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Why I am building a product with a tiny market

219 points by tsergiu 13y ago

crazycog 13y ago
I just build things for myself, and I am part of the smaller market.
ConceitedCode 13y ago
I tend to target niche markets because the odds of me succeeding are much higher. It's much easier to be the best of a small niche and like the article said everything happens on a smaller scale, so less risk. Most the wealthy people I personally know made their money from owning a small niche.
- notahacker 13y ago
  It's easi(er) to own a niche market, but it's also more likely that anyone decently positioned to compete with you can wipe out your profits with small changes to their product or pricing strategy Not all niche markets are small in terms of revenue/cost either: there are product niches worth millions (or even billions) whose actual feasible customer set barely makes it into double digits. But when the niche is that small in terms of customers you find that despite the lack of threat from competitors it's actually the customer that owns the niche....
  - Paul_D_Santana 13y ago
    That is true, but something else to focus on: with smaller niches, the learning that takes place is often much higher and faster, and that is invaluable too. My app is the absolute niche of niche ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavidsantana.timecalculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavids... ), but I learned A LOT, especially about the official Android publishing process. I don't care if it doesn't get used by many people, because my target market was literally 1 person: my girlfriend. In addition, the process of making this app was fun. Learning AND fun; a goal that ALL of us here are striving for, right?
    - scribu 13y ago
      I think most people building products (as opposed to OSS) are striving for profitability.
saejox 13y ago
I once spent an entire month developing a very niche product. I figured about 100 people would be interested in it. Turned out only 11 were. :) I earned no money, gained no fame. Still i am happy i did it. It was challenging enough be fun. Sometimes challenge is all we need. I don't think your product has a tiny market. Everybody uses regex and nobody actually understands it.
mehrzad 13y ago
I love niche products. The popularity of "things for everyone" (like iPhone/Galaxy) somewhat worries me.
nickknw 13y ago
Checked out the debuggex tool. Impressive!
pkamb 13y ago
Will you be charging for this?
- tsergiu 13y ago
  Yes, I am planning to monetize. I have a few ideas for to do that as it approaches the end of beta, but I'd love to hear any suggestions you have.
  - tehwebguy 13y ago
    You've got a really targeted and engaged base of returning users. You could add a text link to a product or service for hackers with an affiliate link, you'd probably get pretty high conversions with this audience.
  - flywheel 13y ago
    I honestly found it to be wonky and not useful, but I am an experienced programmer who knows how to use regex.
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    Debuggex is a very well done and useful site. It reminds me of http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ in terms of utility and slickness of design. Alex Sirota of that site uses a sponsored area that is not obtrusive.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    It would be interesting to do a SaaS play and charge on a monthly basis, with all updates available to all users. And then allow some (very basic AND time-limited) use by free users, only for trial purposes (not freemium).
  - josephgrossberg 13y ago
    What is the value-add over free tools such as rubular?
_lex 13y ago
I don't think a visual regex debugger is a tiny market- it's every programmer who doesn't totally understand regex, or who will have regex that he needs help decoding. This is probably close to 99% of programmers.
- pc86 13y ago
  I think his point is the market overall. Yes it's a huge share of programmers, I'd say 80-90% for your first example 95%+ for your second. But compare that market to the market for Dropbox, or AirBnB, or Amazon. If you're market is "programmers" it's already a pretty minute fraction of the general population.
- patrickyeon 13y ago
  If his market is "programmers who will pay for a regex debugger", it's probably much smaller than 99% of all programmers (and as a sibling comment pointed out, "programmers" are a much smaller market than many other).
  - _lex 13y ago
    Programmer market is ~12M. I agree that very few will pay though. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developers-are-there-in-the-world http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer...
- dogweather 13y ago
  Yes, but: I can't remember the last time u wrote a comes reflex. I've since learned to use an xpath parser, for example.
k4st 13y ago
This reminds me a lot of the regular expression reAnimator: http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/ http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/.
ganarajpr 13y ago
Just FYI.. This is built with AngularJS. One of the coolest product built with it too.
- tsergiu 13y ago
  I've loved working with angular. My only complaint is that the current docs are somewhat lacking, but it seems that will soon be addressed: https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/LfWvcFfqjXA https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/LfWvcFfq...
warmfuzzykitten 13y ago
The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b) you'll go broke collecting a pittance from the few who will pay.
- derefr 13y ago
  It feels like this is the quintessential "feature, not product" startup. The goal of these should be either: A. to acquire a huge customer base and then pivot into satisfying them with a larger "suite" offering which includes your original service as a feature, or B. to be acquired by another company with a huge customer base... and then integrate your feature into their suite. :) I could see, for example, Github buying this (and other things like it) and launching a featureful, language-agnostic online IDE that compiles against Travis-CI.
OGinparadise 13y ago
Why? Because you don't need to make 1 cent off each tomato sold in USA to be successful. Even taking a cut of every water pump of a certain car is more then enough--for most of us.
uokyas 13y ago
i can not say the same about my product http://onetimepost.com/ http://onetimepost.com/ ... but it only took me a Saturday morning so ... it wasn't like something huge was lost xD
- polymatter 13y ago
  well, how did you market it? looks pretty neat to me.
  - uokyas 13y ago
    shared the link on some few powerful websites like this .... truth is, very few people has an immediate need for that.
apinstein 13y ago
That's one awesome regex debugger! Going after such a small niche is a great idea as long as you know that the market is big enough to provide good ROI in both percentage and nominal terms. I don't think the worry from a competitor "adding a feature and crushing you" is a very likely threat. As long as you can stick it out for a few years to build a brand name and continue to keep in front of the indefinite stream of people learning regex you should be fine.
amenghra 13y ago
I wrote a regex tool a while back: http://regexp.quaxio.com/ http://regexp.quaxio.com/ It's open source so feel free to "steal" from it :)
deleted 13y ago
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pbiggar 13y ago
Very cool! Two suggestions: show the examples more prominently (and my add a regex for email, cause it looks cool), and allow people to link to specific regexes.
deleted 13y ago
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johnnyg 13y ago
Good: The top left logo on your blog links to your website. Bad: The first and last mention of Debuggex in the body text should be a link to your product.
- tsergiu 13y ago
  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.
  - johnnyg 13y ago
    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 and uses regexps, a HN reader and I want to check out the product. I want to do this easily. The web uses links to do this. You've earned the right to link. It is exactly when you should. It is directly relevant and it is in "your home". If you are in business, this is why you wrote the blog post. You've got me right where you want me. I'm interested and I have money. Make the path between "he should have my money" and "he has my money" as easy as possible. Link. Let me use a crude dating analogy: 1. Meet interesting person. 2. Invite person to dinner. 3. Groom, clean, prepare, cook, present, share dinner. 4. Goes well, clicks, everyone is interested. 5. Interesting person leans in for kiss. 6. You back away, saying the kiss would take away from the lovely evening. The kiss, and the relationship it hints at, is the point of the evening. And since I see the horse, while on the ground, is still kicking somewhat and not all the way dead: You are in business or you are not. If you are, know this and live by it: Do the prep work, then ask, ask, ask. The worst that happens is no. You've got a great product. Good luck.
    - tsergiu 13y ago
      Ok, I am convinced. I'll add the links :)
mistercow 13y ago
Interestingly, it seems like a lot of this is essentially a generalization of the advantages of B2B.
raawlls 13y ago
Interesting perspective. And regarding debuggex.com itself... Awesome. I'll be using it in the future. Nice work.
znmeb 13y ago
I'm in the same boat - building something I really want to build and use myself, not really caring much about product-market fit or any of that other stuff.
futhey 13y ago
That's a really cool little tool, and I think you're building a very lucrative audience.
nhaehnle 13y ago
Side note about debuggex.com itself: The "Phone Number" example is a bad idea. Please either remove it or otherwise relabel it to warn against using it. Rationale: Almost everywhere in the world outside of US and Canada, phone numbers do not look like that, and interacting with websites that assume they do is frustrating. Even USians or Canadians may want to enter a phone number with an extension, which would get rejected by that regular expression (a colleague of mine got frustrated to no end by websites and bureaucracy assuming the 3-3-4 style of phone numbers when she moved to Canada, because she prefers not to use a cell phone too much, and her work number has an extension).
- tsergiu 13y ago
  Ah good point. I thought I had labeled it "US Phone Number" at one point. I'll try to find another example of similar difficulty.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Even better: https://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/ https://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/ Extensions still needs special-casing, though.
jdnier 13y ago
I 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 http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so try example text like '<div id="123">abc' or 'abc<?xml target?>'. The JavaScript form of the regex follows: [^<]+|<(!(--([^-]-([^-][^-]-)->?)?|\[CDATA\[([^]]]([^]]+])]+([^]>][^]]]([^]]+])]+)>)?|DOCTYPE([ \n\t\r]+([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])|"[^"]"|'[^']'))([ \n\t\r]+)?(\[(<(!(--[^-]-([^-][^-]-)->|[^-]([^]"'><]+|"[^"]"|'[^']')>)|\?([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])(\?>|[\n\r\t ][^?]\?+([^>?][^?]\?+)>))|%([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F]);|[ \n\t\r]+)]([ \n\t\r]+)?)?>?)?)?|\?(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])(\?>|[\n\r\t ][^?]\?+([^>?][^?]\?+)>)?)?|/(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+)?>?)?|(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+)?=([ \n\t\r]+)?("[^<"]"|'[^<']'))*([ \n\t\r]+)?/?>?)?)
- tsergiu 13y ago
  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.
- bengotow 13y ago
  Op, have demonstrated your expertise. Nicely done. Thanks jdnier for the example.
- habosa 13y ago
  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 <li> to a <ul> ... I'm really amazed.
  - tsergiu 13y ago
petercooper 13y ago
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.
asimjalis 13y ago
Regarding 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.
- downandout 13y ago
  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.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    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_Foundation_raises_25_million_in_2012_fundraiser http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...
    - qingu 13y ago
      According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has more traffic than Amazon.com. You said Wikipedia raised $25 million last year. Amazon had over $60 Billion in revenue last year. Obviously Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization and that's good. Just saying that compared to their user base, they are not making a lot of revenue.
littleidea 13y ago
Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets. The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same. In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. My advice is, at the level that you understand what to build to get to market, go after the biggest fastest growing markets you can.
- tsergiu 13y ago
  There's no need to be so aggressive. I think you misunderstood my argument. That may have been entirely my fault; I'm still learning to write. Small and simple problems are rare in large markets because everybody is chasing after them. The low-hanging fruit get picked very quickly, and you need to produce more to reach the bleeding edge. By contrast, smaller markets have more low-hanging fruit simply because there are not as many people picking them.
  - littleidea 13y ago
    My apologies if you were offended, I didn't think that I was particularly aggressive. Certainly not compared to what is possible... I think I understood your argument, I just disagree with what you are asserting and your conclusion. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in big markets, because it is a proportionally bigger tree. If you add the constraint that you want to do everything on your own, then the markets and problems you can reasonably approach are smaller, but I still argue that from a return on investment perspective, you should be looking for the largest market opportunity that you understand enough to build. If you care to discuss in person, I'm on twitter with the same name. @ me and we figure out the best way to facilitate a discussion.
- marcamillion 13y ago
  >In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. Surely that can't be right. The very nature of a small market, implies that the solutions are easier - because of less competition, so less innovation is needed, therefore lower return. With larger markets, not only do you have to solve a problem - you have to solve a problem better/different than your competitors. Not all solutions are created equally and not all solutions solve the problem in the way the customer wants. It's harder to separate the signal from the noise when the customer doesn't know what the solution should look like - and when the competitors don't know either. Quite often, in a large market, many competitors exist largely because no 'significantly better' alternative exists. Think about all the crappy desktop software (from the 90s or early 2000s) that many small businesses still use. In a smaller market, you are more likely able to get away with simpler solutions - e.g. a CRUD web app, versus having to come up with a more sophisticated solution because competitors have already squeezed as much out of CRUD apps as they can.
daninfpj 13y ago
Great product, I loved it but I'd be in great trouble trying to monetize, hope you'll nail it.
randlet 13y ago
OP. Thanks for making debuggex! It has certainly changed the way I write regexes...I now reach for debuggex _before_ I start writing a new (non-trivial) regex. Fantastic tool. One think that I would really love is to be able to used named capture groups like in Python.
- tsergiu 13y ago
  Hey Randle, I read your blog post, and have kept named groups on my mind. Support for more languages is planned. However, I should note that it will be a premium feature. I really appreciate the continued support.
peaceprayer 13y ago
great product, thanks!
guilloche 13y ago
As a small market pursuer, I had to say that a tiny market is different from tiny effort. I developed torapp guilloche designer (http://www.torapp.info http://www.torapp.info) for security printing industry, which is definitely a tiny market. But it did not mean less competition, and it is in fact much more complicated than a regular graphic editor like adobe illustrator and coreldraw. Besides regular editing facilities in AI or coreldraw, I spent tremendous effort to handle all possible math formulas/curves as comupter algebraic system (CAS). I would recommend people to pursue as big market as possible.
imechura 13y ago
I don't think I am in your target market based on your current positioning, however I am in a position where I would be involved in the decision as to whether my company would pay money for something like this. The company I work for (as an SOA architect) uses regex heavily for many mission critical applications. It costs me 100s of Ks in testing effort when a back-end format experiences major change. We usually don't find a lot of bugs in testing but each missed parsing requirement could mean millions to the bottom line thus justifying the investment in man hours. If you think support of regex is a tiny market, I am not sure you have considered all of your angles or fully understand your market.
- tsergiu 13y ago
  I'd love to learn more about your use case and what's important in such large scale operations. Can you please email me at debuggex@toarca.com?
orangethirty 13y ago
In a smaller market, everything happens on a smaller scale. No. Scale has nothing to do with market size. Though you picked to build something (not yet a product) that seems to lack a market (defined as people willing to pay for it). In a smaller market, you can demonstrate expertise. Its actually easier to demonstrate expertise on bigger markets, due to its density. A small market can only have so many experts. In a smaller market, you can iterate faster on non-programming skills. This is more of an attitude than anything else. Its not a big vs small thing itself. One question I have to ask is why are you trying to develop a new kind of product on an untested market, when you can improve on an existing product and just focus on selling? You are still picking the most difficult choice. And the one that usually tends to deliver a failure. Once again for everybody: Don't build new things in new markets. Take old things and improve them.
dleskov 13y ago
You can make an Eclipse plugin and sell it to corporations and/or OEM license it to IDE/tool vendors.
- pmgmendes 13y ago
  +1 on this idea. I would even consider targeting web development editors like Sublime Text 2 or Brackets.
rgovind 13y ago
Interesting arguments...But apart from IDEs like visual studios, How much do individuals and companies pay for developer tools? Like say a better debugger or a code coverage tool? How about VIM plugins or better editors? I too have some ideas for a better debugger that I have been working on.
buro9 13y ago
I would love to see support for Re2: https://code.google.com/p/re2/wiki/Syntax https://code.google.com/p/re2/wiki/Syntax I mainly use Go and am used to Go Playground http://play.golang.org/ http://play.golang.org/ for testing very small snippets and sharing them with others in IRC for education/debugging. Debuggex is already part of my workflow when I write regular expressions, I was using it just yesterday to test some pre-processing of Markdown. The value to me is already there, but right now it's something I could also do without... but if the regexp engine on Debuggex is the one that is in use in the language in which I wish to implement the regexp, then that does change everything. The value then becomes very high to me. Debuggex can get you the first 95% of the way, but that last 5% of working out why something is not quite as you expect is where most of the pain is. I generally find that the last 5% is implementation specific features and syntax (I have only settled on Go recently and tended to work in several languages at a time for the past 5 years, so most of my regexp pain comes from context switching languages and libraries). Being able to select the exact implementation is the tipping point for me to reach into my pocket and pay.
Gmo 13y ago
Hi tsergiu, May I ask you what you used for doing the layout ? All coded by hand ? Good work anyway !
- tsergiu 13y ago
  Thank you! Yup, it's currently coded by hand. I'll find a more scalable way as more pages need to be added to the site. You can see that e.g. the blog post is just a page with a unique link.
  - Gmo 13y ago
    I meant more, the layout of the regex diagrams :) (but I guess it's also "by hand")
kiallmacinnes 13y ago
One of these days, JS regex will support look behinds.. All my dodgy regexes that this would be useful for use them :(
sspiff 13y ago
> "Why isn't my regex doing what I intend it to?" I've found that question to be by far the most frustrating and time-consuming issue with developers I've talked to While I would totally use this tool, this statement indicates to me that he talked to a specific subset of developers. I know that's kind of what the article is about, but still, this sentence makes it sound like he has solved the biggest time-sink for software developers.
droithomme 13y ago
Wow, this really is the best regex checker I've seen. Great work dude, you must be Russian or Romanian.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ajtaylor 13y ago
Others have mentioned it too, but I was blown away with the speed of the renderer! By the time the return key sprang back up, the visualisation was displaying on my screen. How did you do that?
anthonylebrun 13y ago
Admittedly I haven't spent too much time testing your product, but I just wanted to point out a few free tools that have been around for a while (which I use often): http://www.gethifi.com/tools/regex http://www.gethifi.com/tools/regex (js regex tester) http://rubular.com/ http://rubular.com/ (ruby regex tester) Have you heard of/tried these before?
- hipsters_unite 13y ago
  That was exactly my first thought - I use rubular all the time and it's a great scratchpad for regexes.

219 points by tsergiu 13y ago

I just build things for myself, and I am part of the smaller market.

I tend to target niche markets because the odds of me succeeding are much higher. It's much easier to be the best of a small niche and like the article said everything happens on a smaller scale, so less risk. Most the wealthy people I personally know made their money from owning a small niche.

notahacker 13y ago
It's easi(er) to own a niche market, but it's also more likely that anyone decently positioned to compete with you can wipe out your profits with small changes to their product or pricing strategy Not all niche markets are small in terms of revenue/cost either: there are product niches worth millions (or even billions) whose actual feasible customer set barely makes it into double digits. But when the niche is that small in terms of customers you find that despite the lack of threat from competitors it's actually the customer that owns the niche....
- Paul_D_Santana 13y ago
  That is true, but something else to focus on: with smaller niches, the learning that takes place is often much higher and faster, and that is invaluable too. My app is the absolute niche of niche ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavidsantana.timecalculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavids... ), but I learned A LOT, especially about the official Android publishing process. I don't care if it doesn't get used by many people, because my target market was literally 1 person: my girlfriend. In addition, the process of making this app was fun. Learning AND fun; a goal that ALL of us here are striving for, right?
  - scribu 13y ago
    I think most people building products (as opposed to OSS) are striving for profitability.

saejox 13y ago

I once spent an entire month developing a very niche product. I figured about 100 people would be interested in it. Turned out only 11 were. :) I earned no money, gained no fame. Still i am happy i did it. It was challenging enough be fun. Sometimes challenge is all we need. I don't think your product has a tiny market. Everybody uses regex and nobody actually understands it.

mehrzad 13y ago

I love niche products. The popularity of "things for everyone" (like iPhone/Galaxy) somewhat worries me.

nickknw 13y ago

Checked out the debuggex tool. Impressive!

pkamb 13y ago

Will you be charging for this?

tsergiu 13y ago
Yes, I am planning to monetize. I have a few ideas for to do that as it approaches the end of beta, but I'd love to hear any suggestions you have.
- tehwebguy 13y ago
  You've got a really targeted and engaged base of returning users. You could add a text link to a product or service for hackers with an affiliate link, you'd probably get pretty high conversions with this audience.
- flywheel 13y ago
  I honestly found it to be wonky and not useful, but I am an experienced programmer who knows how to use regex.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  Debuggex is a very well done and useful site. It reminds me of http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ in terms of utility and slickness of design. Alex Sirota of that site uses a sponsored area that is not obtrusive.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  It would be interesting to do a SaaS play and charge on a monthly basis, with all updates available to all users. And then allow some (very basic AND time-limited) use by free users, only for trial purposes (not freemium).
- josephgrossberg 13y ago
  What is the value-add over free tools such as rubular?

_lex 13y ago

I don't think a visual regex debugger is a tiny market- it's every programmer who doesn't totally understand regex, or who will have regex that he needs help decoding. This is probably close to 99% of programmers.

pc86 13y ago
I think his point is the market overall. Yes it's a huge share of programmers, I'd say 80-90% for your first example 95%+ for your second. But compare that market to the market for Dropbox, or AirBnB, or Amazon. If you're market is "programmers" it's already a pretty minute fraction of the general population.
patrickyeon 13y ago
If his market is "programmers who will pay for a regex debugger", it's probably much smaller than 99% of all programmers (and as a sibling comment pointed out, "programmers" are a much smaller market than many other).
- _lex 13y ago
  Programmer market is ~12M. I agree that very few will pay though. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developers-are-there-in-the-world http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer...
dogweather 13y ago
Yes, but: I can't remember the last time u wrote a comes reflex. I've since learned to use an xpath parser, for example.

k4st 13y ago

This reminds me a lot of the regular expression reAnimator: http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/ http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/.

ganarajpr 13y ago

Just FYI.. This is built with AngularJS. One of the coolest product built with it too.

tsergiu 13y ago
I've loved working with angular. My only complaint is that the current docs are somewhat lacking, but it seems that will soon be addressed: https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/LfWvcFfqjXA https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/LfWvcFfq...

warmfuzzykitten 13y ago

The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b) you'll go broke collecting a pittance from the few who will pay.

derefr 13y ago
It feels like this is the quintessential "feature, not product" startup. The goal of these should be either: A. to acquire a huge customer base and then pivot into satisfying them with a larger "suite" offering which includes your original service as a feature, or B. to be acquired by another company with a huge customer base... and then integrate your feature into their suite. :) I could see, for example, Github buying this (and other things like it) and launching a featureful, language-agnostic online IDE that compiles against Travis-CI.

OGinparadise 13y ago

Why? Because you don't need to make 1 cent off each tomato sold in USA to be successful. Even taking a cut of every water pump of a certain car is more then enough--for most of us.

uokyas 13y ago

i can not say the same about my product http://onetimepost.com/ http://onetimepost.com/ ... but it only took me a Saturday morning so ... it wasn't like something huge was lost xD

polymatter 13y ago
well, how did you market it? looks pretty neat to me.
- uokyas 13y ago
  shared the link on some few powerful websites like this .... truth is, very few people has an immediate need for that.

apinstein 13y ago

That's one awesome regex debugger! Going after such a small niche is a great idea as long as you know that the market is big enough to provide good ROI in both percentage and nominal terms. I don't think the worry from a competitor "adding a feature and crushing you" is a very likely threat. As long as you can stick it out for a few years to build a brand name and continue to keep in front of the indefinite stream of people learning regex you should be fine.

amenghra 13y ago

I wrote a regex tool a while back: http://regexp.quaxio.com/ http://regexp.quaxio.com/ It's open source so feel free to "steal" from it :)

deleted 13y ago

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pbiggar 13y ago

Very cool! Two suggestions: show the examples more prominently (and my add a regex for email, cause it looks cool), and allow people to link to specific regexes.

deleted 13y ago

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johnnyg 13y ago

Good: The top left logo on your blog links to your website. Bad: The first and last mention of Debuggex in the body text should be a link to your product.

tsergiu 13y ago
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.
- johnnyg 13y ago
  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 and uses regexps, a HN reader and I want to check out the product. I want to do this easily. The web uses links to do this. You've earned the right to link. It is exactly when you should. It is directly relevant and it is in "your home". If you are in business, this is why you wrote the blog post. You've got me right where you want me. I'm interested and I have money. Make the path between "he should have my money" and "he has my money" as easy as possible. Link. Let me use a crude dating analogy: 1. Meet interesting person. 2. Invite person to dinner. 3. Groom, clean, prepare, cook, present, share dinner. 4. Goes well, clicks, everyone is interested. 5. Interesting person leans in for kiss. 6. You back away, saying the kiss would take away from the lovely evening. The kiss, and the relationship it hints at, is the point of the evening. And since I see the horse, while on the ground, is still kicking somewhat and not all the way dead: You are in business or you are not. If you are, know this and live by it: Do the prep work, then ask, ask, ask. The worst that happens is no. You've got a great product. Good luck.
  - tsergiu 13y ago
    Ok, I am convinced. I'll add the links :)

mistercow 13y ago

Interestingly, it seems like a lot of this is essentially a generalization of the advantages of B2B.

raawlls 13y ago

Interesting perspective. And regarding debuggex.com itself... Awesome. I'll be using it in the future. Nice work.

znmeb 13y ago

I'm in the same boat - building something I really want to build and use myself, not really caring much about product-market fit or any of that other stuff.

futhey 13y ago

That's a really cool little tool, and I think you're building a very lucrative audience.

nhaehnle 13y ago

Side note about debuggex.com itself: The "Phone Number" example is a bad idea. Please either remove it or otherwise relabel it to warn against using it. Rationale: Almost everywhere in the world outside of US and Canada, phone numbers do not look like that, and interacting with websites that assume they do is frustrating. Even USians or Canadians may want to enter a phone number with an extension, which would get rejected by that regular expression (a colleague of mine got frustrated to no end by websites and bureaucracy assuming the 3-3-4 style of phone numbers when she moved to Canada, because she prefers not to use a cell phone too much, and her work number has an extension).

tsergiu 13y ago
Ah good point. I thought I had labeled it "US Phone Number" at one point. I'll try to find another example of similar difficulty.
mseebach 13y ago
Even better: https://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/ https://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/ Extensions still needs special-casing, though.

jdnier 13y ago

I 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 http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html It will match either text or XML markup (it's used to tokenize XML), so try example text like '<div id="123">abc' or 'abc<?xml target?>'. The JavaScript form of the regex follows: [^<]+|<(!(--([^-]-([^-][^-]-)->?)?|\[CDATA\[([^]]]([^]]+])]+([^]>][^]]]([^]]+])]+)>)?|DOCTYPE([ \n\t\r]+([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])|"[^"]"|'[^']'))([ \n\t\r]+)?(\[(<(!(--[^-]-([^-][^-]-)->|[^-]([^]"'><]+|"[^"]"|'[^']')>)|\?([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])(\?>|[\n\r\t ][^?]\?+([^>?][^?]\?+)>))|%([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F]);|[ \n\t\r]+)]([ \n\t\r]+)?)?>?)?)?|\?(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])(\?>|[\n\r\t ][^?]\?+([^>?][^?]\?+)>)?)?|/(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+)?>?)?|(([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+([A-Za-z_:]|[^\x00-\x7F])([A-Za-z0-9_:.-]|[^\x00-\x7F])([ \n\t\r]+)?=([ \n\t\r]+)?("[^<"]"|'[^<']'))*([ \n\t\r]+)?/?>?)?)

tsergiu 13y ago
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.
bengotow 13y ago
Op, have demonstrated your expertise. Nicely done. Thanks jdnier for the example.
habosa 13y ago
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 <li> to a <ul> ... I'm really amazed.
- tsergiu 13y ago

petercooper 13y ago

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.

asimjalis 13y ago

Regarding 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.

downandout 13y ago
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.
- icebraining 13y ago
  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_Foundation_raises_25_million_in_2012_fundraiser http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...
  - qingu 13y ago
    According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has more traffic than Amazon.com. You said Wikipedia raised $25 million last year. Amazon had over $60 Billion in revenue last year. Obviously Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization and that's good. Just saying that compared to their user base, they are not making a lot of revenue.

littleidea 13y ago

Nothing about what has been built or blogged makes me believe this person really understands products or markets. The logic of the points that are being made is flawed, starting with repeatedly conflating building a product for a small market with solving a small and simple problem. These are not the same. In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. My advice is, at the level that you understand what to build to get to market, go after the biggest fastest growing markets you can.

tsergiu 13y ago
There's no need to be so aggressive. I think you misunderstood my argument. That may have been entirely my fault; I'm still learning to write. Small and simple problems are rare in large markets because everybody is chasing after them. The low-hanging fruit get picked very quickly, and you need to produce more to reach the bleeding edge. By contrast, smaller markets have more low-hanging fruit simply because there are not as many people picking them.
- littleidea 13y ago
  My apologies if you were offended, I didn't think that I was particularly aggressive. Certainly not compared to what is possible... I think I understood your argument, I just disagree with what you are asserting and your conclusion. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit in big markets, because it is a proportionally bigger tree. If you add the constraint that you want to do everything on your own, then the markets and problems you can reasonably approach are smaller, but I still argue that from a return on investment perspective, you should be looking for the largest market opportunity that you understand enough to build. If you care to discuss in person, I'm on twitter with the same name. @ me and we figure out the best way to facilitate a discussion.
marcamillion 13y ago
>In general, solving problems for small markets is just as hard as solving problems for big ones. Surely that can't be right. The very nature of a small market, implies that the solutions are easier - because of less competition, so less innovation is needed, therefore lower return. With larger markets, not only do you have to solve a problem - you have to solve a problem better/different than your competitors. Not all solutions are created equally and not all solutions solve the problem in the way the customer wants. It's harder to separate the signal from the noise when the customer doesn't know what the solution should look like - and when the competitors don't know either. Quite often, in a large market, many competitors exist largely because no 'significantly better' alternative exists. Think about all the crappy desktop software (from the 90s or early 2000s) that many small businesses still use. In a smaller market, you are more likely able to get away with simpler solutions - e.g. a CRUD web app, versus having to come up with a more sophisticated solution because competitors have already squeezed as much out of CRUD apps as they can.

daninfpj 13y ago

Great product, I loved it but I'd be in great trouble trying to monetize, hope you'll nail it.

randlet 13y ago

OP. Thanks for making debuggex! It has certainly changed the way I write regexes...I now reach for debuggex _before_ I start writing a new (non-trivial) regex. Fantastic tool. One think that I would really love is to be able to used named capture groups like in Python.

tsergiu 13y ago
Hey Randle, I read your blog post, and have kept named groups on my mind. Support for more languages is planned. However, I should note that it will be a premium feature. I really appreciate the continued support.

peaceprayer 13y ago

great product, thanks!

guilloche 13y ago

As a small market pursuer, I had to say that a tiny market is different from tiny effort. I developed torapp guilloche designer (http://www.torapp.info http://www.torapp.info) for security printing industry, which is definitely a tiny market. But it did not mean less competition, and it is in fact much more complicated than a regular graphic editor like adobe illustrator and coreldraw. Besides regular editing facilities in AI or coreldraw, I spent tremendous effort to handle all possible math formulas/curves as comupter algebraic system (CAS). I would recommend people to pursue as big market as possible.

imechura 13y ago

I don't think I am in your target market based on your current positioning, however I am in a position where I would be involved in the decision as to whether my company would pay money for something like this. The company I work for (as an SOA architect) uses regex heavily for many mission critical applications. It costs me 100s of Ks in testing effort when a back-end format experiences major change. We usually don't find a lot of bugs in testing but each missed parsing requirement could mean millions to the bottom line thus justifying the investment in man hours. If you think support of regex is a tiny market, I am not sure you have considered all of your angles or fully understand your market.

tsergiu 13y ago
I'd love to learn more about your use case and what's important in such large scale operations. Can you please email me at debuggex@toarca.com?

orangethirty 13y ago

In a smaller market, everything happens on a smaller scale. No. Scale has nothing to do with market size. Though you picked to build something (not yet a product) that seems to lack a market (defined as people willing to pay for it). In a smaller market, you can demonstrate expertise. Its actually easier to demonstrate expertise on bigger markets, due to its density. A small market can only have so many experts. In a smaller market, you can iterate faster on non-programming skills. This is more of an attitude than anything else. Its not a big vs small thing itself. One question I have to ask is why are you trying to develop a new kind of product on an untested market, when you can improve on an existing product and just focus on selling? You are still picking the most difficult choice. And the one that usually tends to deliver a failure. Once again for everybody: Don't build new things in new markets. Take old things and improve them.

dleskov 13y ago

You can make an Eclipse plugin and sell it to corporations and/or OEM license it to IDE/tool vendors.

pmgmendes 13y ago
+1 on this idea. I would even consider targeting web development editors like Sublime Text 2 or Brackets.

rgovind 13y ago

Interesting arguments...But apart from IDEs like visual studios, How much do individuals and companies pay for developer tools? Like say a better debugger or a code coverage tool? How about VIM plugins or better editors? I too have some ideas for a better debugger that I have been working on.

buro9 13y ago

I would love to see support for Re2: https://code.google.com/p/re2/wiki/Syntax https://code.google.com/p/re2/wiki/Syntax I mainly use Go and am used to Go Playground http://play.golang.org/ http://play.golang.org/ for testing very small snippets and sharing them with others in IRC for education/debugging. Debuggex is already part of my workflow when I write regular expressions, I was using it just yesterday to test some pre-processing of Markdown. The value to me is already there, but right now it's something I could also do without... but if the regexp engine on Debuggex is the one that is in use in the language in which I wish to implement the regexp, then that does change everything. The value then becomes very high to me. Debuggex can get you the first 95% of the way, but that last 5% of working out why something is not quite as you expect is where most of the pain is. I generally find that the last 5% is implementation specific features and syntax (I have only settled on Go recently and tended to work in several languages at a time for the past 5 years, so most of my regexp pain comes from context switching languages and libraries). Being able to select the exact implementation is the tipping point for me to reach into my pocket and pay.

Gmo 13y ago

Hi tsergiu, May I ask you what you used for doing the layout ? All coded by hand ? Good work anyway !

tsergiu 13y ago
Thank you! Yup, it's currently coded by hand. I'll find a more scalable way as more pages need to be added to the site. You can see that e.g. the blog post is just a page with a unique link.
- Gmo 13y ago
  I meant more, the layout of the regex diagrams :) (but I guess it's also "by hand")

kiallmacinnes 13y ago

One of these days, JS regex will support look behinds.. All my dodgy regexes that this would be useful for use them :(

sspiff 13y ago

> "Why isn't my regex doing what I intend it to?" I've found that question to be by far the most frustrating and time-consuming issue with developers I've talked to While I would totally use this tool, this statement indicates to me that he talked to a specific subset of developers. I know that's kind of what the article is about, but still, this sentence makes it sound like he has solved the biggest time-sink for software developers.

droithomme 13y ago

Wow, this really is the best regex checker I've seen. Great work dude, you must be Russian or Romanian.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ajtaylor 13y ago

Others have mentioned it too, but I was blown away with the speed of the renderer! By the time the return key sprang back up, the visualisation was displaying on my screen. How did you do that?

anthonylebrun 13y ago

Admittedly I haven't spent too much time testing your product, but I just wanted to point out a few free tools that have been around for a while (which I use often): http://www.gethifi.com/tools/regex http://www.gethifi.com/tools/regex (js regex tester) http://rubular.com/ http://rubular.com/ (ruby regex tester) Have you heard of/tried these before?

hipsters_unite 13y ago
That was exactly my first thought - I use rubular all the time and it's a great scratchpad for regexes.