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

You mean, I already had a Docker in 1997?

One could day Excel was /is an ok-ish database builder with integrated editor and real time output.

Who is this product for? The majority of expert Excel users in a company, do not know how to code. The majority of people that in a company are coding (for whatever aim) are never asked to produce business reports from excel. People who need the report (management) do not care how easy or complex it is to create it. Airtable is (somewhat) successful because it allowed a vast group of people with limited excel knowledge to create good looking reports with a simple visual interface. I think your app just gives people who know how to use (coders) it something they don't need (excel reports), or gives people who would need it (analysts, controllers, managers) something they would be scared to use (too much coding!!). So nobody is really going to bother management with the request to try it and buy it.

audited as in "version controlled". In Excel, if you insert a column somewhere, all the cells move, and all the formulae change, so it's really hard to spot the differences between two versions of the same sheet.

In excel, a lot of operations are "atomic", they work on numbers. If you get data in a table, and then want to operate on that data, you have to copy over the formula for each row in the table. Now, what happens is that sometimes, someone will need to change one of the n formulae, for some specific reason, and then forget that they left the change there. So suddenly, the data that's output by the sheet is garbage, cause someone screwed up. And since the sheet can't be diffed between versions, nobody can easily notice what had happened.

Not webable means that people now like to have things available online. I guess this is not true for Office 365, but a lot of people I am talking about rely on technologies that are not compatible with office 365 (COM stuff for instance)

Ok, you have hit the reality of most startup enthusiasts. Most of us when starting are without much connections and of course no big marketing budgets.

How to go from here? If you truly believe it solves a real problem, then proceed.

First we need some customers and serve them individually on this tool. One customer at a time; each one will give you amazing joy because you were giving up on it.

One nice way for this is to search for jobs/projects on freelancing sites like Upwork, that are looking to "build me tool that takes excel file as input and let me do this and that", something like that.

Pitch them that you can do it for fraction of the price with an existing tool you've built.

It's time consuming, because you'll bid and may not here from many, but you can see those are real customers with problems looking for similar solutions.

I built https://ASPSecurityKit.net v1 back in 2013, after I saw a project on upwork asking to build user registration/management workflow.

I already had pieces of it figured out in my client projects, but there was no impulse to package it up and offer it as an independent product.

I built a pre-launch page, talking about what I'M going to build and collected 70 odd emails from HN folks, thinking some of them will buy upon launch.

Worked hard for 1.5 months on coding, packaging, docs etc. and launched but nobody bought from that email list or HN right away.

I was in a job then (at Microsoft) and didn't spend much time on marketing after launch as nobody bought.

1st month: nothing. 2nd month: nothing. Latter half of the 3rd month: first sale while I was on a sort of vacation/WFH!