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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?

#261

Post by danielmarkbruce »

he11ow wrote: post #247
d--b wrote: post #167

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…

In all of this 200+ comments thread, this is the first time you've clearly articulated examples of the pain to solve. Here's what to notice about these three comments: In all three, you still want to ideally be using Excel. In a sense, these are three feature requests for Excel...and each of them is valuable: -Getting a tool that instantly turns Excel into something made available online, that can be easily manipulat…

:)

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

#262

Post by danielmarkbruce »

d--b wrote: post #207
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I am honestly not looking at disrupting the industry. If I can sell this to a bunch of guys and make $200k/yr, that'd be totally fine for me...

I get that you don't want to compete with MSFT and GOOG. But, you are. That is, unless you follow the above advice from he11ow...

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

#263

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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…

+1000

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

#264

Post by motoxpro »

ganafagol wrote: post #209
motoxpro wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the solution for every business. Especially a small app that is hard enough to monetize already.

First, apparently they didn't find anybody interested in it, so throwing the code into the open is still better than the trash can where it would disappear forever. Maybe as open source they find somebody willing to invest time and energy to make it more useful and/or accessible which then even flows back to benefit the original author. For free. Second, open sourcing does bot preclude making money from it. If it tur…

You're 100% right. I just wouldn't give the advice that you should "open source it because it's better than it going in the trash" after a little bit of trying. Business is hard.

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

#265

Post by randyrand »

winrid wrote: post #64
randyrand wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a dev doing data work, it looks useful. In particular, it seems nice that in a single file you can keep both your data and code, together, easily.

How would this compare to jupyter notebook?

"The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application..."

Seems like you need an internet connection to use Jupyter, and you rely on them staying in business. OP's software and data is customer owned, it seems.

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

#268

Post by kowlo »

rikroots wrote: post #255
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, if OP had included it I would have been suspicious this whole post was just an excuse to push the app. Not mentioning it made the question genuine. A bit of a catch 22...

This. As someone who regularly adds (I mean, added) a link to my GitHub library in various comments I make to HN threads, I've learned the bitter lesson that adding the link will often result in the comment getting downvoted. When I did manage to get a "Show HN" post to the front page (with admin assistance) the link was in the title. Interest in the library was ... muted. I've come to realise that spamming my librar…

> So I've decided to move on to spamming the link across Twitter and Reddit instead.

How's that going? Isn't Twitter mostly bots retweeting other bots?

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

#269

Post by rikroots »

kowlo wrote: post #268
rikroots wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. As someone who regularly adds (I mean, added) a link to my GitHub library in various comments I make to HN threads, I've learned the bitter lesson that adding the link will often result in the comment getting downvoted. When I did manage to get a "Show HN" post to the front page (with admin assistance) the link was in the title. Interest in the library was ... muted. I've come to realise that spamming my librar…

> So I've decided to move on to spamming the link across Twitter and Reddit instead. How's that going? Isn't Twitter mostly bots retweeting other bots?

> Isn't Twitter mostly bots retweeting other bots?

Yes. When a human retweets one of my tweets I treat myself to chocolate.

The ones that get retweeted most are the ones linking to Codepen demos, rather than my library's landing page. This tweet[1] (linking to a "Pixellate a realtime webcam feed"[2] demo) managed to attract 7 bots and 2 humans!

[1] https://twitter.com/RikRoots/status/1375107862637252615

[2] https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/BapjaXO

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