Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

Looks awesome, but Lego will come after you for your logo.

It's a valid point. From a technical standpoint, I'd say over time the number of feature implementations that can be re-used across modules increases. You're right for now that nino has yet matched all the feature sets, but the path to reach there might not be as linear as you think.

First of all, I want to congratulate you on what seems to be a massive (solo?) technical achievement. I can't even imagine the amount of work that must have gone into building all of this and making it function. There's clearly a huge amount of engineering talent behind this, so a million kudos to you on that!

That being said, since you're asking for feedback -- if you're trying to turn this into a business, there are three major issues that immediately jump out at me:

1) What is your actual business strategy? It appears like you're trying to compete directly against Microsoft and Google, but they have literally thousands of engineers working nonstop on the long tail of features businesses require. Your spreadsheet app looks fine for making lists or simple functions, but I'm assuming it doesn't do pivot tables, or 1,000 other things businesses do with Excel that they need to do. You simply can't compete against Microsoft and Google unless you have hundreds of millions in venture capital at a minimum, and since users need a lot of those long-tail features, it's not clear to me who you think is your customer?

2) What makes it better than Microsoft/Google? It's not a pain point for me that all my info in Google Workspace is split up between apps, because they all interoperate perfectly well in all the ways I need (I think). It doesn't matter to me whether I have 18 apps on my phone, or 18 icons within a single app. Your home page talks about "modular" and "pages" and "blocks" but even after browsing for a while, I don't understand exactly what those are, nor do I have any idea why I would want them. I would suggest that, to start, your home page needs to present 3 clear, obvious ways Nino is better in terms of how it helps the user. E.g. what is a basic common workflow that Nino lets you do in 5 clicks, that requires 1000 clicks in MS/Google and 100 lines of scripting? How is this going to save somebody hours/days/weeks of their time? Potential users don't really care about whether something is apps or modules -- they care about whether it lets them get their work done faster.

3) Whether it is or not, it looks like a solo project. It doesn't look like a business. It doesn't look like you've hired marketing professionals who can explain what it does, it doesn't look like you've hired a graphic designer to give the site a unique brand identity, and there are even a lot of subtle mistakes in the English copy ("by having all tools in one place" needs to be "all your tools", "we only collect metrics on the server-side" needs to be "collect metrics server-side", etc.). I can see that you know what you're doing as an engineer, but none of this inspires confidence that you know what you're doing as a business. I couldn't recommend anybody purchase your software because I simply don't trust that you'll be around a year from now.

Again, I want to congratulate you on such a truly massive technical achievement. But it's hard for me to see this taking off as a business the way it looks right now. What I would do is suggest two possible directions, depending on your personal preferences:

a) If you want to turn this into a large business that competes with Google and Microsoft, identify and rank the use cases where this is superior. Find a cofounder with more of a business/product management background, and an enterprise sales cofounder as well, get VC funding, and figure out how you can be a "disruptor" by meeting enterprise needs in ways that Google/MS somehow can't do.

b) Or if you just want to focus on your awesome engineering accomplishments, open-source this as something people run on the cloud of their choice -- that way potential customers don't need to worry as much about you going out of business. Get other engineers interested and turn it into something 100's+ of people are invested in maintaining and building features for. And then build a consulting business on top of it, where you and people you hire visit enterprises, set it up for them, build their business logic flows for them, provide phone support and SLA's and all that stuff.

Sorry for this super-long comment, but I hope it helps. You've really built something incredibly impressive, and I want to see you succeed!

You brought up great history! Shout out to the first ever (popular) integrated software Lotus 1-2-3/Symphony/Notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_software)

>I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics.

That's true .. but the problem is that there is a long tail of more advanced features than are needed. That is, for any given advanced feature only a small number of users care about those, but if you aggregate all the 'small number of users' that need some advanced feature, that number can be quite substantial.

>If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.

Right, and Google Docs did not make any meaningful traction in the enterprise - and it still has issues outside of education. What Google Docs did do well when they came out was 1) Have great live/collaborative document editing, 2) 100% web-based - so it worked great on Macs, PCs and Linux systems and 3) even though they were feature-poor, they still had a base level of features that was much greater than what Nino has today ..

So Google Docs was able to find a nice niche - I was finishing up University that around that time, and it was great to use that for projects.

Keep in mind, Google Docs was released mid-2000s - it could get away with being feature-poor compared to Office and rely on its 'secret sauce' of being free and 100% web-based. This isn't enough today.