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It looks interesting, but CEO's don't have time to get syntax errors. That is why they pay big money to companies for products like Synergy SmartViews or UniPoi

It looks interesting, but CEO's don't have time to get syntax errors. That is why they pay big money to companies for products like Synergy SmartViews or UniPoint or Crystal Reports. So they can pay someone with moderate skills a moderate salary to generate professional looking reports. This would have to undercut those other tools in price and also be geared towards more technical industries. Preferably industries that have internal developers with time to play around with this. Then the real money will come in the form of paid training courses and certification levels. I think you're onto something and I do think there's a market for this, but you're aiming too high. The target audience for this is buyers, planners, and schedulers. They are the boots-on-the-ground who generate these kinds of reports for the CEO. They are the ones who will see your product, identify with it, and recognize it's value. CEO's don't care where pretty reports come from. They pay someone else to worry about that. The good news is the hard part seems to be mostly done. If you spent some time adding Visual development features to this (so you can just click and drag buttons to create queries) you would have a very big market. You would get bonus points for integrating this directly into popular ERP systems like Job Boss or Infor Visual.

d--b 6y ago
Sure, what you say works for big corporations. However buyers in big corporations are not first customers. Nobody gets fired for buying tableau. CEOs in 20-people companies don’t have time for syntax errors for sure, but they do care how much time reports take away from building features. Anyway that needs rephrasing
- batoure 6y ago
  I’m the Founder of a sub 20 person company and you are right about tableau but also completely wrong about your view. The problem with your tool is anyone who will find this useful can also just solve this problem with JavaScript. Additionally I think you fell pray to a mistake i my self made about 8 years ago. I built a product thought it was amazing tried to turn it into a company and completely failed. In one of my final meetings about the project someone said “you know you just reinvented Apache yarn here right?... and not in a good way” I had no idea what they were talking about I left the meeting and started power googling they were right 80% of our code was pointless and missing 90% of the features of a pretty generic open source project. Today I red team any idea I have by assuming someone solved it and I just haven’t found it yet. I ask the smartest people I know “what does this idea feel like?” Before I build anything... If I could go back in time and tell you one thing it would be “while you may feel like you are fixing excel 100% of your features are in the developer docs for google sheets... a free product”
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    This is a key issue in my field as well. Marketing isn’t just about selling and should also be part of focusing on what to build. Commercial passion projects are awful for this because you have to go from building something for yourself to understanding what people actually want. Part of the problem is cultural as well. Games in particular lionises unrepeatable successes. Which ends up with very similar “scratch your itch”/“build the game you want” and “build it and they will come”/“just make a good game” generic advice. Often given by people who haven’t succeeded themselves!
  - d--b 6y ago
    > The problem with your tool is anyone who will find this useful can also just solve this problem with JavaScript. Well yeah, though they won't do it as fast. Having a live repl, and packaged charts should make it at least 10x faster. Sure I may very well be making a mistake. The fact is I'd rather fail than not give it a shot..

d--b 6y ago

Sure, what you say works for big corporations. However buyers in big corporations are not first customers. Nobody gets fired for buying tableau. CEOs in 20-people companies don’t have time for syntax errors for sure, but they do care how much time reports take away from building features. Anyway that needs rephrasing

batoure 6y ago
I’m the Founder of a sub 20 person company and you are right about tableau but also completely wrong about your view. The problem with your tool is anyone who will find this useful can also just solve this problem with JavaScript. Additionally I think you fell pray to a mistake i my self made about 8 years ago. I built a product thought it was amazing tried to turn it into a company and completely failed. In one of my final meetings about the project someone said “you know you just reinvented Apache yarn here right?... and not in a good way” I had no idea what they were talking about I left the meeting and started power googling they were right 80% of our code was pointless and missing 90% of the features of a pretty generic open source project. Today I red team any idea I have by assuming someone solved it and I just haven’t found it yet. I ask the smartest people I know “what does this idea feel like?” Before I build anything... If I could go back in time and tell you one thing it would be “while you may feel like you are fixing excel 100% of your features are in the developer docs for google sheets... a free product”
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  This is a key issue in my field as well. Marketing isn’t just about selling and should also be part of focusing on what to build. Commercial passion projects are awful for this because you have to go from building something for yourself to understanding what people actually want. Part of the problem is cultural as well. Games in particular lionises unrepeatable successes. Which ends up with very similar “scratch your itch”/“build the game you want” and “build it and they will come”/“just make a good game” generic advice. Often given by people who haven’t succeeded themselves!
- d--b 6y ago
  > The problem with your tool is anyone who will find this useful can also just solve this problem with JavaScript. Well yeah, though they won't do it as fast. Having a live repl, and packaged charts should make it at least 10x faster. Sure I may very well be making a mistake. The fact is I'd rather fail than not give it a shot..