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Ask YC: Review our new product

cleanupdata.com

31–40 of 61 posts

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#31
Business model is the question: (1) Trade sale to spreadsheet makers. (2) Sell a plug-in to spreadsheet users. (3) Or... let users lead you to a problem that only you can solve.

I don't think it's patentable[1]. It's a cute idea, kind of obvious; I'm not sure how well it really generalizes on all the cases that come up in huge datasets. If you continue along this path, you might come up with some patentable detail. I think in the US, you can file up to a year after inventing, so public demos don't destroy novelty (IANAUSAPA).

I think your strength is less the technology than the interface, which is nicely wrapped up and works[2].

You'll get interesting user leads from this demo. Maybe: who is suffering from what problem in what specific context who really needs your help. It's hard to get this market research any other way,

I can't see a really neat or natural way to monetize it - it's just not big enough. But the world's imagination is greater than my imagination. If you stick at it, I think something will come to you. That would be really cool!

[1] a patent isn't for suing people, but to have something to sell to Microsoft or Google etc.

[2] of course, you can improve the GUI further once you know what people need - imperfection is a good thing, because a head start on the competition is worthless when you run out of track.

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#32
This is great. Very useful for itunes connect reports since they changed the way they handle dates (went from 20081128 to 11/28/2008) halfway into this month. Now, I can easily change it without going through hundreds of rows.

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost certainly won't be advertising, though we'll make it easy to get to Dabble DB from here, which seems to be a good way of monetizing traffic. Otherwise, we're pretty open-minded at this point -- I'd be interested in hearing what people think makes the most sense..

The business model that makes the most sense to me is to sell the solution to businesses. Companies that deal with a lot of databases and want an easy solution to do mass edits. They probably could have their IT guys write some crazy Excel macro to do a lot of this, but your product is so simple my mom could use it, which is a great thing. You could keep it as a web service and/or charge to license it to businesses a…

It might be interesting to offer repeatability to businesses. Have them create an account and save their transformations. The challenge might be how to allow the editing of a transformation in the same simple UI.

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#34
A good demonstration that excel needs some very-easy-to-use macro-ing capabilities. And perhaps a better business model for this stuff would be to wrap up this functionality as a $20 set of excel macros. There's a healthy market for excel macros - it should do well.

I do this kind of manipulation quite a lot, but use my lovely emacs to do it. snip snip - easy peasy. But I know it's not reasonable to expect regular excel users to use emacs.

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#35
The "Magic/Replace" thing should be clickable. It's confusing not to have an obvious way to go 'home'. Worse, 'dabbledb' is clickable, and sends me off to some other site. I know that other site is related, but you might want to make that more obvious with 'created with dabbledb' or something like that.

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#37

Good idea, nice implementation, wrong medium. There is no reason this should be a web application - in a perfect world, I want something like this directly integrated into my database tool, and not have me open my browser and all that. At the same time, considering that the data work may be large, having this on a server is not too bad of an idea. What I suggest to you is this - spend a day to make a version of this…

Yes please. I work for a Canadian health care provider and I legally cannot upload the data for which I would find your tool useful.

Re: Ask YC: Review our new product

#40
post #39

Please founders put intro videos on a CDN. If I didn't have an interest in reviewing your site as part of this community, I would have left without trying a thing.

I would support this as a requirement for reviews. It just makes the entire process much easier for everyone in the community.
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