I built it, nobody came, now what?

The fact that you've got a comment on the front page of hacker news about your products lack of awareness, yet you don't say what the product is or link to it explains a lot.

You need to hustle more. This is a huge opportunity to get it in front of hundreds of people.

Edit: I had to search through the page to find a link to your app. You need to make it more obvious.

Downloaded it and installed it, and you seriously need to have some kind of onboarding for this kind of tool.

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.

There's a reason this Justin Kan quote has become famous to the point of being a meme:

"First time founders are obsessed with product.

Second time founders are obsessed with distribution."

You just learnt through bitter experience that distribution is the far harder problem to solve. You need to figure out who this thing is useful for, what is a way to get it in front of them and then how to adapt your product to get it to click.

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.

You may not like Excel but most people who "NEED A QUICK ANALYSIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS" (to quote your copy from https://www.jigdev.com) rely on it.

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.

I don't understand the problem you are solving. Usually when this is the case it also means you don't really know what problem you are solving.

You haven't planned to reach out to people to sell your software so I guess you are targeting individual people, and not ceo or cto who don't have time.

So you have two problems, you have not figure out what is your target audience and who you are selling to

Take a paper and list real world use cases that are ideal for your product. It should take a few days. Figure out who has this kind of use case, among those people who is really wanting to improve the way they are solving it. And finally where they gather. Then go on popular saas website and try to understand how companies are positioning themselves. There are mostly two ways of communicating. Either you talk about your product either you talk about your vision.

The fact that people that you talk to don't get it doesn't mean they don't get it, it means you don't know how to explain what you do, whether or not you have a product won't make them change their mind about it. If you have trouble communicating the values you will also have trouble communicating the values on the website and throughout the product. So spend a few days thinking about the value, the use case. That's an iterative process especially if you have never done it before

"Build it and they will come" doesn't work anymore.

I see way too many people have killer skills to build something wonderful, but don't execute much when it comes to marketing. The reasons are plentiful: marketing is boring, it's a sleazy game, I don't want to spam people, I don't know how to, etc. That's why sometimes you see people that are good at marketing/sales out-succeed those that are great at building.

These days you gotta take people by the hand and bring them to your product (esp at the beginning). At worst, you're going to learn. At best, you'll get new customers.

Looking at what others are doing, I'd say it takes an equal amount (or more) of time and effort, to tell people about your product, as it does to build it. And it's a continuous thing, there's never an end to it.

So just like you develop the product and learn what it takes to build the best version of it, plan on telling people that it actually exists. You got tons of platforms for that. I've started Polyzag [0] to educate people (and learn myself), about how other profitable companies do just that.

It's a skill that you can learn, just like dev'ing.

P.S: Bonus points if you level up on marketing yourself w/o a co-founder. It's a superpower.

[0] https://polyzag.com/

I read all of your site and checked out Observable as well. In spite of that I still can't succinctly answer the following:

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.

I think you should throw away everything and start from scratch sailing on an already solid platform. Whether that is a plugin for Office 365, a paid app for Smartsheet or Airtable or any other *already successful* platform.

From your submission, I think what you are failing to understand is that you are asking people/companies to move their excel app/reporting to random-joe-bloggs' platform. It's not about the marketing. Even with the best marketing in the world, as a buyer I would ask myself "where this is going to be in one year?", and well...

Pick a solid platform. Hundreds of thousands of buyers are already there, the technology is already there, and you are not asking them to rebase their business. You only need to pipe the solution to the problem. If there is such problem then marketing will be way easier with a solid ground.

So I can kind of see what you are trying to get at with your product. There are 3 books I recommend you read to help you further:

1. "Competing Against Luck" by Clay Christensen https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...

This book will teach you how to look at the market from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. People don't want products, they want progress. They will hire a product to do a job for them towards that progress. It will help you understand where your product fits in ie. you should be able to answer the questions "what job can my product be hired to do?", "what progress does it help make? and for whom?"

2. Obviously Awesome https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning...

This is a book on Positioning by April Dunford. It's absolutely fabulous! It will help you understand how to position your product in the market and how to clearly communicate your benefits to them.

3. Demand-side Sales by Bob Moesta https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progr...

This is a sales book that explores things from a jobs-to-be-done perspectives. I have found his frameworks extremely helpful.

These 3 books taken together will help you understand your market better, communicate with them more clearly and position your product in a way that the market gets it. More importantly, working with your target market in this way will help you reshape the product towards something they will eventually want to buy.

Hope this helps!

> CEO OR CTO?

> NEED A QUICK ANALYSIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

Coming to this site for the first time I had no idea what your were talking about. If I had come randomly I would have left right away.

2 recommendations:

1) Put a one sentence literal no marketing description of your product at the top so I know what it does, maybe " Jig: A programmable tool for generating metrics for startups" or whatever it is.

2) Use full sentences. When the context isn't clear "CEO OR CTO?" is confusing. After establishing what the product is, then start your pitch in complete sentences :

"Are you a CEO or CTO?

etc.

Good luck!

You are targeting CEO/CTOs. You need to have conversations with them. It'll be impossible to reach those at large companies, but maybe you can find smaller companies and get their feedback.

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.

If your goal is to build a free tool that will be used and beloved by millions, you probably need to continue building on a deeply technical foundation and blog about it the whole way. It's ancient history now but a master class of this is when Damien Katz built and live-blogged Couchbase, like 2004.

If your goal is to build an indie software business with hundreds or thousands of customers where you're making like 10-100k a month, i can give you more specific advice.

Based on your website, it's not clear what you're after.

I mean, if you don't think you have followers guess again. I recognize your handle. Just because you don't have functionality for followers on HN doesn't mean you don't have name recognition.

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!

I took a look at it, and my very first thought was, "Oh, another analytics app."

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.

Checked out the website and I still don't really know what it does. Why is it better than any of the popular dataviz products?

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 had a quick look and for your benefit I'll be blunt - I hope you'll see it that way.

Your application directly competes with Excel and is both more complicated and less powerful at the same time. The JS syntax is too much for your average MBA.

To avoid competing with Excel, which thousands before you have attempted and failed at, you need a way to make it interoperable with Excel - that means an easy way to export to and from. Make sure you know it in and out, so you can focus on solving problems that are hard/obscure in Excel. Like, for example, programmatic data sanitation, normalization, and import.

If your tool could generate nice plots and graphs from various data sources, update them in existing documents, and dump the processed data into Excel sheets, all in a single step, I could see someone using it.

A thing that is 'big' nowadays is 'Google Sheets as a service'. The way this works is that someone maintains a Google Sheets document that - for instance - contains current market prices. They may do this with some sort of custom script.

Then others can use that tables data in their own table, which automatically updates with the source data.

A tool that creates automatically updating sheets - be it by running locally or by updating some sheet in the cloud - might sell.

Anyways I went off on a tangent that is indeed pretty far from what your tool does right now.

I had a quick look at your app's web page. Seems like a quality tool that could indeed be useful for people.

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.

Start by saying what it does and posting a link (or at least adding a link into your profile)? Pro tip: add a call to action to your description.

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.

Ok, you have hit the reality of most startup enthusiasts. Most of us when starting are without much connections and of course no big marketing budgets.

How to go from here? If you truly believe it solves a real problem, then proceed.

First we need some customers and serve them individually on this tool. One customer at a time; each one will give you amazing joy because you were giving up on it.

One nice way for this is to search for jobs/projects on freelancing sites like Upwork, that are looking to "build me tool that takes excel file as input and let me do this and that", something like that.

Pitch them that you can do it for fraction of the price with an existing tool you've built.

It's time consuming, because you'll bid and may not here from many, but you can see those are real customers with problems looking for similar solutions.

I built https://ASPSecurityKit.net v1 back in 2013, after I saw a project on upwork asking to build user registration/management workflow.

I already had pieces of it figured out in my client projects, but there was no impulse to package it up and offer it as an independent product.

I built a pre-launch page, talking about what I'M going to build and collected 70 odd emails from HN folks, thinking some of them will buy upon launch.

Worked hard for 1.5 months on coding, packaging, docs etc. and launched but nobody bought from that email list or HN right away.

I was in a job then (at Microsoft) and didn't spend much time on marketing after launch as nobody bought.

1st month: nothing. 2nd month: nothing. Latter half of the 3rd month: first sale while I was on a sort of vacation/WFH!

I've been in this position many times. The only things I know how to are...

- post in relevant online forums

- targeted advertising (throw 1k or 2k at it and see what happens)

- targeted reach outs on linkedin sales

- cold email campaigns at scale (better follow best practices here so you don't get your domain ruined)

- spam your personal/community connections

- reach out to "non techy businesses who want tech" or other people who sit in your customer acquisition channels about partnerships

Yeah that's kind of it. It's not pretty stuff, you have to have thick skin and be ok getting rejected and annoying people.

Maybe use a "happier" example than COVID cases on your landing page? Something that people aren't depressed to see go up? Seeing a graph of COVID trending upwards is going to put potential users into a negative mindset immediately, not something you want when they are learning about your new product. It's definitely low-hanging fruit for "everyone knows what this is and why you might want metrics on it" but I'd try and come up with another example data set.

Here's a list of how various companies attracted the first 1000 customers: https://first1000.substack.com/

Also, Segment's tale of finding product-market fit is worth a watch: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6B-on-finding-product-ma...

What I gather from the comments in this thread: you built a tool to make it easier for developers to make custom data visualizations (for other people in their company to look at probably).

The fundamental idea of building tools that radically improve developer productivity in making internal tools is sound. Logically, engineers cost a lot of money and don't like building internal tools so decreasing the time they spend on them is a win for everyone. And empirically, I know of at least one company in the internal tools market that is doing extremely well in this space: Retool (source: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/181-david-hsu-of-retool).

You might take a look at their State of Internal Tools survey (https://retool.com/blog/state-of-internal-tools-2020/) to get a broad idea of the market and problems developers are facing.

If I were you, I'd try to find just a few developers in any organization that you can work with one-on-one and get them to use your product. That would easily help you validate that the problem exists and your product addresses that problem usefully in organizational contexts. Or not and you learn a bunch of things (for example, maybe you find that hosted solutions are more useful).

I don't think a broad reach is the right move at this stage. I would only focus on widely distributing your product once you've had a lot more early validation and it starts to build some momentum (the best being organic word-of-mouth — developers using the tool convince others to use the tool). If you don't have that early validation, I'd expect that distributing would just feel like throwing messages in a bottle into the ocean — kind of lonely and depressing when you never hear back. But if you do have early validation, then you have a lot better idea about who finds it valuable and where/how you should market it.

Reading the website with my startup founder hat on:

--------

— HAS YOUR BUSINESS AN EXCEL PROBLEM?

No. I'm good at Excel.

— DO YOU HAVE HUNDREDS OF UNMANAGED SHEETS RUNNING REPORTS?

Not really. I keep telling people to put files in the right Google Drive folders and one day very soon they definitely will, but we get by and so far it's not been a big problem.

— DO THEY TELL YOU IT WOULD TAKE TOO MUCH TIME TO REPLACE WITH PROPER APPS?

Excel is a proper app.

--------

I think a big part of your messaging comes across like you're assuming the people who need your app are a bit stupid. You seem to think people can't workaround the problem your app tries to solve. They can, obviously, because they're running their businesses day to day. You need to push the reason why your app is a better solution rather than why Excel is bad (which it clearly isn't considering how many businesses use it for reporting).

Also, "UNLIKE EXCEL, JIG FILES ARE AUDITABLE"... I'm not 100% sure what you mean by auditable there, but Excel has features for auditing formulae. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...

Check out Ash Maurya's blog post the 10X product launch. From memory and possibly a few other thought leaders it looks a little bit like this:

1. Conduct customer development interviews where you interview potential users and don't show them your product. Simply ask questions that will demonstrate to you if they have pain.

2. For each pain statement, ask them to rank it's importance on a scale of 1 to 10 and their satisfaction with their current solution on a scale of 1 to 10. This helps you quantify the size of the opportunity.

2.a. repeat this process 50 to 200 times.

3. Stock rank your pain statements based on the largest surface area.

4. Build an MVP.

5. Show it to the people that rated the pains the highest and ask for feedback.

6. If you really nailed it they will be asking you how they can become customers.

7. If they're not asking how they can buy then ask for more feedback.

I think the quantify step was pulled from "lean product management".

I've followed this twice and you usually have to loop through the feedback step a few times before you get it.

Both times, my first 10 customers have come from these interviews and my next 100 have come from referrals from those initial 10. I think that's the gist of Ash's 10x product launch.

I'm being fairly brief because it's a complex subject and I'm on mobile.

You are now on the front page of Hacker News- this is a golden opportunity to tell people about your product, yet there don't seem to be any links or information about it. Did you market it enough?

A good idea is to split your time between product creation and product marketing / selling. I've seen people doing 1 week of each.

That said, if your target market is not easily reachable online / doesn't read blogs / doesn't search on Google, you're in for an uphill battle.

Selling door to door may be a solution but it's expensive and not necessarily effective.

I'd look into alternative ways to sell your product: does your target buy services from a class of other established companies (eg. They use web agencies to built websites)? If so you can try to get them to do the sales and agree on some revenue sharing / referrals.

It's hard to advise more without knowing the specifics, but you'll have to think outside the box.

Best of luck! Ps: for the next product you may want to reach out to potential customers before, so that you'll have some market proof and a potential list of leads before investing time building.

Oh I saw your original thread on Observable https://talk.observablehq.com/t/observable-based-dashboard-a...

Currently I don't think you add enough value over the existing observable platform to entertain the thought of switching runtimes.

Anyone who is not familiar with observeable will need a ton of literature to explain the reactive runtime concept.

I feel like entrepreneur who see a successful product and thinks "how can I beat that" are framing wrong. If you look at a product and think, that's great, how can I add to it you will find more success.

I am also building on observable, but I am not trying to direct people off the ecosystem. I want to make observable better and add to their success and perhaps capture some value off the delta of the combined improvement.

I understand the problem you are trying to solve and if I was still working for my former emploeyer I would probably spend some more time to download it and evaluate it. However I don't have the motivation to do it now.

Having said that, the thing that is missing that would satisfy my personal needs is some form of quick demo so I can understand why it is easier to use your product over excel. Maybe a short gif or video, maybe a few screenshots of a workflow. Even though I don't need this software right now, I would be interested in getting more information on how it works without having to download it and test it myself, because I might need it in the future or I could recommend it to someone who has an excel problem. Right now I can't recommend it because I didn't really understand the solution by looking at the splash page

Who is this product for? The majority of expert Excel users in a company, do not know how to code. The majority of people that in a company are coding (for whatever aim) are never asked to produce business reports from excel. People who need the report (management) do not care how easy or complex it is to create it. Airtable is (somewhat) successful because it allowed a vast group of people with limited excel knowledge to create good looking reports with a simple visual interface. I think your app just gives people who know how to use (coders) it something they don't need (excel reports), or gives people who would need it (analysts, controllers, managers) something they would be scared to use (too much coding!!). So nobody is really going to bother management with the request to try it and buy it.

It gets worse than the comments I’m reading are saying. They’re implying that you could get there with marketing. But the thing is, you aren’t competing with Excel. You’re competing with PowerBI, Tableau, Splunk, ELK, and Jupyter, but without any of the enterprise or scaling selling points. So this is a cool demo of a way to define charts once you have the data mostly there, but I don’t think it will scale to very large data volumes. With no way to hook into some already-scaled query engine, you won’t have much use by people that need to analyze production data.

If this was very performant compared to Excel, then that would be a use case that could get you a niche while trying to build out the scale and interoperability required for successful BI tools.

"What features are not in the beta, but that I can expect soon?

Database connectivity. Right now, you can only access REST apis, and local files. Support for MySql, PostGreSQL and others is coming soon."

That is killing you in my opinion. I'd wager it's 90%+ of your typical use case.

The current site is not very informative. Copywriting is hard. Fortunately, your own rewording from one of the comments here is much better at explaining the tool:

'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).

>I have built an application to scratch my own itch.

So are you scratching your own itch or are you building a business? Those could be quite different.

You are marketing toward the wrong person in the company, and I'm not sure how to fix it because:

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. :)

My be im not target audience but from website i didnt get any idea on 1) what this thing actually does? 2) why exactly am i gonna need one? What’s the value. 3) why exactly should i forget Excel?

So on the surface it doesn’t feel like a painkiller product, that just lacks marketing power.

More like “I didn’t want to waste time learning other solutions so just created yet another one mine, with blackjack and hookers”.

If there’s a strong value inside the product- you should put 100% effort to make this value clear from the first page of website through to uninstall/unsubscribe screen.

And yes, best way to do that is to try make 100 sales personally before even bothering with marketing stuff.

Some feedback: I looked at it and I don't understand how its different from someone just importing a charting library and plotting the data. It really needs a better explanation of what it does/how it works.

Well, you’re missing out on free marketing by not having your app listed here and now. (https://www.jigdev.com/)

I think there could be something there, just needs to be tweaked. I recently came across this tool: https://www.tillerhq.com and instantly signed up. Think it's $10 a month or less. I think they do pretty good as well.

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)

Did you try to find for online spaces (reddit, fb groups or other) where you can get an audience that might have the problem you are trying to solve.

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

Some programs are solutions to problems that only you have. In this case, the problem is that you want to work in your comfort zone, not Excel. You built something for yourself. Many other programmers have the same sort of problem, but a different comfort zone, so it becomes a different problem. They'll build something for themselves.

Your actual selling points then seem more like post-hoc rationalizations:

"LIKE EXCEL, JIG IS A LIGHTWEIGHT SOLUTION TO CREATE DYNAMIC BUSINESS REPORTS AND APPS IN MINUTES."

Okay, I already got Excel here and everyone is trained in it.

"UNLIKE EXCEL, JIG FILES ARE AUDITABLE, MAKING JIG APPS INHERENTLY SAFE."

I don't care. Even if I switched some of my workloads over to Jig from Excel, I'd still be using Excel. The threat model that somebody sends me a malicious Excel file remains. The threat model that somebody sends me a malicious PDF file remains as well. It's also not the case that Excel files can't be audited, nor does the ability to audit something make it "inherently safe", because I still need to actually do the audit.

> What would have most impact in getting the app in front of people?

Maybe a better use of your time would be to just accept that there is no product-market fit, move on to something else. You still get to enjoy a program you made for yourself.

> nobody came...

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.

Just wanted to say thanks for sharing (again I guess). I have heard of d3 but not the observable project or jig. Not sure how I can use it exactly, but having it downloadable does give the user the confidence to put data In they would not feel comfortable online only. Like some other users have said going to be hard to take on excel / tableau but for programmers they can prototype something fast and cool. Look forward to trying them both out. Keep up the good work!

Looks like a great tool. I know people who have built similar things in Java for example... You are competing with Jupiter notebooks and R in some sense here. Is your market business analyst? Data scientist or something else?

How expressive is your DSL and how easy is it to learn?

A few other things, can I export one of the models I develop to a web server so that I could deploy it to my internal network for someone else to manage?

Can I export it to Powerpoint?

Do you have connectivity to spark, snowflake or a hosted database?

On a similar note, I built quite a few things, one of which resulted in millions of daily active users, getting its own Wikipedia page, articles in The New York Times, Fortune and 50+ others.

I built an alternative to a popular website and it slowly snowballed from there. I did no marketing other than to share the link with a few people and it just went viral.

I did not build every feature the original had, but I was spending a lot of time engaging with users and making sure they feel welcome. I event sent them postcards for Christmas! What made it work in the end, is the fact that I treated users with respect and dignity.

Now, the above was a community, and I loved building and nourishing a community.

When it comes to building a business, however, a whole new set of rules kick in, and with no marketing experience, it's bound to fail, especially if you think that people will come, and all you need to do is build it. This stopped being true a long time ago, and marketing is crucial. The last SaaS I built definitely has a market, but without reaching out to actual people who need it, chances are, they will never find it on their own. This is where a co-founder with marketing skills and a network would be great, but finding one is super difficult, especially for me as a dev.

The important thing is not to market your app or product but focus on the job it performs. Write about that job, what can be done to get better at it and then pitch your product sometimes when its relevant. The core idea of this is to focus less on the product and more on making the job of people easier more productive even if its out of your products scope. Iterate your product to get closer to above goal. For more: read about Job to be done theory.

I can see that. You could have included a link to your product in this post and yet you missed.btw, i just checked out the product and i love it.

This is a startup in a similar space. https://usesummit.com/

It is a replacement for Excel that is much more powerful. Target users are CFO pulling in different financial data.

If you listen to the Out of Beta podcast, you can hear the founder as he progresses through creating Summit. Might help for learning product and marketing process.

Check out the videos from https://startupschool.org

Launch repeatedly and talk to users

It's a data science package from the looks of it, and I, as a data science person would be interested. But then, Javascript? I only know Python, and my Notebooks are sort of similar to this, but in Jupyter-lab I have Pandas and Seaborn (among many others, and I can access any file, any api, any database). If those were available I might have tried it, although my Jupyter-lab notebooks also make nice PDF reports, the only difference I see is that you can place cells next to each other, right? Maybe there is an extension for Jupyter-lab that can do that. So what is the USP? Javascript? Just Ducking around I found I can also do that in Jupyter-lab: [0]

[0] http://bluegalaxy.info/codewalk/2017/12/04/javascript-how-to...

Have you tried posting to Indie Hackers? https://www.indiehackers.com

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.

Another idea: Quite often when I see a tool that isn't useful to me immediately, but might be in the future, I like to follow them on a social media channel like Twitter. This way I get reminded of the occasional update in the future, at a time when I might be in a position to use it. I think other developers would be the same.

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.

You landing lacks a concise paragraph about your tool, I don't see documentation, and I see others commenting they didn't understand anything when they downloaded your tool.

You should assume that people is tired and has not much brainpower left to understand anything new and complex.

You do that to address your own itchy, so you don't have the pressure to promote it.

Just use it as usual, if others find it useful, the popularity will grow organically.

If it stays low profile, like many npm packages. Let it be. Unless you need to relay on others using it to pay your bill.

Thanks everyone for the great advice. So far what I take away from this is:

1. People who do download the app are completely lost. This is a major screw up that needs to be addressed asap.

2. I am not very good at marketing. Getting a cofounder who is would be a simpler way forward. Otherwise I need to crank up my skills there, or pay people to do this.

3. Changing the website to specifically target CEOs/CFOs produced strong reactions. This was intentionally bold. Not sure what to do with this.

4. I need to at least give people a comparison to other tools in the field.

5. Be more aggressive in chasing potential customers. Paid ads, linkedin campaigns and other user acquisition mechanisms work.

One of the things I've learnt is the size of your audience doesn't matter - at least not initially.

What is much more important is that the messaging you use cuts through the noise. That means they read the half sentence of your headline and think "I need that".

You have literally four or five words to show them that you 1) understand their problem, 2) know it's a problem that they NEED solving and 3) have the solution they've been waiting for.

The rest of your copy just consolidates this initial impression. And without that "I MUST HAVE IT" initial reaction the biggest audience in the world is a waste of time.

> What would have most impact in getting the app in front of people?

Can't it be web-based? I'd like to try it, but I'm on Linux.

I mean - Linux certainly isn't your problem, but not being web-based probably doesn't help.

I have recently built a product(https://www.buyitforquality.com/) to test how easy/hard it is to get new customers. It is REALLY hard. Even if you are willing to spend money on Google Ads, the result may not be satisfactory. Given the popularity of this post, I'm wondering why no one is building a solution for cheap and efficient marketing. Building products essentially is to solve people's pain points. We need a better solution for such pains.

Yeah, I got to front page of hacker news but I'm only getting 80 unique users per day on my website. Through there are now also 200 unique bots per day. (Where do all these internet bots come from?)

On the same boat, I built an API to check for pirated links inside text content. I moderate a discord server and need to make sure no one is encouraging piracy according to ToS. I automated that using the API.

I have listed the API on rapid API. I have little idea how to get customers for it. I do think the API can be useful in many places. Any help?

Link: https://rapidapi.com/searchableland-no-piracy-team/api/pirac...

Say more with less. I had a look at the website and it's not easy to understand what your product does. For some reason I thought it was code analysis software at first. If I go back and read more closely I see that it is an editor so to speak. I think a video to explain how to make a basic app would be nice, it's hard for me to see why I should learn to use your app when I can't understand how I get to a finished product.

I highly recommend going through YC's startup school. After having gone through YC once and in the middle of my second attempt at startups, I'm still learning every single day. It's extremely difficult, and I feel I need to absorb everything to even have a chance. Doing anything else besides their playbook and mantra is going blind.

https://www.startupschool.org

Your questions have been answered by pretty much every startup book going, but try "Running Lean" for a quick read that covers most of it.

Here's some quick advice, but tbh you could write a book answering this question. I suppose the general point of this answer is _you're asking the wrong question_.

Firstly: the mistake nerds make is asking "Can I Build it?" rather than "Will they buy it?"

There is a distinct difference between a _business_ and a _side project_. Nerds enjoy and are great at building side projects. Building a business is much much more than that. It's much more difficult. It requires a range of skills. And absolutely crucially, the software is _part of the business_ rather than the business being an "add on" to the software.

Writing software is almost never the difficult part of the business.

You should have a business model canvas describing your business. If you don't have one, create one (or more) to match your different models. You can knock one out in 15 minutes.

Now you have the canvas in front of you, you know exactly what you think the problem is and who you think your potential customers are. Great. Now you can go gather information that tests those hypotheses. No problem if you're wrong - you'll just need to adjust your hypotheses and try again.

How many of those potential customers have you spoken to and formally interviewed? I can guess it's none or very few, because those interviewees become your customers and you're having trouble getting customers. It should almost never be a "release the product on the world and sell it", but "build a product with users / potential customers". Most of us are not Steve Jobs or Apple.

Go back to basics. What are the three main painpoints you're fixing? What is the problem they have? Now speak to a CEO. Ask them what their biggest painpoints are. Mention excel, as them if they use it. Talk about it. See if they raise those painpoints. If they don't, you're off the mark. Find out what they _do_ care about. Be open minded to the idea of having to change your product.

Diving into specifics about copywriting or marketing strategies is pointless if you haven't gotten the fundamental right, that is: "make something people want" as some incubator likes to say.

The premise as I read it from the website was "You have a problem with tool X, replace it with tool Y." Why would I do this, I know tool X, everyone uses X if we need to move from tool X there's DBs and web apps, tool Y is a total unknown with no clear benefit.

Other issues: There was no Linux option for download so I can't try it & it's an electron app meaning there very well could be.

What does it do, what user segment are you looking at?

I recommend you read the first four chapters of The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. In those chapters, they talk about the importance of understanding your users, not “build it and they will come.” I think if you understood people’s response to what you’ve made very well, you would know a few things to tweak to fix a lot of concerns.

The journey can end if you want it to but it doesn’t have to. I’ve built stuff and didn’t have the immediate viral adoption I wanted it to have, but it’s not over.

I takes time to refine and market your product, a long fucking time. If you’re not in it for the long haul (not really committed to the idea) that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to end if you don’t want it to.

This is so cool! Don't know what the best way to contact you is, but I shared some thoughts at the email in the footer.

> now what?

Now comes 99.9% of the work.

Interview with some real users. Ask them to open the product and tell you everything about how they feel and what they miss and what they think and what they want. You mentioned that you already knew HN users aren't the audience. But, do you know where you can find at least 5 of them to do usability testing?

It looks like you're targeting a very specific niche. I don't think you can just assume your target audience is going to seek this one out. You'll have to be active in getting in contact with your potential users and help them see the value you are providing to drive early adoption.

For a really good effort-to-payoff, it would probably take you a couple of hours - put three example documents in the downloadable application. That was the first thing I looked for and it would make it far easier for me to understand how to start playing with the app.

> Now I posted it here and there and sent it to a few people I know, but it doesnt seem good enough.

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.

What you need to do is called usability and value testing.

Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank will show you the way: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119690684/

Is your project JigDev? I actually had a need for something like that awhile back. I needed quick visualizations for data from my database. I used Google Sheets as a solution by calling API calls inside the cells and having a chart rendered from that data.

I guess you've changed your landing page after the suggestions here, but the first question "CEO or CTO?" seems like a great filter. My reaction was "No I'm not, so does that mean I should't look at this program?"...

I have to admit I don't quite understand your product. With that said. I work a lot in excel. So does my co-workers. Why is this better than xlwings? As you said - people learn VBA - why is this better than learning Python?

Get a content writer. There are a lot of words saying very little on your front page.

This sounds like something I could use for my job, but what I’m wondering about is:

What feature does it have (or will it have) that R or Python doesn’t already do better? I don’t see why I’d choose this over generating a report in R Markdown

In my experience time is the key. Keep posting, keep mentioning it, it takes me several months for any MVP to actually judge its value.

In the meanwhile find and describe use cases to make it more discoverable.

I couldn't figure out how to use this tool.

Consider making a screen recording with a voice over what it is doing.

Put an excel work flow side by side vs. this. That shows why this is better/faster/cleaner ... etc.

Did you try becoming an excel or sheets power user first (using macros/vba/apps script)? What specific thing/things/usecase do they suck at which you are doing well?

My best bet is to do effective marketing. Marketing connects people all around that specific niche. People need to learn more about the existence of your application.

So what can this do (much easier) what excel can't do?

I think you just need to answer two questions:

Why do I want to use it?

How do I use it?

You just need to appeal to someone's dream. What are someone dreaming of (and willing to pay for) that this MVP is about to provide?

Product and distribution are usually two distinct things in business. We've all learned this the hard way.

Talk to and show it to customers. You'll quickly see if they like it or not.

The first thing to do is add a link to the MVP to this post.

Perhaps telling us what the app is really about would help.

Market it like crazy. Product is 33% of the work

Open-source it.

what's the site?

Pay someone with social reach to write about it. Effectively, it's marketing of the subtle kind.