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Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

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Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#131

Post by skmurphy »

d--b wrote: post #124
skmurphy wrote: post #53

You may not like Excel but most people who "NEED A QUICK ANALYSIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS" (to quote your copy from https://www.jigdev.com ) rely on it. I think you have a solution in search of problem. Showing it to more people is not the answer. Adding features only helps when you have someone who has a clear point of dissatisfaction with Excel. Who is so dissatisfied with Excel that they will take the time to install an…

Ah, I myself am what they call an Excel wiz. I’ve been building all kinds of tools with excel since I started working in finance in 2007. Excel has been both a miracle and a curse. We could make super complex apps in hours, but these were insanely unsafe. People would leave typos all over the place, and there was zero way to audit changes. This is THE major reason for this tool to exist.

Then you should consider writing two tools:

1. A detailed audit and change control / diff tool for Excel Here are some alternatives:

https://www.spreadsheetdetective.com/

https://www.themodelanswer.com/

List at https://sites.google.com/a/usfca.edu/business-analytics/deve...

2. A translator that maps an existing Excel file into Jig.

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#133

Post by lubujackson »

d--b wrote: post #124
skmurphy wrote: post #53

You may not like Excel but most people who "NEED A QUICK ANALYSIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS" (to quote your copy from https://www.jigdev.com ) rely on it. I think you have a solution in search of problem. Showing it to more people is not the answer. Adding features only helps when you have someone who has a clear point of dissatisfaction with Excel. Who is so dissatisfied with Excel that they will take the time to install an…

Ah, I myself am what they call an Excel wiz. I’ve been building all kinds of tools with excel since I started working in finance in 2007. Excel has been both a miracle and a curse. We could make super complex apps in hours, but these were insanely unsafe. People would leave typos all over the place, and there was zero way to audit changes. This is THE major reason for this tool to exist.

If that is THE reason for the product to exist, you are marketing this all wrong.

You list features and say what it can do, but you are really selling robustness, stability and clarity. Don't sell the product, sell the problem. Spaghetti code in Excel. Untouchable formulas created by some ex-employee. Replacing a magic variable in 30,000 cells, etc. At the end, show how your product solves it.

You need some sample before and afters. This is what the formula looked like before, here's how it was abstracted and this is what that change enables.

Ideally your product would be a service that a company pays for where you come in a help clean up their files. If possible, I would see if you could find a company willing to let to try and use them as a case study.

That would be 1000% more effective than worrying about marketing details.

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#134

Post by aristofun »

My be im not target audience but from website i didnt get any idea on 1) what this thing actually does? 2) why exactly am i gonna need one? What’s the value. 3) why exactly should i forget Excel?

So on the surface it doesn’t feel like a painkiller product, that just lacks marketing power.

More like “I didn’t want to waste time learning other solutions so just created yet another one mine, with blackjack and hookers”.

If there’s a strong value inside the product- you should put 100% effort to make this value clear from the first page of website through to uninstall/unsubscribe screen.

And yes, best way to do that is to try make 100 sales personally before even bothering with marketing stuff.

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#136

Post by batoure »

d--b wrote: post #118
zelon88 wrote: post #72

It looks interesting, but CEO's don't have time to get syntax errors. That is why they pay big money to companies for products like Synergy SmartViews or UniPoint or Crystal Reports. So they can pay someone with moderate skills a moderate salary to generate professional looking reports. This would have to undercut those other tools in price and also be geared towards more technical industries. Preferably industries t…

Sure, what you say works for big corporations. However buyers in big corporations are not first customers. Nobody gets fired for buying tableau. CEOs in 20-people companies don’t have time for syntax errors for sure, but they do care how much time reports take away from building features. Anyway that needs rephrasing

I’m the Founder of a sub 20 person company and you are right about tableau but also completely wrong about your view. The problem with your tool is anyone who will find this useful can also just solve this problem with JavaScript.

Additionally I think you fell pray to a mistake i my self made about 8 years ago. I built a product thought it was amazing tried to turn it into a company and completely failed. In one of my final meetings about the project someone said “you know you just reinvented Apache yarn here right?... and not in a good way” I had no idea what they were talking about I left the meeting and started power googling they were right 80% of our code was pointless and missing 90% of the features of a pretty generic open source project.

Today I red team any idea I have by assuming someone solved it and I just haven’t found it yet. I ask the smartest people I know “what does this idea feel like?” Before I build anything...

If I could go back in time and tell you one thing it would be “while you may feel like you are fixing excel 100% of your features are in the developer docs for google sheets... a free product”

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#137

Post by d--b »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #135

Did you try becoming an excel or sheets power user first (using macros/vba/apps script)? What specific thing/things/usecase do they suck at which you are doing well?

Yes, I am a 10y+ finance excel-based app developer. In short:

- sheets cant be audited

- too many formulae

- not webable

It’s inherently unsafe to run apps on Excel. Yet, people are more productive with Excel than with any other platform.

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#138

Post by shalmanese »

There's a reason this Justin Kan quote has become famous to the point of being a meme:

"First time founders are obsessed with product.

Second time founders are obsessed with distribution."

You just learnt through bitter experience that distribution is the far harder problem to solve. You need to figure out who this thing is useful for, what is a way to get it in front of them and then how to adapt your product to get it to click.

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#139

Post by teekert »

It's a data science package from the looks of it, and I, as a data science person would be interested. But then, Javascript? I only know Python, and my Notebooks are sort of similar to this, but in Jupyter-lab I have Pandas and Seaborn (among many others, and I can access any file, any api, any database). If those were available I might have tried it, although my Jupyter-lab notebooks also make nice PDF reports, the only difference I see is that you can place cells next to each other, right? Maybe there is an extension for Jupyter-lab that can do that. So what is the USP? Javascript? Just Ducking around I found I can also do that in Jupyter-lab: [0]

[0] http://bluegalaxy.info/codewalk/2017/12/04/javascript-how-to...

Re: Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

#140

Post by dt3ft »

On a similar note, I built quite a few things, one of which resulted in millions of daily active users, getting its own Wikipedia page, articles in The New York Times, Fortune and 50+ others.

I built an alternative to a popular website and it slowly snowballed from there. I did no marketing other than to share the link with a few people and it just went viral.

I did not build every feature the original had, but I was spending a lot of time engaging with users and making sure they feel welcome. I event sent them postcards for Christmas! What made it work in the end, is the fact that I treated users with respect and dignity.

Now, the above was a community, and I loved building and nourishing a community.

When it comes to building a business, however, a whole new set of rules kick in, and with no marketing experience, it's bound to fail, especially if you think that people will come, and all you need to do is build it. This stopped being true a long time ago, and marketing is crucial. The last SaaS I built definitely has a market, but without reaching out to actual people who need it, chances are, they will never find it on their own. This is where a co-founder with marketing skills and a network would be great, but finding one is super difficult, especially for me as a dev.

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