Sometimes building an excellent product or service in a tiny niche can also result in that tiny niche becoming bigger (by either a little or a lot). The MP3 player market was relatively tiny until the iPod blew it apart, ditto for tablets and the iPad, but I'm sure there are more niche examples.
Why I am building a product with a tiny market
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Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was somewhat intentional. I had a larger plug at the beginning initially. I decided it did not seem genuine enough, and would take away from the content.
You are clearly genuine, but also a little naive business wise. Please give this a read and let me know where the right place to link is, if not here. 1. You are giving me quality content about your business experiences and decisions. 2. You are giving me this information on a blog supporting a product which, by the way you've crafted the blog post, seems likely to be professional and loved. 3. I'm a person who makes…
Ok, I am convinced. I'll add the links :)
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#43I fed it a favorite regex... Bravo. Unfortunately, the permalinking fails with this particular regex, or I'd include it here. The visualization is so large, it more than fills my large screen. Still, pretty cool to see it render instantaneously and to watch it match example text. The regex is described here: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so…
The permalinking is very rudimentary and was put up quickly so that it worked for "most cases". I wanted to focus on building the actual debugger. This will be fixed in the near future.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#44Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas:
1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working.
2. You could license your debugging code/technology.
3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes might be interested in your product.
4. You could ask for donations to support the site.
5. You could make it social. Have people vote on regexes. Have another complementary site where people contribute test-cases for common regexes like phone numbers, dates, email addresses. You could hold competitions in different categories.
6. You could offer a cloud-based regex parser. I know it sounds a bit absurd, but I want to throw this out there in case it leads to other neat ideas.
7. You could save regexes and have people vote them up. You could have discussion threads around regexes.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#45I fed it a favorite regex... Bravo. Unfortunately, the permalinking fails with this particular regex, or I'd include it here. The visualization is so large, it more than fills my large screen. Still, pretty cool to see it render instantaneously and to watch it match example text. The regex is described here: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so…
Op, have demonstrated your expertise. Nicely done. Thanks jdnier for the example.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#46Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas: 1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working. 2. You could license your debugging code/technology. 3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes mig…
4. You could ask for donations to support the site.
If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compliance that they will voluntarily pay even if it is unlikely that the site owner would ever find out about their unauthorized corporate use.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#47Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas: 1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working. 2. You could license your debugging code/technology. 3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes mig…
Some very useful suggestions. Thank you.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#48Regarding business model and monetizing, here are some ideas: 1. You could sell tutorials and ebooks on regexes. People who use your tool might want to understand why their regexes are not working. 2. You could license your debugging code/technology. 3. You could sell a corporate license to use your site. Corps’s regexes won't be shared publicly. Others might be. Corps paranoid about people stealing their regexes mig…
4. You could ask for donations to support the site. If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful. He is far more likely to make money selling a premium subscription to corporate users. He can even just say "site is free for personal use, and corporate users must pay $495/year". You would be surprised at how many businesses are paranoid enough about compl…
If you learn nothing else from Wikipedia, learn this: Begging annoys users and isn't particularly successful.
As far as I know, Wikipedia fundraising efforts have been very successful. They got $25 million dollars just last year.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are clearly genuine, but also a little naive business wise. Please give this a read and let me know where the right place to link is, if not here. 1. You are giving me quality content about your business experiences and decisions. 2. You are giving me this information on a blog supporting a product which, by the way you've crafted the blog post, seems likely to be professional and loved. 3. I'm a person who makes…
Ok, I am convinced. I'll add the links :)
Anecdotal confirmation: I probably wouldn't have clicked through (or found it) if the only link was the blog image - despite the first thing I did being to look for the link to the product. (Which is great, and might replace my current 'go-to' for this!)
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#50I fed it a favorite regex... Bravo. Unfortunately, the permalinking fails with this particular regex, or I'd include it here. The visualization is so large, it more than fills my large screen. Still, pretty cool to see it render instantaneously and to watch it match example text. The regex is described here: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so…
Wow. How the hell do you (OP) get it to render so fast? That was instantaneous as far as I could tell. I've seen websites take 5x as long to add a to a ... I'm really amazed.