201–210 of 270 posts
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Yeah, that was unexpected... Ugh... Clearly, the product's not ready, the message's not ready. A bit of a missed opportunity there. Maybe in a couple of months when I have ironed out the wrinkles people saw here.
Link to the product? I don't care if it's not ready, I want to look at it :).
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Can you be more specific on what you mean by "audited" ? What does "too many formulae" mean? Like what is a specific example? What does "not webable" mean?
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 hap…
It appears that you have a pretty tough battle on your hands - you are straight up competing with Microsoft and Google, and an army of super users who probably have a large incentive not to change? You also have a network effect to overcome - even if you get users, they need to convince other users to use it at their org/whatever.
I have to admit I don't quite understand your product. With that said. I work a lot in excel. So does my co-workers. Why is this better than xlwings? As you said - people learn VBA - why is this better than learning Python?
Excel files are not safe, as in you can't know what changed between two versions of a sheet, and because usually many things change between two versions of a sheet. So Excel sheets are very prone to having mistakes in them. It's usually fine when you have a few sheets handled by a few people. But when sheets start to pile up and people leave, then these errors tend to accumulate, leading to actual financial risks.
Open-source it.
The fact that you've got a comment on the front page of hacker news about your products lack of awareness, yet you don't say what the product is or link to it explains a lot. You need to hustle more. This is a huge opportunity to get it in front of hundreds of people. Edit: I had to search through the page to find a link to your app. You need to make it more obvious.
I kind of already knew that users of the tool are not here on HN. So messages like "I don't get your product" aren't very helpful. I was genuinely looking for advice as to what to do next.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hap…
I see. These feel like super user problems? Except for the last one, which isn't a problem in many cases in that if it's that important, the user could have just changed to Google Sheets. It appears that you have a pretty tough battle on your hands - you are straight up competing with Microsoft and Google, and an army of super users who probably have a large incentive not to change? You also have a network effect to…
You should assume that people is tired and has not much brainpower left to understand anything new and complex.
Open-source it.
This is not the solution for every business. Especially a small app that is hard enough to monetize already.
Second, open sourcing does bot preclude making money from it. If it turns out that enough people actually find it useful. As long as nobody does, the argument "butbif I oprn source it then I can't monetize it" is void in any case.