Show HN: A web-based Excel/Database hybrid(ragic.com) |
Show HN: A web-based Excel/Database hybrid(ragic.com) |
1) Stupidly simple messaging. To do this, talk to the people that are already using it and ask them how they'd describe it to someone who's not that tech-savvy. Try and phrase what they say as close to word-for-word as you can. "Supercharge your database development" meant nothing to me.
2) A very clear list of use cases/examples. I didn't actually get what it was until I saw the expense report example at the bottom of the page. These examples need to be called out very quickly.
3) A stupidly simple demo before requiring any input. I'd have the call to action say "Try a simple demo" and definitely don't require registration before seeing it. Trying to get me to start a 30-day free trial right away makes me leave the page before I even try a demo.
"Build your database with online spreadsheet"
I've already updated this to the website.
Ps. Love the idea for the project, I have been looking out for something like this for a while.
Looks like we need more clear explanation even before the registration. We tried to focus on the benefits of Ragic to encourage registration, but it looks like it's not clear enough "why" our product can bring this benefit.
I get it from your perspective, you want to get their info so you can follow up, etc. It's just risky since a lot of people won't get to the "Aha" moment and will just end up leaving.
The original page is here: http://www.ragic.com/intl/en/registerSandbox
For people who would like to use the sandbox instead.
See how they have done it on https://hollyapp.com/
It took me a while to find that link again, but I thought it was worth it as an example.
Good luck.
edit: I just watched the video. I was expecting to see your product instead of a story board on CRM (Oh? what is CRM? But it is even better than Excel...)
Great product, but weak marketing. It is targeted for non-technical small businesses, but homepage and everything looks complicated, and makes less sense for these people. There should be a one sentence which clearly explains what the product is meant to do. Customers are more interested in the end result, show them some examples of what they can do with this product. Unfortunately , this looks like a product for developers by developers.
Would be interested to hear how the product has evolved since then. Have they incorporated any of the feedback they received the first time around?
The biggest problem was that it's not really easy for people to get started on how to build applications with Ragic. People don't like to read documents, so we added an "Interactive Tutorial".
The interactive tutorial takes new users step by step to build a simple application on Ragic, pretty much like how you do it on a flash game or online game. If you click through the tutorial, you will have built a simple Ragic application. We really hope that this can help our users get the hang of it.
Is Javascript really the language to use when you're seemingly trying to talk to non-developers - either small business owners or business analysts at larger companies?
I can see lots of uses for Ragic, but I don't know any business analyst types who'll just knock out some Javascript code to do a function, when they're fairly happy to use Visual Basic for Applications.
Finally, your samples all seem relatively small, which is understandable, but you don't mention how large a data set you can cope with - a lot of Excel based apps now seem to have 100,000s of rows of data (which is why they end up so slow).
Look at how Twilio markets their paas to non devs.
Not trying to take away anything from the app. It might be wonderful, I didn't try it because of the unnecessary registration.
seems like you will swim in money in a few months if you reach the right target market...
There are some grammar mistakes and you can hear mouse clicking when he switches slides.
The information is there, but I think it needs a bit more polish in terms of phrasing ("Special need is nothing special.") and a proper speaker.
We try to make the sentences as short as possible.
In 15 minutes this app will disappear from my mind.
A few more things:
- It was hard for me to get into design mode again after having tried the form view. I'd make that more prominent. Right now I think it's only in the context menu for the entities, not for the whole db however.
- I see forms, but do you have (dynamic) list views as well? How do I format / generate them?
- Try to get rid of all the "leave this page" browser warnings.
- paragraph text fields behave very odd in Chrome (graphical issues after resizing, I think it also cut some pasted text). I also think rich text capability might be critical there, but I can understand that you wanted to avoid that beast at first.
In general I like the approach - I think it's a very valid business idea to try to give benefits to all those businesses with Excel 'workflow applications'. The ability to do multiuser editing might be a big enough benefit alone to get some customers - maybe you could accentuate more on that. IMO however the UX from the developer end needs a lot of streamlining.
1. What browser/OS version are you using? I would like to reproduce this issue.
2. It's in the context menu you mentioned, and in the upper right corner of the form. We should find some way to make it more prominent.
3. The dynamic list views are generated automatically. When you finish designing a form, just click "<< Back Listing" and it will take you to the listing page.
4. We added the "leave this page" warning because a lot of users have mentioned that they accidentally click on the exit button.
5. There's some special feature that we added to the copy and paste function that might confuse new users. I think we need to disable it by default. The feature is mean to match the field names from the source with the field names in the Ragic form, and put values from the source to their corresponding fields.
Really appreciate the feedback, please let me know if there's any other advices. I can be contacted at jeff at ragic dot com
4) How about a save-by-default stance? is versioning and rollback hard to implement on your stack? (those two characteristics should be used together IMO) Alternatively I'd just implement a message that asks whether to save, forget changes or cancel.