Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?
I have built an application to scratch my own itch. It’s a tool that I had a need for in my day job for years. The problem it’s solving is a problem that I felt many people had too. But when I talked to people about it, most times it didn’t really click. So I thought “crap, they don’t get it, cause they don’t see it. Once I build it, they’ll get it”.
I didn’t spend an awful lot of time on it. And I think the app is ok-ish for an MVP.
Now I posted it here and there and sent it to a few people I know, but it doesnt seem good enough.
I realize now the importance of having a broad reach. If I was someone like Mike Bostock, with a bunch of followers, I’d just post it to Twitter and voila. Someone said earlier on HN: building an MVP should include a distribution strategy. And I can feel that pain. Now distribution is something I have zero skills at.
What should I do? There are a few things I could be doing, like:
- get better at marketing, make a video for my target customers
- try and build an audience through blogging and things of that nature
- go and sell it to customers in real life.
- try and find a co founder who would have the time and skills to do these things.
- add more features to the MVP that people tell me are missing
- create more documentation for the MVP, so that onboarding is smoother.
What would have most impact in getting the app in front of people?
268 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadIt didn’t even reach the Show HN page. And I don’t want to spam by repeat-posting...
RAD or low-code should be targeted towards non-developers in the org.
This market is heavily saturated with most solutions falling short of expectations and being limited in what can be achieved.
In other organizations, such roles don't exist because it's too expensive to make business apps, and they don't want shitty solutions. It's a little hard to find how to put the foot in the door.
Then later on, plan on adding paid add-on features and professional support, etc.
Pricing will be somewhat similar to LinqPad.
In my case I am trying to get Javascript/visualization/web developers to embrace the literate programming paradigm. The tough part here is that those familiar with something like Jupyter don't often know web APIs very well to really build a simple "app" in 100 lines, and those who do have probably never used a "notebook" at all and wouldn't even consider it.
How I am currently adressing this issue is by embracing content authoring first. The base of my tool are now WYSIWYG blocks, with the "super powers" being use-as-you-learn. Think gitbook but it's actually notebooks: that's not too scary. In your case it may mean some pre-built drag and drop no-code visualizations.
Importantly: don't give up now. My project has gotten some attention, but not nearly as much as I think it deserves. Follow the advice of others: see who really has a need for your product and let them help guide your next steps.
Finally, check out ellx [1] too as it's quite similar in its target audience.
[0]: https://starboard.gg [1]: https://ellx.io/
What do you think the best way of doing this is though?
I need to 1. find potential users 2. Get in touch with them 3. Convince them that a half baked product will eventually solve their problems.
Going one on one seems easy but with limited reach, while “trying to build an audience” seems hard but with more upside.
What appeals to you about your MVP is likely not what will appeal to your target market, unless they are you. In which case, you should know where they hang out!
Marketing and value prop refinement is hard. You have to nail it, and nail how you talk about it. 80% won’t cut it - spend the time to refine by putting it out there.
IH is a community of people working on their own products, often solo devs, and it may be a good place to introduce yourself and your project (possible customers could read IH), but also ask for some more advice.
Launch repeatedly and talk to users
I'm not kidding.
For you it's an exercise to describe it.
For us it's 1) a way to see it (which is what you want), and 2) even if we're not interested, we could give more precise suggestions.
Install the beta from https://www.jigdev.com
Now you need to be able to handle objections.
What does this offer (me the CEO/CTO) that isn't done with Tableau or PowerBI?
Those tools get me custom insights about the business without using any developer time; the work is generally done by entry-level data analysts or accountants.
(This is not to say your idea is bad, but this is an objection you will need to have a response too, like "this tool is cheaper". If that response seems to get traction you might change your pitch to "it gives you 80% of Tableau, but at 20% of the price".)
https://nifi.apache.org/
Generally I suggest deleting most of the text above the screenshots.
My approach would be to do some traditional web-based paid promotion marketing along the lines of Google Ads and via Twitter. Hook into key words that you think your audience would connect with your product. Let it run for a bit and monitor any engagement that you get.
Only other thing I would suggest is have a simple video/loop on your web page, showing the tool in action. That is a bit more engaging than a static screenshot.
Having been in a similar position to yours in the past, I sincerely wish you the best of luck. This kind of scenario is a classic example of the commoditization of ideas, and the importance of execution (and the ability to do so, which is often constrained, as you've discovered, by resources).
Ideally you would probably want a little money behind you to launch a concerted marketing campaign, that would be a combination of paid promotion on a larger scale, as well as directly reaching out to certain small-medium sized organisations that you think your product could help to solve their business problems. A step towards that might be engaging with a startup incubator, which could provide such resource, or at least connect you with other like-minded people who might be open to collaboration.
It's quite approachable, and Google and Twitter make it very easy to set a small budget that your impressions will be limited to (i.e. the promos will run until you get a certain amount of views/interactions that you can define). Definitely recommend giving it a try.
Who is the target market?
What urgent, important problem does it solve?
You claim "Jig makes writing business apps faster than ever before." But I can't find any compelling evidence to backup that claim.
Sales and marketing are harder than it appears. If you haven't done it before then your best bet is to find a co-founder who has the sales and marketing skills and experience that you lack. Of course, they would need to have the knowledge of your target market's needs and motivations. They should also be able to help you improve the website and the product examples.
If nobody came, then talk to somebody; somebody who is willing to pay you. The success of the search for these elusive first paying customers is what makes a startup succeed or fail.
Drop me a line at edb at jigdev.com if you think of features that would make it better.
And if you like it, please tell others! That'd be a big help.
Finding users to use your product is by far the hardest part in my experience. Just expecting them to come doesn't really work anymore. It did back in the early 2000s. I remember how back then even the average projects I was working on required almost no marketing to attract a significant number of visitors and rank well in Google, but since ~2010 I found this no longer to be the case.
Personally I've found marketing efforts to be largely luck. Sometimes you'll write a couple of blogs that take off, or perhaps you'll share a link to HN, Reddit, Twitter and people will upvote / retweet it. But in general the more you can write and post the better chance you have of something working.
SEO is more predictable, but it's very hard these days as there is always so much competition with established products. Personally I don't even focus on SEO as a way to attract visitors anymore. Although perhaps if you are confident you had a strong niche which you could target in search it might be worth it.
I would strongly recommend against adding more features at this stage. In my experience this never works and is always a waste of time. If you have people coming to your site, using your product and then commenting that they wish it did 'x', then you might want to consider adding new features. I've wasted years of my life adding features to products that literally no one used and now I regret how much of my early twenties I spend working on products no one cared about instead of spending time with friends and family.
Finding a really good co-founder would probably be the way to go. You want someone with a lot of connections who can push your product into businesses and get it shared online by influential people. They're hard to find, but they can be found at local meet ups and you may also know a few people like this from your past / present employment. But this is where I would focus (ideally before you've built something).
Other than that paid ads could be an option, although it would be good to know if you can convert organic users first. If you have the budget in my experience paid ads are the best way to get users in front of your product, but for it to be worthwhile you need to be sure you're converting enough visitors at the right price point.
Not to be too negative, but personally I've given up on bootstrapping startups. I've found out the hard way that if don't have a great co-founder or if I'm not able to put serious cash behind a product it's almost certainly going to fail. It was different twenty years ago, but competition is so high today it's extremely hard to break through all the noise.
There's an interesting post on Indie Hackers which highlights just how hard what you're trying to do is: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8eb...
I think a lot of people massively underestimate how hard it is to build a successful software product today if they don't have funding or an amazing team backing it -- although ideally you should have both. So give it your best shot, but also know when to quit. Your time is valuable and what you're trying to do is extremely hard and success is largely a product of luck. If it doesn't work out you can always keep it on the backburner for when you do find a great co-founder or an investor for your project then you can give it another shot.
I definitely see how having access to influencers and/or money could make the process infinitely easier.
I didn't realize it until I read a piece saying a16z was a media company first.
I guess I'll push my luck a little bit with bare sales/marketing tricks.
Your problem might be a niche problem, but unless the niche is extremely small, there must be places online where you can get a relevant audience and throw the idea at them to start collecting some feedback.
It is also possible that the problem you see is not perceived by other people, so always take a critical stance towards your own idea. Try to evaluate based on facts and not your own passion.
My 2 cents
Do you use the tool for your own need, eat your own dog food?
Maybe it is like you said - I'm just not seeing what is distinguishing it from Tableau or other such "DIY analytics from your data" apps. It gave me the impression that you built your own solution instead of learning what was already available.
If I am wrong, then you don't need broader reach. You need a different message.
It’s very hard to find a way to convey what’s different... i’ll keep trying
However, these 3 solutions are screen-based. They are designed to be interactive and be consumed in the monitor.
Another user here made a comparison to Crystal Reports. The last time that I used it, Crystal Reports was a picture-perfect page reporting tool. While you can consume it on the screen too (of course), reports are designed to be printed in specific paper page size (letter, checks, etc). This is not bad. It is just different, and a very scarce feature nowadays, as most applications are leaving this functionality out. Cognos ReportNet and Business Objects are also picture-perfect reporting tools that try to do too many things and don't do anything particularly well. That's why the visualizations tool like Tableau and simple picture-perfect reporting tools Crystal Reports are eating the market. You need to understand your niche.
On your comparison, you need to explain how can people connect to a database. Once connected, what in-app support do you provide to help the non-programmer user join a few tables and limit records (WHERE) based on values, if any.
Are the visualizations interactive? If yes, how selecting interesting data points in one visualization will highlight data points or rows in another visualization? Before implementing, make sure that there's no active patent for this. I was curious that this basic feature exists in Spotfire, but not in Tableau. But then I remembered a presentation from the Spotfire inventor showcasing this functionality when he was a student in the University of Maryland about 15 years ago. Maybe he patented it.
Will I be able to transform data (change table shape or derive new transformed table from the tables that were requested from the database (client processing)? If yes, you should highlight that. Regular Tableau installation cannot do it, but Spotfire can, and I think that PowerBI can do it too.
Can you create HTML/CSS dashboards? Can you import pictures to act as buttons? Can you create a map of and office campus to let me click on buildings to get statistics?
How about world maps?
And, since you are talking about cell based visualizations, have you evaluated what Smartsheets can do in this field. I know people how do awesome visualizations using Smartsheets. There's also Airtable, but I don't think that it is competitive with Smartsheets in visualizations (I might be wrong).
The current tools are very featured. You can find a niche, but you might have to level the playing game in term of features with the existing tools in order to be gain the user mind share.
'It’s a “Rapid application development” tool, targeting developers who create internal apps'. Now I get it.
Many developers build many internal apps every day. They want to do it rapidly. Now hire a technical writer to help you write this story.
It's Ok to namedrop as it will help with postitioning of your product against more famous tools:
"Hassle-free Excel"
"Dirt-cheap Tableau"
"Salesforce on JavaScript"
The other thing that's missing is an example of the tool in action in the form of a short video/gif or a small case study.
First fix your site then try to get more visitors to it otherwise they'll bounce like crazy (leaky bucket).
Might be an idea to make a quick Twitter profile to allow this kind of thing to occur. Currently, you would need to remember to check back on your web site each time, whereas with the above approach, you have the option of pushing reminder content to people who previously expressed a "keep an eye on this" level of interest.
Of course, it does assume that you are wanting to keep the product around for a while, and continue developing it :)
A mailing list (often presented under the guise of "Sign up for the Beta program, and keep up with future updates") is another way of achieving this.
In a big/medium company, business analysts do this work.
A business analyst doesn't know javascript. They use Excel.
The javascript devs know how to make charts themselves.
That's why nobody came. :)
In particular, it seems nice that in a single file you can keep both your data and code, together, easily.
Like a node/electron version of jupyter.
IIRC jupyter has a node kernel too, though not sure how well it integrates with the plotting API etc.
Seems like you need an internet connection to use Jupyter, and you rely on them staying in business. OP's software and data is customer owned, it seems.
The hardest part of a start up or small business is socializing your ideas. I've heard countless business leaders talk about why big businesses fail to innovate vs why small businesses are innovation machines. In my experience at startups it was all about hustle and connections. These are things big businesses struggle to do, and hustle does not scale unfortunately. A big Twitter account may help spread the word, but it's pretty arbitrary if you learn to hustle efficiently. This could be networking meetings but it can also be things like hosting a small seminar that's informational and reinforces what your tool is about.
Wish you the best of luck!
All it is is syncs your bank data to a Google Sheet and has pre built templates.
It doesn't have a great way of doing graphs tho, i'd love something like your tool but for analysing my transactions (not saying you should focus on that demo)
I'm an extremely technical person and I have no idea what I'm looking at. I can create cells that have code in them? How do they connect? What's the output, what's the input? Can I at least see an example of a jig file?
Is this vanilla Javascript? It looks like it might be, but the `viewof` keyword is confusing.
It doesn't really seem like what you're describing once you run it. For one, I can make all kinds of widgets and import all kinds of code (which is confusing in its own right). But more importantly, I can't export or publish my workspace in any meaningful way.
Sorry for wasting your time.
In a nutshell:
- cells are code blocks that form a directed acyclic graph (like cells in Excel)
- cells can have a name (v=10) that can referenced in other cells (w=10*v)
- the whole thing is not exactly javascript, the viewof keyword represents the “html element of the cell”. This needs more than a comment on HN...
Users in group #4 are allergic to anything with appearance of code in the same room that they cohabitate. Users in group #3 will also get panic attacks by getting code mixed with their visualizations. Users in group #2 will tolerate it, but will fear how their reputation would be affected if anybody see them coding.
My message hear here is similar to what you have received so far. You need to pivot how you market this solution.
It clearly produces stronger reactions. In smaller organizations, CTOs often are of type 1, so I am not exactly certain that the message wouldn’t land. Though I agree it is a weird approach.
Not at all, this is what testing out new products is all about! I think you may have something here, but it's hard to figure out exactly what.
Don't get me wrong, I think marketing and splash copy is important (a lot of comments are about your website), but I would personally focus first and foremost on the value proposition of your product.
> - the whole thing is not exactly javascript, the viewof keyword represents the “html element of the cell”. This needs more than a comment on HN...
Gotcha, I was also trying to label a graph's axes based on textlabels (two different cells), but I couldn't figure out how. Some docs, at least specifying what kind of object a graph or a table is expecting would be very helpful. Also, it's kind of odd that md`hello ${text1}` works, whereas I was expecting it to be md`hello ${text1.value}`. The reactivity is awesome though!
You’ll find plenty of onboarding stuff there if you’re interested.
Observable is great, but it’s got some annoying traits (saas only, lock in, no 2d layouts, no tabs) which make it not well suited to solving business problems.
ALL the other things are wasted effort until you have that feedback. And, this is a ton of work, you'll need to improve your skills in reaching out to people, selling them on why even having a meeting is good for them, then sell them in the meeting, then figure out a way to get past the fear of closing them in that meeting.
Those are transformative skills to have.
You'll probably need a coach to get you past all your blind spots. Its worth it to do that. Or, at least get yourself into a mentorship group with real concrete goals and people that will ask hard questions of you and hold you to your answers.
- interview 40 users over zoom, gain insights, test assumptions, create hypotheses
- create sketch of product, wireframe or prototype and get feedback from 60 users on a site like UserTesting.com that produces granular insights
- hone in on problem space, understand user pain points through research instead of guessing in a vacuum
> You need to have conversations with them.
This, a million times this. Stop building and start talking.
Your site says "forget excel", but the only example is something I could easily make in excel. I suppose you have better options for "gathering data from any data source", but I don't think that's apparent currently.
I agree it's probably most about marketing!
I think you have a solution in search of problem.
Showing it to more people is not the answer. Adding features only helps when you have someone who has a clear point of dissatisfaction with Excel.
Who is so dissatisfied with Excel that they will take the time to install and learn a new tool.
Excel has a lot of debugging checks built in to catch mistakes and if they make a mistake in an Excel sheet they can ask many people to double check their work.
If they are the only Jig user in the firm they are completely on their own.
Excel has been both a miracle and a curse. We could make super complex apps in hours, but these were insanely unsafe. People would leave typos all over the place, and there was zero way to audit changes.
This is THE major reason for this tool to exist.
1. A detailed audit and change control / diff tool for Excel Here are some alternatives:
https://www.spreadsheetdetective.com/
https://www.themodelanswer.com/
List at https://sites.google.com/a/usfca.edu/business-analytics/deve...
2. A translator that maps an existing Excel file into Jig.
You list features and say what it can do, but you are really selling robustness, stability and clarity. Don't sell the product, sell the problem. Spaghetti code in Excel. Untouchable formulas created by some ex-employee. Replacing a magic variable in 30,000 cells, etc. At the end, show how your product solves it.
You need some sample before and afters. This is what the formula looked like before, here's how it was abstracted and this is what that change enables.
Ideally your product would be a service that a company pays for where you come in a help clean up their files. If possible, I would see if you could find a company willing to let to try and use them as a case study.
That would be 1000% more effective than worrying about marketing details.
https://www.startupschool.org