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I'm no domain expert here, just a random HN user. But I think this looks cool though, is trying to solve a real problem. My first thought: This is a very big
by feral 11y ago
I'm no domain expert here, just a random HN user. But I think this looks cool though, is trying to solve a real problem.
My first thought: This is a very big problem space to be tackling all at once. Massively huge.
I could see it taking a lot of engineering time to build out a featured product, which has parity with the incumbents at the things they do well. Also your target customers are very process oriented, so you've a big challenge to sell to them. For any given engineering application, you're probably going to be missing some features or feature-richness they consider 'key', for at least the medium term.
Unless something has changed that means they can achieve their needs with a lot less functionality?
E.g. Spreadsheet software, by virtue of the inherent power and simplicity of the metaphor, turned out to be good at a lot of things, and killed a lot of special purpose apps. Even then it took a lot of resources to write an early spreadsheet package. And its really difficult to build horizontally successful products like that.
So the common pattern to tackle this is to pick a really narrow niche you can specialize in and dominate, within the wider market. Ideally a new or underserved niche, or one that has changed recently in some important way, which means it isn't being served optimally by existing solutions. And getting enough better than an incumbent in just that niche that you can get some traction, get funding, bootstrap your development, and [>5-10 years later] eventually build the more general product.
Have you thought about doing that? Its not always the best thing to do, but it should be given a lot of thought?
- theuttick 11y agoYou are very right in that a product in this space has to meet a very high bar before it is useful compared to other things like Matlab. I have functionality to do things like differential equations, linear algebra, FFTs, but not really hard math things like symbolic integration. So, right now my targets are users that need something more powerful than excel but don't need the higher level features of matlab or python. To help acquire those people, I am writing a server side on AWS to let them solve large problems and simply pass the cost they incur on to them (for now). In this way, I can target small companies and let them solve some large problems without having to buy large servers. I am hoping that this side can pay for the development of the CAD system.