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ThingieQuery: $19 SQL IDE for Excel
- tryitnow 10y agoGoogle Sheets has a "query" function in which you can write out SQL-like scripts and I have found it to be tremendously useful. I've been disappointed that a similarly easy-to-use function doesn't exist in Excel. This is a solution to that problem. At first I thought this might not be all that useful given Excel's Power Query functionality, but then I realized there are still a lot of use cases where this could come in handy.
- iask 10y agoJust an FYI...Exact software offer a similar tool like this to enable power users to query their data. It's not fully loaded as this so you might be up for grabs if the price is right. Why not connect with them after you review your value.
- anakic 10y ago(I'm the author)
- r00fus 10y agoTried downloading without giving an email addy and it threw "The parameter 'to' cannot be an empty string." with a stack trace - might want to check inputs?
- Vintila 10y agoRelying entirely on client-side validation isn't a great idea. Also your site doesn't seem to be in production mode, can still see the stack traces on exceptions.
- svmegatron 10y agoThat is AWESOME! Nice work! If I can offer a button nitpick - I suggest "Try it out for free!" in big text, and "Version 1.5.248.1, 2016-04-26" in small text. Maybe as simple as wrapping the version info in a <small> tag.
- anakic 10y agoThanks a lot, I'm pretty proud of it!:) That's a good point, the version isn't really the important part, will do.
- dang 10y agoOn HN stories are treated as dupes if they have had significant attention in about the last year, which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022 did. If there's something significantly different, it would be best to post specifically about that.
- anakic 10y agoHi Dang. That's true, it's been less than a year:( It was a hobby project back then and I've switched to full time now. Trying to launch it properly now. I've done serious work in the meantime and lowered the price, and I think it's worth another go. Rules are rules though. Should I remove it?
- anakic 10y agoAlso, I wasn't the one posting it back then. I had posted it on reddit, and someone from there crossposted it to hn. Does that count?
- erikcw 10y agoLooks like it is Windows only. Is it likely that there will be a Mac version in the nearish future?
- anakic 10y agoUnfortunately no. The way it integrates into Excel is only available in Excel for Windows. Excel for Mac just doesn't have many ways you can talk to it (that I'm aware of).
- salimmadjd 10y agosuper bummer! I clicked on purchased with paypal and then decided to check and make sure if there was mac option or not. It's too bad there is not. I was ready to buy. That said, great work!
- anakic 10y agoIt's the thought that counts:) Yeah, it's a shame there's no way to integrate with Excel for Mac, not a small market either.
- PeCaN 10y agoDude. You seriously need to market an enterprise edition of this (offer support or something). It's a great idea with exceptional execution. At least half the companies I work with (oil & gas companies—they are addicted to Excel like it's crack or something) would buy this for quite a bit if it were marketed at them.
- anakic 10y agoThanks! Something like a site wide license? Any suggestions on a price point for this? I'm decent at development, but I'm a complete noob at marketing and business.
- PeCaN 10y agoSite-wide or per-seat, I'm not really sure which would be better. For the companies I work with, which are by-and-large pretty small, I think a per-seat license would be better (several of them only have 2-3 production analysts). You could do ~$600/head including support+updates for a year (might want to cap hours of support, however) pretty easily I think. I'm not any better at marketing, I just know a lot of people that would use this if it were pitched at them correctly. Unfortunately, most of sales involving enterprisey companies is in the pitch and not actually in the product.... Alternatively you could just get bought by Microsoft like that other guy mentioned. Best of luck!
- anakic 10y agoThanks! I haven't given too much thought to support, but it seems to be a recurring theme here. It's definitely something to think about.
- wyldfire 10y agoYes, good idea. Put "call" in for the price for now and be prepared to negotiate. All the big companies think they're special and will want a "great deal." You can give all of them a great deal and at the same time find out what the market is willing to pay while not underselling.
- dataminded 10y agoThis is amazing. Microsoft is going to buy you for a TON of cash. I said it first! (?)
- anakic 10y agoIf it happens, I will find you and make sure you get TONS of beer delivered to your doorstep:)
- andreashansen 10y agoShit, can I opt in to this as well?! On topic: downloading
- anakic 10y agoNeed to come up with an algorithm for this now, fingers crossed I actually end up doing the calculation:) Half a ton for you too!:)
- dataminded 10y agoI am so down for this. I'm also down to grab a beer at any point on your journey. You should be really proud of what you've built.
- anakic 10y agoThat sounds awesome! Send me some contact info and I'll get in touch!
- yolesaber 10y agoI'm recommending this to all my friends in the office not only because it's a great idea (playing with the free trial now), but because you have an awesome attitude!
- anakic 10y agoAnd you made my day:)
- Keyframe 10y agoThis ought to be a part of Excel. Microsoft, bring out your wallet for this fine gentleman!
- gfosco 10y agoVery very well done! I have no use for this right now but I'm buying it anyway because you deserve the support. Congrats on launching!
- anakic 10y agoThanks, much appreciated!:)
- soapdog 10y agoThis is quite impressive! Congratulations! Its cool stuff such as this that makes the life of a lot of people easier. Good work!
- anakic 10y agoThank you, that's the plan! And hopefully to earn a decent living while I'm at it:)
- co_dh 10y agoAm I misunderstood somewhere? Did you provide a sql interface to excel? are you asking a DBA to use excel instead of a real database? For me, it seemed to be more interesting to provide an excel interface to database.
- anakic 10y agoBoth really. Some times you don't need the overhead of a database, you just want to do a damn join in Excel or something. But also, it has the option to connect to an external database. When connecting, you can pull Excel tables into the database as temp tables, do queries (or import the data from the temp tables into permanent tables), and write results back into Excel. What's more you can automate this, even without VBA.
- charlesdm 10y agoLooks great, but your pricing sucks. $19, seriously? Multiply that 10-20-50 fold.
- sremani 10y agoI would not say 10 fold, but $99 has ring to it ;)
- anakic 10y agoWell, $99 seems fair to me as well:) The reason for the low price now is I need the users and word of mouth. I'm well aware it's worth a whole lot more than $19, but right now I just don't know how to get it in front of potential customers other than by keeping a low price for a month or two.
- sremani 10y agohttp://fcell.io/ http://fcell.io/ They have a product like yours but will do C#/F#/VB instead of SQL (in your case). Their pricing is pretty heavy ;).
- chaz6 10y agoWhat benefit does it have over VBA? A lot of the things shown in the demo could be done by simply importing a dll.
- anakic 10y agoFirst time I see this, pretty cool stuff. Glad to see I potentially have a lot of room for pricing adjustments:)
- api_or_ipa 10y agoWhat?! $1k license or bust? Any idea of the number of customers they have?
- anakic 10y ago
- Sukrat 10y agoDayummmm..!!!! (y) That is soooo awesommeee..!!! :)
- spdustin 10y agoIf you support the .NET Framework Data Provider for OLEDB, it's worth mentioning. That opens up a bunch of additional data sources for folks, potentially including Active Directory, and suddenly you're (maybe) getting the attention of enterprise IT folks as well as the business side.
- anakic 10y agoDoesn't support it yet, did not think to use it for directory services, that's an excellent idea! PowerQuery can query ad already though but still, it's worth investigating. Thanks for the tip.
- asimuvPR 10y agoAre you open to re-selling? Maybe white label it? If you don't want to talk about it publicly please email me (check profile). :)
- anakic 10y agoWould have to think about it, I think I'd say yes to re-selling, not sure about white labeling though, to be successful with it I need to build the brand. Too late here to say anything more, barely awake at the moment:)
- asimuvPR 10y agoI will email you. Thanks for the response. Go sleep. :)
- eloff 10y agoEvery now and then one sees something on HN that makes you think "why didn't I think of that?" This is one of those ideas executed very well. My prediction is this guy makes millions and is eventually bought by Microsoft for a ridiculous sum of money. I think he'd be a shoe-in for YC, but I also think that'd be a waste now - with a product like this he can easily show it off to investors and raise money, if needed, or just bootstrap off his own revenue. $120K for 7% is not a good deal with a polished product like this - I think it would be easy to beat.
- MichaelGG 10y agoWow this is excellent. In telecom, everything gets passed around as Excel sheets. And people spend non trivial effort screwing around in it. This would have saved so much time. Like everyone else said, your pricing and marketing is aiming too low.
- jldugger 10y agoSo... pivot tables?
- anakic 10y agoThey're good for aggregating data, but they're not designed for precise querying, manipulating and cleaning data. If they were, we'd likely see powerpivot replacing sql server management studio:)
- sourcd 10y agoIt's not every day that you come across such rave comments about a "Show HN" kind of thing. Congratulations to the dev. I'm not familiar with enterprise / Excel requirements & use cases. Could someone explain why is this such a great product [1]. I wrongly assumed that excel champs won't be comfortable dealing with SQL because they are either non-engineers or have been away from programming for way too long. [1] No offense to the author, I'd love to understand what the enthusiasm is all about.
- tryitnow 10y agoExcel superuser here. There's a lot of excel users who aren't comfortable with SQL, but I think they're a dying breed. The SQL you need to know for about 99% of your workflow is something you can learn in a couple of weekends. Most of the younger people I know learn SQL basics in college (I'm talking about business people, not just engineers). Spreadsheets are just really terrible at data manipulation. Good Excel analysts know this and understand why a query language is so useful. Data usage is exploding and business users want to roll their own analyses and not wait around for an IT ticket to be filled. So having business users able to easily use SQL in Excel makes things a lot more efficient. Using VLOOKUP functions and pivot tables is just not an elegant solution to a lot of data problems. A SQL script would be much more useful.
- tuyguntn 10y agoHave similar thoughts and would like to know others opinion on that.
- itisbiz 10y agoCan I use window functions like partition by?
- anakic 10y agoIf you connect using a SQL Server instance yes, with the built in database - no, SQLite doesn't have them yet. I've added some of my own functions to the SQLite engine though, e.g. ElementAt(pos, elements, orderElements) will return the element at position pos in a group, ordered by orderElements. Not exactly window functions, but close.
- majc2 10y agoThis provides a lot of value for businesses - therefore I'd definitely charge more. I would also consider changing the name to something else - "Thingie" might cause some friction in purchases. As to setting the price - I'd look at comparables such as Sublime, JetBrains IDEs/Resharper. I'd be looking at charging at least $49 - but I think $79 to > $100 would feel right to me. As to a long term enterprise pricing plan, I dunno - but I'd definitely be looking at it. Good luck and well done.
- retube 10y agoAs a heavy excel user this is tremendous. I've always wanted to be able to run SQL queries against a Range. However: from much experience working in gigantic firms where Excel forms the core of a like a gazillion work flows and is the default analytics platform - sadly most users just aren't technical enough for this to be useful to them. There's probable a niche 1% who'd get value from this. Most people do not understand databases, SQL, and have little/no experience in any kind of coding including VBA.
- banku_brougham 10y agoI fully agree that enterprise version would be in high demand. I work in a business org at a large tech company. Everybody is an excel user, most are sort of familiar with SQL but aren't great at setting up ETL jobs. This product is amazing.
- rukuu001 10y agoThis is an awesome product, but: the name and price-point will not encourage customers to take the product seriously. For a while I've been thinking about how hard it is to wean corporate analysts off Excel (it's their frame of reference) and on to something more 'Enterprise-y', and the solution is to go the other way and scale Excel instead. This product is an excellent start at that.
- osullivj 10y agoStrongly agree on scaling Excel. Excel is deeply entrenched in corporate environments because it's the go to tool for users when IT depts can't or won't deliver what they need. Consequently there's a huge amount of Excel based end user generated solutions out there that are business critical. Looks like ThingieQuery has hit a sweet spot for power users working on Excel-as-a-DB type problems. Another outfit taking the scale up Excel approach is BlockSpring. Thingie could add a lot of value manipulating BlockSpring imported data. My own interests lie in Excel-as-calc-engine rather than DB, and I think there's a lot of value to be had in scaling up calcs by serverizing.
- NKCSS 10y agoLittle bit of advice: 1) Obfuscate your deliverables 2) Don't store the Licensing information in plain-text in a XML file; it's trivial to create a generator to generate a valid license for the current product. Make sure to use a public/private key you sign it and check it, not giving the client the information to create a valid license if they know the CPU Id, Hdd s/n's and Nic Mac Adresses. Other than that: well done, looks great and as others have said: market it for enterprises and buy a boat :)
- anakic 10y agoThanks! 1 - much debate about this, it's certainly safer to do so 2 - if you take a look at the license again you'll notice the digital signature field, to make a generator you would need my private key:P Boat is good, I like boat. :)
- NKCSS 10y agoOK, good; I just did a quick decompile and skip through the code to see; glad you have it covered :) It's cool to see you stuck with it; looking at your history, it really is a shame it hadn't got the attention it deserved earlier on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic
- anakic 10y agoWell it was fun, I felt it was the type of tool I would want for my self in Excel. Also, not liking ones regular job goes a long way to fuel enthusiasm for hobby projects:) And it did hit the front page when /u/petepete crossposted it from reddit last year, which was a big moral boost.
- tixocloud 10y agoIncredible! I wish this was out before I switched roles. Would've been extremely useful especially for advanced pivoting.