ThingieQuery: $19 SQL IDE for Excel
thingiequery.com
thingiequery.com
I suggest that you offer at least two tiers (personal/education and corporate). You can keep the personal tier low to drive adoption as part of your growth strategy and price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points. If it will increase productivity, just buy it.
Lastly, consider an enterprise or site option for users with more than X licenses.
Come work for government, then despair.
I'm not any better at marketing, I just know a lot of people that would use this if it were pitched at them correctly. Unfortunately, most of sales involving enterprisey companies is in the pitch and not actually in the product....
Alternatively you could just get bought by Microsoft like that other guy mentioned.
Best of luck!
This is something I'd like to be able to purchase to toy around with at work, but not necessarily something I would want to try to get my employer to buy for me, especially so I could move around with it (and use it for personal projects as well).
Maybe something cost-wise between the personal and commercial licenses?
1: Get insurance for your product. It will run really cheap for something low-risk like this. (Our firm pays less than 10 grand a year for General Liability, All-risk, and Professional Liability up to 10MM, which is more than good enough for nearly every company out there.)
2: Like Patrick said, the second you throw "HIPAA" compliance up there you have the ability to charge 10 (IME, more realistically, 25x -- but your expenditures increase as a result of that (incurred labor costs of additional support, etc)). At your 20 dollar price-point, you're undervaluing yourself by literally 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. Find an industry (say, that dude who mentioned oil, find out what regulatory institutions dominate), get vendor certified and insured and you're looking at Oracle-esque money + 30% maintenance fees per year + support fees + modification fees.
Corporate sales is all about the steak and strippers (and nepotism) but it's wildly lucrative, even now when oil is trading at like 40/bbl due to SA flooding the hell out of the market. To put it in perspective, Parker hydraulic gear commands a 3 or 4x premium over other brands of nearly-comparable quality. It's a lot like medicine or finance, huge markups but huge barriers to entry re: regulatory certs/risks. I wouldn't sell a site license for the product itself (per actual site, not per corporation, that midtown Manhattan office is billed separately from the LA office) for less than low 6 figures. (Sales cycles are long and expensive, your net on that will probably be 30%, which is why Oracle is always pushing for you to go buy that RAC license, it's only 30% more!)
3: Along the veins of having industry compliance, obviously, offer support. Lets say you want to target the mid-market, Bob the engineer won't be able to do buy the software until his manager sees a support contract available. You're basically not going to maximize revenue targetting this demographic. Supports a must though. (Joel Spolsky factioned software sales off into the "under 1k, petty cash" and "above 100k, gotta take it to the board". Supports a must for either one, at 400 a seat or 400/k/year/seat) I'd target niche oil + board approval market with a relatively long sales cycle (especially if that other HN'er who mentioned oil can get you in for a round of golf with the CIO and give him the 30% rip or whatever's standard now in enterprise sales).
4: Just a note, I take things apart for fun and your product isn't well protected. I'm sure you know that since you left little fun notes around your code base (ps. I do snoop around, and I like you also! haha).
Just another why targeting the "Oracle" demographic (where they literally give copies away with no license keys or anything to everyone on their website), and corporations comply with the fee policies because it's wiser to pay the fees now than have the BSA audit come in and have a 5x fine imposed.
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I made a really long post about here[1] re: medical hardware (another tightly regulated industry with high margins and a sales team that makes or breaks) -- the relevant information is in the last few paragraphs.
There are also .NET licensing components if you make the (imo unwise) decision of targeting the mid-market, which uses USB keys + a network server to limit your trial functionality, but as I'm sure you know, the second those bits hit the hard-disk, someone like me is going to take Olly to it and have it smashed into pieces within a few hours to a few days. Those keys just keep the honest honest (i.e. a company might forget that their trial ran out, or the note to authorize the purchase didn't make it down to their AR/AP dept, etc).
Anyway... wow that's some comment! It's a lot of info to unpack! Would love to be able to hit you up with a question or two later if possible, but this gives me a sh*tload of stuff to research, you have my thanks!
If you prefer to just work on your project, you can make a decent amount of money from selling to individuals. I make around 10k a month from an SQL client app that is targeted at web developers, and I spend very little effort on sales.
What _is_ your selling point for postico? I'm genuinely curious since there are other SQL client apps out there that either: 1) free or 2) F/OSS or 3) cross-platforms. Granted they may not look as "beautiful" as yours but gosh... they work out of the box...
Man I need to do more market research....
It also doesn't matter if the app is cross-platform. Most people use only a single platform, and it turns out that Macs are very popular among my target audience (web developers & data analysts).
It also doesn't need to support a lot of features. I focussed on features that are important for web developers and data analysts, and I made sure they work really well. Yeah, pgAdmin has more admin features, but my users don't care about that.
I discovered most of what I know of the market as I went along, by talking to customers. Nobody bought the early versions of my app; it took three years of iterating on customer feedback to get to 10k a month.
Talking to (potential) customers is really important. In the beginning, I thought that DB admins would be my target audience. But from talking to people at pgConf, I discovered that most PostgreSQL admins don't care about GUIs, but web developers do. So that's where I put my focus.
I think the most important choice I made in the beginning was to focus on PostgreSQL rather than MySQL. The latter might be 10x as popular, but PostgrSQL is gaining popularity and growing, and there's lots of interest in PostgreSQL -- perfect conditions for starting a business.
I guess I hang out with the wrong circle ;). Most developers around me typically would just download something that is free (if it's cross-platform it gets +1 added-value since often we switch between Windows and Ubuntu). Case and Point: Eclipse vs IntelliJ. I bought IntelliJ during the Doomsday discount (75% discount) but people around me still using Eclipse until some event where they decided to move to the "free" (community) version of IntelliJ. I haven't gone back to Eclipse after that...
I'm just amazed with your story. I need to "get out" more and talk to more people... seriously...
Maybe that's another selling point for my app? Most other database software is targeted at enterprise customers (endless feature checklists, a price of $500 per seat); whereas I mostly target individual developers.
I'm not familiar with enterprise / Excel requirements & use cases. Could someone explain why is this such a great product [1]. I wrongly assumed that excel champs won't be comfortable dealing with SQL because they are either non-engineers or have been away from programming for way too long.
[1] No offense to the author, I'd love to understand what the enthusiasm is all about.
Spreadsheets are just really terrible at data manipulation. Good Excel analysts know this and understand why a query language is so useful.
Data usage is exploding and business users want to roll their own analyses and not wait around for an IT ticket to be filled. So having business users able to easily use SQL in Excel makes things a lot more efficient.
Using VLOOKUP functions and pivot tables is just not an elegant solution to a lot of data problems. A SQL script would be much more useful.
1) Obfuscate your deliverables
2) Don't store the Licensing information in plain-text in a XML file; it's trivial to create a generator to generate a valid license for the current product. Make sure to use a public/private key you sign it and check it, not giving the client the information to create a valid license if they know the CPU Id, Hdd s/n's and Nic Mac Adresses.
Other than that: well done, looks great and as others have said: market it for enterprises and buy a boat :)
1 - much debate about this, it's certainly safer to do so
2 - if you take a look at the license again you'll notice the digital signature field, to make a generator you would need my private key:P
Boat is good, I like boat. :)
It's cool to see you stuck with it; looking at your history, it really is a shame it hadn't got the attention it deserved earlier on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic
I think he'd be a shoe-in for YC, but I also think that'd be a waste now - with a product like this he can easily show it off to investors and raise money, if needed, or just bootstrap off his own revenue. $120K for 7% is not a good deal with a polished product like this - I think it would be easy to beat.
For a while I've been thinking about how hard it is to wean corporate analysts off Excel (it's their frame of reference) and on to something more 'Enterprise-y', and the solution is to go the other way and scale Excel instead.
This product is an excellent start at that.
If I can offer a button nitpick - I suggest "Try it out for free!" in big text, and "Version 1.5.248.1, 2016-04-26" in small text. Maybe as simple as wrapping the version info in a <small> tag.
Also this is a really nice piece of work, great job
As to setting the price - I'd look at comparables such as Sublime, JetBrains IDEs/Resharper. I'd be looking at charging at least $49 - but I think $79 to > $100 would feel right to me.
As to a long term enterprise pricing plan, I dunno - but I'd definitely be looking at it.
Good luck and well done.
Also, $149 is nothing for a business. If you're selling to a financial business, whose $100-200-300k paid employees use Excel a lot, it's easily worth $500-1,000 per license (or more!). You need to price for value in the context in which your software is being used.
The trial version should be sufficient to convince people to upgrade -- asking for an e-mail address before initiating the download probably isn't a bad idea. :-)
P.S. And quit claiming you're a noob. You're in business now. So get to reading on positioning your product and doing some direct outreach.
Great job! Seriously
They have a product like yours but will do C#/F#/VB instead of SQL (in your case). Their pricing is pretty heavy ;).
However: from much experience working in gigantic firms where Excel forms the core of a like a gazillion work flows and is the default analytics platform - sadly most users just aren't technical enough for this to be useful to them. There's probable a niche 1% who'd get value from this. Most people do not understand databases, SQL, and have little/no experience in any kind of coding including VBA.
At first I thought this might not be all that useful given Excel's Power Query functionality, but then I realized there are still a lot of use cases where this could come in handy.
Also your site doesn't seem to be in production mode, can still see the stack traces on exceptions.
Like everyone else said, your pricing and marketing is aiming too low.
For me, it seemed to be more interesting to provide an excel interface to database.
But also, it has the option to connect to an external database. When connecting, you can pull Excel tables into the database as temp tables, do queries (or import the data from the temp tables into permanent tables), and write results back into Excel. What's more you can automate this, even without VBA.
I've added some of my own functions to the SQLite engine though, e.g. ElementAt(pos, elements, orderElements) will return the element at position pos in a group, ordered by orderElements. Not exactly window functions, but close.