1. The website and product would benefit from having a designer involved. There is a design fashion that changes about every five years or so and you're a couple cycles behind.
2. Get someone that needs your software to talk through the copy. "Merge, split, clean, dedupe, reformat and more" into what? From where? Is this online or downloadable? Does this work for my specific workflow?
3. Screenshot looks like it is on a Mac. Is it Mac only? If not, put a Windows screenshot right next to it. I know after you scroll down it shows Windows support, but that can be easily missed.
4. Block quote testimonials: Bold or highlight the most relevant part. I'm not reading a paragraph, I'm scanning.
5. Fix the about page. Many Excel files have sensitive data and people click about to make sure that they can trust the company. You need better, more reassuring copy and a better picture. Asking for feedback is fine, but the current copy borders on "this is really new and may not be reliable" territory.
6. If your target demographic is Excel pros, explain why user defined functions or macros couldn't or shouldn't accomplish the same task that you help with.
Hope this helps and best of luck!
A big PITA for us was the data we'd get from various sources (vendors/clients/whomever). Oh, there's a rando string in a "number" field in row 9,100,500, huh, that sucks.
You can't always build the validation into your ETL pipeline for various reasons. Or it fails the whole file (b/c the data science folks built it that way really aren't that experienced at handling exceptions in the file loads, etc)
Anyway that rambling is trying to lead up to me saying that there's a chasm between your supposed target market (marketers, BSAs, scientists) and the engineers/devs etc that could probably use some better tools for CSV/JSON munging.
Excel is terrible at this job. What I often did was load the csv into sqlite to and then ran queries on the data to figure out how many records were horked. Or if it was a process we were testing, to verify that we had the right data or a good approximation. That works for csv, but with JSON, it's even harder.
Anyway, I'm just not sure that your target market knows to look for a tool like this or would really know what to do with it. On the other hand, an engineer might look at this tool as too down level.
- No cli options - No api?
I think there's a market for tools to help "data plumbers", software devs, engineers, support personal, etc. There's all kinds of application consultants/support etc that are moving data between systems for migrations, upgrades, custom exports, etc.
>I'm just not sure that your target market knows to look for a tool like this
Perhaps not. I am getting traffic for things such as "merge csv files" or "join excel sheets". But they mostly bounce without downloading the free trial. Even when I send them to a dedicated landing page. Most people really hate change.
>That works for csv, but with JSON, it's even harder.
Currently I am only exporting JSON (not importing). Importing JSON would involve potentially flattening a tree into a table, which is harder.
>- No cli options - No api?
Command line is high on the wish list.
Given that I am aiming mostly at non-programmers, I'm not sure an API would be useful. Note that there is a 'Javascript' transform, which adds a lot of flexibility if you are able to do some scripting.
Is this meant to support ETL workflows?
Is it possible to create transform recipe packs as part of the product offering? Basically pre-built configuration instead of users doing this. Maybe provide the software for free and sell the recipes?
Is this something you can package as a component that other ETL products could plug into? This can be either native plugins or some kind of web API front-end.
Just spitballing :)
>I am looking at this and thinking, how many times would a typical user need this?
I am trying to keep the product easy-to-use and the price low to reduce this barrier. But I guess a lot of people would rather spend several hours tweaking their data in Excel, rather than pay $99 and learn a new tool.
>Is this meant to support ETL workflows?
No. I imagine my target user as a marketing guy, scientist or business analyst who has a bunch of CSV and Excel files they need to munge together and clean-up to get some useful data. Maybe they build a process that they repeat once a month or with several different datasets. But they aren't data science people building an ETL pipeline. In fact they have probably never heard of 'ETL'. Data science people seem fairly wedded to R, Python+Pandas and expensive corporate ETL tools.
>Is it possible to create transform recipe packs as part of the product offering?
I think everyone is going to have different data sets and different use cases. I'm not sure that is possible to generalize the process beyond the individual transforms.
>Is this something you can package as a component that other ETL products could plug into?
Probably not.
Who is your target audience (programmers, analysts, accountants)? What industries can benefit most from it? Your homepage is all about features and not about users or their problems.
I'm trying to find that out. ;0)
I think it is probably a non-programmer business analyst, marketer or scientist with lots of Excel or CSV files to munge together. But experience with other products tells me that you often end up selling to different markets than the one you envisage.
>Your homepage is all about features and not about users or their problems.
I would like to have case studies and talk more about types of users. But I am still learning the market.
Also I find those 'sell the sizzle, not the steak' websites quite tedious. Tell me what it does!
> I'm trying to find that out.
You can start with why you use it.
I went for time limited, rather than use or feature limited, because it allows people to test the full capabilities. The 7 days use don't have to be contiguous.