longneckdeer

I think a reasonable follow up question is how did you market your blog posts so successfully?

Hi,

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

We hired a native English speaker to edit most of our copies.

I changed to the first suggestion: "Build your database with an online spreadsheet"

We try to make the sentences as short as possible.

OK, let's try this for a title.

"Build your database with online spreadsheet"

I've already updated this to the website.

Got it. We've put the simple demo and tutorial as a automatically installed application in your account when you registered.

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 see. It's freestyle drag and drop after you exit the tutorial. Fixed workflow is only for teaching purpose only.

Hi, did you run into some problems in the tutorial? Or because the steps of the tutorial is too complex?

Great suggestion. I think Twilio is a great role model for development tools. We'll try to learn a thing or two from it.

Yes, we've worked on A LOT of items from the last submission.

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.

We had a sandbox account log in at the registration page, but after some testing we found that it made a lot of people who would have signed up just go to the sandbox instead.

The original page is here: http://www.ragic.com/intl/en/registerSandbox

For people who would like to use the sandbox instead.

Agree, didn't know I can scroll-wheel to scroll until I saw this comment.

Ragic, a Database/Excel hybrid. I just posted Show HN above. It's a product where you can build online databases just like creating a Web Excel spreadsheet.

There's free trial that you can try out first with online tutorial. The lite license is $5/user/month

The idea is like this:

If the user already have data on an Excel, we provide an import wizard so that they can import their Excel and create a database with it.

If the user does not have existing data from Excel, they can first define the data fields on Ragic using the design mode. They can actually create cells as fields just like they would on a spreadsheet, but a lot of users find it hard to catch on so we added the drag and drop model just recently. So both ways should work okay.

And actually we do support OpenID log in, and the ability to click on an URL in e-mail to grant access to some DB entries. I guess we have to work on making these features more obvious to users.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, using the import Excel wizard we can do that.

There are 4 of us, and some of us are doing projects using Ragic so that we have the money to survive. We are currently self-funded.

Thanks, very useful comment, and I apologize for the confusion that you experienced.

Right now most of the Ragic developers first go through 2 hours of training before they start building. So they kind of know what the basics process are.

We are in the transition process trying to move from a tool that we personally teach developers how to use, to a self help type of product that developers can start by themselves. Functions like drag and drop add fields are added just this month.

I will certainly find a group of users, sit by them one by one to make our learning process a lot smoother. Again, sorry for the confusion. I think I will certainly post again after we tune the process. The HN posting feedback is really helpful.

The user limit is to segment large user sites from small user sites. We assume larger users sites have more budget.

But we seem to need a cheaper plan designed for developers and geeks so that they can play around Ragic with minimal investment.

Pricing has always been a big topic of discussion inside our team. Would really like to know what kind of pricing would keep you or anyone else reading this comment interested.

Some of the content didn't show for a while because we used GAE as our CDN and we exceeded billing limit.

Things should work normally now.

We used Google Application Engine as our CDN...turning on billing now!

One big point that we forgot to mention in that blog post is that Excel is hard to work with when multiple users are involved.

It would be quite a bit of trouble if Excel users want to implement access control on whether some users can read or write certain entries.

Kind of curious what kind of trouble that you ran into when using Quickbase. You can e-mail me if you don't feel like posting it here. (jeff@ragic.com)

Great tip! Thanks! We'll do that.

For a long time when we search "Ragic" google will ask us "Did you mean tragic?"

Rag-ick It's suppose to be Rapid + Magic

Hey thanks! I really appreciate this, my English is not all that good.

Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Ragic.

if 60% of developers break even, counting opportunity cost, I would be really surprised

Seems not able to load website right now.