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

nino.app

181–190 of 269 posts

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

#182
Really liking it so far!

An offline-first platform that lets you store your information in a central way and provides multiple forms of use and access is exactly what I've been trying to find, without much success until now.

I'm not sure I've understood how to fully realise the promises of it though. I created a board, and added some records to it, alongside fields for additional data.

It's not obvious to me how to use the calendar module using that board as a source. I don't have a way to see the existing records. I can create new records inside the calendar view, but when I look at that new record using the board, or using a sheet, the "Time" field disappears. The "Time" field appears only to be visible when looking at the records via that calendar.

Similarly, the to-do lists don't seem to map the "checked" nature of the boxes to any field on the record.

I would also like to be able to link to the record or embed its content in another page somewhere, but don't seem to see how.

It would be nice to be able to immediately link to (or embed) blocks/records by using `[[` or `@` instead of just documents. In particular, it would be nice for the quick search to yield blocks/records as you type, and not have to fall back to the advanced search.

Also, as an offline-first application, I would like to be confident the app is always fully synced - but after creating a few documents on my computer, then opening the first of them on my phone, I tried putting my phone into airplane mode, and once I'd done that I could open the other documents I'd opened before (great!) but when trying to open one of the others I'd created (that the app clearly knew about whilst it was online), it said "You're not connected to the internet".

But well done on a really awesome implementation of an awesome idea so far! I think it's very cool, and has a lot of potential.

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

#184
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's actually dead on point. Back in the day, here is Sokovia, there was a local competetitor to Facebook. They had a great start and everything went perfect for them, but it quickly turned out that the technical side was really bad. Sluggish interface, constant outages, etc. They tried to rewrite the app from scratch two times, and eventually failed. So yes, making sure you're moving in the right direction at the be…

This is actually the same reason Friendster failed in the face of Facebook, pun intended. Friendster simply could not keep up technically and had to shut down. Later, Facebook actually had a more solid technical footing and could scale quickly. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/n8hogn https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/8whow5

Facebook didn't kill Friendster. Friendster getting popular killed Friendster's weak stack, and then everyone moved to Facebook.

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

#185

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…

Single biggest technical thing, anyway. IMO, the single biggest thing is focus and clarity in their communication. If people without a working mental model of software development can’t instantly understand the tangible problem it solves in their existing business process, they won’t even scroll past the break, let alone pay for it. Consolidation and modularity are solutions, but people don’t go shopping for solution…

Fair point. I know little to nothing about design, and don’t really care about it. It’s not that I think it’s unimportant, it’s just not something I want to expend any time learning. To be fair, I’m also not trying to create any user-facing products.

To me, rsync.net is peak design. It has just enough modernity to appeal to people who might expect that, but it quickly gets out of the way and tells you what it is, why it matters, and how much it costs.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s tarsnap.com, which is probably a turnoff for anyone who doesn’t like text. I love it (as, apparently, do enough other people to keep its author comfortably employed), but I get that it’s an extremely narrow niche.

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

#186

There seems to be no way to delete my account..

If you want delete your workspace after testing it, you can go to Tools > Workspace > Scroll down to the bottom, click "Danger Zone", type in password to delete it

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

#187

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…

Single biggest technical thing, anyway. IMO, the single biggest thing is focus and clarity in their communication. If people without a working mental model of software development can’t instantly understand the tangible problem it solves in their existing business process, they won’t even scroll past the break, let alone pay for it. Consolidation and modularity are solutions, but people don’t go shopping for solution…

Nailed the real important part, the product marketing

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

#188
post #71
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could've said the same about Notion and its current valuation is at least 10B. Don't let this kind of feedback deter you, OP.

Valuation cool, but are they profitable or still burning money. As a solopreneur you don’t have piles of cash to burn to make people use it.

They burned money but 2024 will show if they can maintain or grow revenue without more cash infusion.

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

#189
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually the same reason Friendster failed in the face of Facebook, pun intended. Friendster simply could not keep up technically and had to shut down. Later, Facebook actually had a more solid technical footing and could scale quickly. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/n8hogn https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/8whow5

Facebook didn't kill Friendster. Friendster getting popular killed Friendster's weak stack, and then everyone moved to Facebook.

Yes, that's what I meant, my apologies if I conveyed that incorrectly. Friendster's own scale was untenable for them but Facebook was able to handle their own scale much better.

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

#190

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…

The problem with modern development is having to nail down the data model first.

I wish we would develop software where the data model could easily change.

To do this every data dependency in the system needs to traceable. Nothing does this so far. And everyone just picks a database off the shelf but none are even remotely useful for this.

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