Show HN: A Notion-like platform for building interactive models | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Notion-like platform for building interactive models

decipad.com

88 pointspgte16 comments

Hey HN. I wanted to share an update to our previous thread, “Notion with problem solving capabilities”.

The Decipad public beta is now live. You can try it for free here. https://www.decipad.com/

We started building Decipad to make numbers more expressive and playful. It’s a notebook environment where you can combine text, numbers, data and calculations into a story.

Our goal is to help people communicate with numbers more effectively and collaborate across diverse backgrounds. It’s feels a bit like Notion, but it’s for building interactive models and reports.

A few things we’ve been addressing building Decipad…

- A friendly modelling experience: You can express variables and calculations with quasi-natural language and connect them with tables, charts, pivot tables and other widgets.

- Unit expression: we built Decipad on a powerful unit system. You can assign labels and units to your data, like, `Cost = $5 per month per seat.`

- Dimensional Categories: Expressing relationships between variables and categories, making a model easy to adapt. We wrote about it here: https://www.decipad.com/blog/breaking-the-grid-overcoming-di...

- Connecting Data: Ability to connect data sources directly to your notebook. Right now, it’s intended for technical users. You can use JS and SQL to run a query.

We’re still exploring several areas like support for large data sets and building more UX interactions on top of our language to make modeling even more approachable and collaborative.

We would love to get feedback or any thoughts on our approach.

Open articleView on HN

Not sure if this was the feedback you were looking for but I spent about a year in a similar field trying to build out a product before we successfully pivoted. The product was very similar to grid.is

Ours was really tough sell as a product because it wasn't really a product. It was kind of a no code platform that worked with excel models. It was technically very capable and cool, converting excel logic to run in browser but no one really cares about the tech, but what are you supposed to do with it. And you can use it for a lot of things, like someone can embed it into an existing website to serve as a calculator (eg. Mortgage calculator), you can run Monte Carlo on workbooks easier or a solver, share simplified workbooks hiding the model guts, etc

But it wasn't a product. Every one of those problems (are they problems?) Could have been solved in a better way. No code space is also very competitive and we knew we couldn't keep up with the high bar of generalized no code platforms and the sell wasn't big enough. It was classic solution looking for a problem

Luckily we stumbled on one workbook people actually used and realized that we were held back by our old tech and built a solution to address that one problem the wb was trying to solve.

So all that's to say I think you should focus on a single very specific problem you're trying to solve (something a lot more specific than "data stories"). And think about the pricing and how many $15/mo subs you need to support your team.

I may be way off and you may already have a few thousand active users and are well on your way in case disregard what I said (we got maybe a dozen or so users at a higher price point but very little actual usage)

I have a lot of other stories to share if you're curious. But best of luck.

Hey! I'm Nuno a co-founder at Decipad.

Appreciate the input. We actually have two former founders of similar products working in our team. Would love to know what you think of Decipad after using it. Grid is a terrific company. None of the "competitors" in the space made it, but surely one will. Hopefully many of them, us included. I agree -- it's really hard to build a product that defines a new category. But that's what motivates us.

Let me know if you do try it, would be super curious to see the feedback.

Very good points. One thing that still makes us broad but narrows down is the fact that we are focusing on financial modelling and analysis. But yeah, as Nuno pointed out, it's a new product category and super broad in application, which is part of what makes us excited about this!

Quick feedback: I really thought the “ROI Calculator” on your landing page was meant to be interactive not a screenshot so was wondering why it didn’t work. Any chance it could easily be made interactive by embedding the actual software there?

We are currently working on interactive embeddable documents, so expect some news on that front :)

I was just looking for a tool like this over the weekend.

How is Decipad different from other cloud data visualization/analysis/science tools such as https://observablehq.com/?

We love Observable, but Decipad is made for a different audience and use cases.

We are focusing on numbers and collaboration, while Observable kind of focuses on the programmers and the DataViz community. The Decipad user shouldn't have to know how to program. Observable uses JS. Decipad created a custom language with a number of specific features, like the way we handle units, dates and dimensions. (We can also use JS if you want to).

We have and plan to creating custom widgets for specific use cases for financial and quantitive modelling and analysis.

I don’t understand who the audience is (obv not me).

People who make models for a living: hard to remove them from excel. Likely view this product as superfluous. Likely find excel, comments etc as enough to collaborate.

People who don’t make models as their main role function: hard to get them to invest in a solution that only impacts 10% of their time.

I think products like this tend to be too frivolous for the power users and too intense for the casuals.

Very well done!

Is there any plan to have some kind of "read-only" view or play mode or history? Right now it's a bit risky to create a nice sheet and give it to others because they will change the value forever without warning.

And eventually creating snapshot for comparison would be super nice.

Yes! There are two ways to do this right now. You can create a shared link which creates a read only view and users can 'play with' any interactive element to see how the model adjusts (like a widget), but the changes are local (it won't change your work). You can also invite someone as read only. We are exploring more capabilities and controls when publishing to readers.

Any reason for all the animated text on the landing page? I found it jarring to glean information about the product when the page is constantly moving.

Awesome work yall. We're doing something similar for a more focused market. How long did this take to build?

about 2 years give or take. but there's a lot more than the surface shows:

* live collab * own parser, interpreter, computer, language

if you are building something similar happy to jump and tell you more! always keen on helping others! good luck

BIG fan of Tydlig so I’ll be giving this a go as well

why does every new tool think i want to waste half my screen for white space and rounded corners?

Super cool:)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com