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

nino.app

161–170 of 269 posts

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

#161
I notice that you have been working on this for a while [1] and announced a couple of modules last year so I expect you have already validated the concept with a bunch of users.

I love the idea and played with a couple of modules and didn't find it intuitive (e.g. embedding a block from a sheet into a canvas using block embed) I also tried to drag and drop.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nino.app

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

#163

A lot of people are saying to specialise your business or die. I think you have a good opportunity here to do what nothing else does quite well, and that is to implement a vertically integrated document management system for use cases such as ISO 9001 etc. Use case 1, document management: This basically just means that you need to implement the capability to “publish” a document version, permanently view that documen…

This is indeed a clear market gap. Ideally it has the workflow features but they can also be swapped out. Enterprise market though as opposed to wherever this was aimed.

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

#164
Next, focus on making something some percent of your users will love.

I think you have a good first pass technical implementation, and your next task is to polish your UX/UI to the point where at least one of your apps will inspire a following of passionate advocates. I don’t think your current pass will do that - the “all in one” interoperability angle alone wont be enough.

The docs market is $100B+ - it’s huge, and highly contended.

Notion targeted creative, designer types with great typography and minimal UI taste. Coda targeted Product Manager types with lots of features for building fluid workflows for complex projects. What’s going to be your first user story & angle?

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

#166
It looks good. The problem for me, to use it is that Google Sheets and Docs are way more fully featured, even if they aren't integrated as neatly as you have done. You will need to find the people for who having calendars, docs and sheets in one place matters a lot. Maybe it is the kind of people who already use notion and obsidian etc.

There are some UX things I think should be looked at:

1. New sheet asks me 'Create source' or 'select source'. One is black and the other blue. I assume they are both links? Looks like I need to click "Create source" to do the thing I would intuitively expect, which is to show me a blank spreadsheet to edit.

2. First column of a new spreadsheet is called "Name" and I cannot rename it, it only has sort options, but if I add another column it is called "unnamed" and I can rename it. I am not sure why this is. Since all I have been told at this point is that it is a "sheet" I am expecting a free homogenous experience like Excel. If it is not that, you might think about how to make it more obvious what it is. (Do I need training, a quick tutorial, a quick highlight-feature/click-next intro etc.?)

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

#167
I would take your current marketing front page and make it the page for developers. Then I would work with a B2B SaaS marketer on what you actually need for the people who make the purchasing decisions. You made a great construction kit, now you need to demonstrate with actual app demos what you can make in an amazing way that your competitors cannot.

Developers love making libraries and construction kits as a product, but almost nobody buys construction kits unless the target market is constructors (like dev tools). You need to turn this into an actual product normal people would use. I think your pretty close to that although, you just need a few extra steps for that.

What your targeting is a next step evolution in the target market that microsoft office is targeting. You need to demonstrate with demo videos (not workflow diagrams) so this reality is more apparent with what you've made. Go talk to users, understand what their needs are and then create a message and glue features that would make that happen.

Notion kind of languished for years in their 'productivity dudes' niche and then exploded relatively recently. Figure out how they made that transition. Looking at what you made, it effectively looks like a better notion.

I would also look into what makes people transition off notion to a more specialized tool. Like you can do task management, standup tracking, etc with notion, but it doesn't scale after a while and people go on to things like linear and teamplify. What can make people scale with your tool? That will probably be a thing to think about at a later stage with your company product although.

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

#168

Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model. It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful thought, it’ll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns, duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance. Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs, where you’d be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3 et al. Chat practically needs to be its…

Notion might have written something about their journey in this regard?

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

#169

Honest and genuine feedback. I am concerned that you may be working on something that does not have a market in its present form, or possibly ever. I am worried as to how much of your life / time / money you might be pouring into this. It is difficult for me to be categorical about this, as for all I know it's a tiny side venture and you're not bothered about adoption. But, based on the marketing copy / launch, previ…

Agreed. As a solo dev I am 1.5 years in to building something that represents just one of these apps, and I am still at least 6-12 months away from a v1. I guess it's a choice of going wide or deep.
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