, which eliminates the email attachment pain without really requiring them to learn anything new.

The idea is cool, the website looks good, and this seems like it could be really useful, but I don't get the sense that the right audience is targeted here.

Also an aside to the Sheetlabs folks, sort of a pet peeve of mine, your site returns a blank white page if JavaScript is disabled, you might want to at least throw a noscript tag in so people don't think you are just down.

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