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Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#171

Post by hermitcrab »

grok22 wrote: post #119
hermitcrab wrote: post #75

Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!

I think you need to experiment with different price points for the product. To me it seems like I would hesitate buying this for simple jobs due to the price itself. But maybe it it was $25-$40 I might buy it as a impulse buy for speeding my job at work. Or maybe make the free trial dependent on amount of use rather than making it time limited (transform a small number of rows for free for example).

It is already a lot cheaper than other similar tools (but less mature also). Any cheaper and it might start not to look credible. And I anticipate that some users might need quite a lot of support, so I can't afford to make it too cheap. If it is only worth $25 to you, then you aren't really my target market.

I went for time limited, rather than use or feature limited, because it allows people to test the full capabilities. The 7 days use don't have to be contiguous.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#172

Post by hermitcrab »

atentaten wrote: post #122
hermitcrab wrote: post #75

Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!

I'm curios to know what are your other two commercial products since EasyDataTransform looks useful.

My other 2 commercial products are: https://www.hyperplan.com https://www.perfecttableplan.com

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#173

Post by speedplane »

hermitcrab wrote: post #75

Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!

> the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!

Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it? Your homepage is all about features and not about users or their problems.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#174

Post by JamesBarney »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #92
stakkur wrote: post #24

Last year, I built a local/regional tech job listing website, targeted at helping 'older' people (35ish and up, of any gender) looking to find work--experienced or not. $100 listings. Plenty of traffic. Totally failed. Started MVP by pulling in listings from elsewhere, but couldn't get a single listing. Why did it fail? I think because: 1. Companies had zero interest in targeting 'older' workers in tech, despite them…

I don't know what it's like on your jurisdiction (although I'm still laughing a bit at the notion that I'm an 'older' worker at 30 something), but could part of the problem be that it's technically illegal/regulation risk? By which I mean, we all know that age discrimination happens, but you're not 'supposed' to do it. By setting up a website that explicitly discriminates based on age, you're exposing the employer to…

In the U.S. you can discriminate against someone for being younger all you want. You just can't discriminate against someone for being too old when they are over age 40.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#175

Post by watwut »

erikrothoff wrote: post #165
jakequade wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're both giving marketing too much credit in the product's creation, and inverting the creation process in general. > It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete It's more like building a backend, then realising that the data structures could be improved when you're building the front. Marketing at best provides enhancements, not core changes (unless your product itself was i…

I disagree. Marketing gets people in. Users guide product development and thus the product. If an ”unstable product” is one that users actually want to use, then I guess an unstable product is a good thing?

Treating marketing as requirements gathering gets you overly complicated internally inconsistent requirements. The instability is side product. Marketing is not making trade-off between bugs and features, they are unaware of trade-off. When the "buggy" part happens, they treat it as "we have incapable developers" and not as reason to change something in process and requirements gathering.

By overly internally inconsistent I mean that at some places they will be impossible to fulfill. The code will always breaking at edge cases. The ui will do three things at the same time, will be incoherent and will be complicated for user to understand and learn.

By complicated I mean that you will have to code super complicated hard to maintain structures to fulfill everything at the same time.

Marketing can not be requirements gathering, because marketing is motivated to promise everything to everybody and to exaggerate. I dont use exaggerate here as euphemism for "lie" through that happens too. Exaggerating itself is a problem. Marketing is not motivated to build coherent analysis.

I know because I worked on projects where marketing was driving requirements . It did not led to happy customers, because customers were unhappy over instability and our inability to fill their requirements in a reasonable way.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#176

Post by watwut »

rapphil wrote: post #151
jakequade wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're both giving marketing too much credit in the product's creation, and inverting the creation process in general. > It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete It's more like building a backend, then realising that the data structures could be improved when you're building the front. Marketing at best provides enhancements, not core changes (unless your product itself was i…

But marketing can help the dev team focus on the core functionalities that the customer really want.

No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#177

Post by speedplane »

watwut wrote: post #176
rapphil wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But marketing can help the dev team focus on the core functionalities that the customer really want.

No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.

> No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.

Marketing is about exposing your product to your target customers. It's relatively orthogonal to product features.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#178

Post by hermitcrab »

pragmatic wrote: post #130
hermitcrab wrote: post #75

Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!

In a recent job, I was a software engineer who worked with the data science people in an "analytics" group. A big PITA for us was the data we'd get from various sources (vendors/clients/whomever). Oh, there's a rando string in a "number" field in row 9,100,500, huh, that sucks. You can't always build the validation into your ETL pipeline for various reasons. Or it fails the whole file (b/c the data science folks buil…

Real data is almost always dirty. But the filtering and replace transforms could help with that.

>I'm just not sure that your target market knows to look for a tool like this

Perhaps not. I am getting traffic for things such as "merge csv files" or "join excel sheets". But they mostly bounce without downloading the free trial. Even when I send them to a dedicated landing page. Most people really hate change.

>That works for csv, but with JSON, it's even harder.

Currently I am only exporting JSON (not importing). Importing JSON would involve potentially flattening a tree into a table, which is harder.

>- No cli options - No api?

Command line is high on the wish list.

Given that I am aiming mostly at non-programmers, I'm not sure an API would be useful. Note that there is a 'Javascript' transform, which adds a lot of flexibility if you are able to do some scripting.

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#179

Post by hermitcrab »

speedplane wrote: post #173
hermitcrab wrote: post #75

Launched https://www.easydatatransform.com earlier this year. It has sold some licenses and I wouldn't call it a failure yet, but the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome!

> the visit to download ratio is low compared to my other 2 commercial products. Not sure why. I'm pretty sure the traffic is targeted, I am solving a real problem and the website explains what it does. Any feedback would be welcome! Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it? Your homepage is all about features and not about users or their problems.

>Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it?

I'm trying to find that out. ;0)

I think it is probably a non-programmer business analyst, marketer or scientist with lots of Excel or CSV files to munge together. But experience with other products tells me that you often end up selling to different markets than the one you envisage.

>Your homepage is all about features and not about users or their problems.

I would like to have case studies and talk more about types of users. But I am still learning the market.

Also I find those 'sell the sizzle, not the steak' websites quite tedious. Tell me what it does!

Re: Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?

#180

Post by hermitcrab »

rusticpenn wrote: post #168
pragmatic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent job, I was a software engineer who worked with the data science people in an "analytics" group. A big PITA for us was the data we'd get from various sources (vendors/clients/whomever). Oh, there's a rando string in a "number" field in row 9,100,500, huh, that sucks. You can't always build the validation into your ETL pipeline for various reasons. Or it fails the whole file (b/c the data science folks buil…

I can tell you from experience that this is primarily a Business Transformation problem more than a technical one. A tool would of course be helpful but solves only 5% of the real problem.

And what are the 95% of 'real problem'? Are you talking about soft/people issues? Is it even possible to address these things with a tool?
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