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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?

#211

Post by d--b »

batoure wrote: post #136
d--b wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> The problem with your tool is anyone who will find this useful can also just solve this problem with JavaScript.

Well yeah, though they won't do it as fast. Having a live repl, and packaged charts should make it at least 10x faster.

Sure I may very well be making a mistake. The fact is I'd rather fail than not give it a shot..

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

#212

Post by linybin »

tifadg1 wrote: post #170
linybin wrote: post #152

I have recently built a product( https://www.buyitforquality.com/ ) to test how easy/hard it is to get new customers. It is REALLY hard. Even if you are willing to spend money on Google Ads, the result may not be satisfactory. Given the popularity of this post, I'm wondering why no one is building a solution for cheap and efficient marketing. Building products essentially is to solve people's pain points. We need a b…

just checked your website and here's a tip - there's no way I found that I could limit the scope to a general area - i.e. kitchen appliances.

Thank you for pointing out! It's in the backlog. I will work on it in the following days.

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

#213

Post by rmetzler »

d--b wrote: post #185
raspasov wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link to the product? I don't care if it's not ready, I want to look at it :).

Thanks it's here: https://www.jigdev.com

1. I had to search through the whole HN page to find a link to your app.

2. the landing page doesn't show anything except a screenshot. Make a video, put it on youtube and demo what you build. I'll not install a software that goes vaguely in some direction.

From the looks of it, you're a developer who needs someone who's good in marketing and design.

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

#214

Post by dd36 »

d--b wrote: post #180
polote wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you understood what I was trying to say. You should not rush to make a change to your website, this is something you need to think thoroughly. You can contact me by mail if you want (We surprisingly did the same school :))

ha nice! No I get what you say, I had changed the message just to take advantage of HN's front page feedback. I have thought about this for a while. My experience is that if I sit down with someone and talk to them for a while, they do get it (as a few people on this thread have shown). The issue I have is that it's not a simple "here's your problem, here's a solution" type of situation, it's a lot finer than that.

The key to customer interviews is not telling them what your product does. Otherwise people will be nice and fit their answers to your product.

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

#215

Post by searchableguy »

On the same boat, I built an API to check for pirated links inside text content. I moderate a discord server and need to make sure no one is encouraging piracy according to ToS. I automated that using the API.

I have listed the API on rapid API. I have little idea how to get customers for it. I do think the API can be useful in many places. Any help?

Link: https://rapidapi.com/searchableland-no-piracy-team/api/pirac...

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

#216

Post by kdelok »

d--b wrote: post #205
disordinary wrote: post #186

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.

To be frank, it would have looked sleazy to many people here. 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.

There are lots of startup founders who do feel a bit sleazy, or like they're just faking it until they make it. You don't give that impression at all!

As others have said below, I think you should push your product a bit. It might not be perfect, but if you can talk it up a bit whilst accepting valid feedback, then you're more likely to come off as dedicated and earnest. People can then trust that the product is likely to head in the right direction under your care.

Best of luck.

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

#217

Post by d--b »

kdelok wrote: post #216
d--b wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be frank, it would have looked sleazy to many people here. 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.

There are lots of startup founders who do feel a bit sleazy, or like they're just faking it until they make it. You don't give that impression at all! As others have said below, I think you should push your product a bit. It might not be perfect, but if you can talk it up a bit whilst accepting valid feedback, then you're more likely to come off as dedicated and earnest. People can then trust that the product is like…

Thanks for the kind words!

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

#218

Post by AznHisoka »

d--b wrote: post #159
mpermar wrote: post #149

I think you should throw away everything and start from scratch sailing on an already solid platform. Whether that is a plugin for Office 365, a paid app for Smartsheet or Airtable or any other *already successful* platform. From your submission, I think what you are failing to understand is that you are asking people/companies to move their excel app/reporting to random-joe-bloggs' platform. It's not about the marke…

Well, people were pretty quick to adopt AirTable, even when they were random-joe-bloggs themselves... The difference is that people trusted them because of who they were, and because of the distribution channels they had access to.

Yes and you could leverage all that by simply developing for that platform. Rather than trying to build a brand from scratch, which is extremely hard.

And don’t underestimate how hard it was for Airtable to get traction: you make it sound as if it was easy. Underneath the surface, the founders would tell you how hard it was.

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

#219

Post by incrudible »

Some programs are solutions to problems that only you have. In this case, the problem is that you want to work in your comfort zone, not Excel. You built something for yourself. Many other programmers have the same sort of problem, but a different comfort zone, so it becomes a different problem. They'll build something for themselves.

Your actual selling points then seem more like post-hoc rationalizations:

"LIKE EXCEL, JIG IS A LIGHTWEIGHT SOLUTION TO CREATE DYNAMIC BUSINESS REPORTS AND APPS IN MINUTES."

Okay, I already got Excel here and everyone is trained in it.

"UNLIKE EXCEL, JIG FILES ARE AUDITABLE, MAKING JIG APPS INHERENTLY SAFE."

I don't care. Even if I switched some of my workloads over to Jig from Excel, I'd still be using Excel. The threat model that somebody sends me a malicious Excel file remains. The threat model that somebody sends me a malicious PDF file remains as well. It's also not the case that Excel files can't be audited, nor does the ability to audit something make it "inherently safe", because I still need to actually do the audit.

> What would have most impact in getting the app in front of people?

Maybe a better use of your time would be to just accept that there is no product-market fit, move on to something else. You still get to enjoy a program you made for yourself.

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

#220

Post by chmod775 »

I had a quick look and for your benefit I'll be blunt - I hope you'll see it that way.

Your application directly competes with Excel and is both more complicated and less powerful at the same time. The JS syntax is too much for your average MBA.

To avoid competing with Excel, which thousands before you have attempted and failed at, you need a way to make it interoperable with Excel - that means an easy way to export to and from. Make sure you know it in and out, so you can focus on solving problems that are hard/obscure in Excel. Like, for example, programmatic data sanitation, normalization, and import.

If your tool could generate nice plots and graphs from various data sources, update them in existing documents, and dump the processed data into Excel sheets, all in a single step, I could see someone using it.

A thing that is 'big' nowadays is 'Google Sheets as a service'. The way this works is that someone maintains a Google Sheets document that - for instance - contains current market prices. They may do this with some sort of custom script.

Then others can use that tables data in their own table, which automatically updates with the source data.

A tool that creates automatically updating sheets - be it by running locally or by updating some sheet in the cloud - might sell.

Anyways I went off on a tangent that is indeed pretty far from what your tool does right now.

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