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Comment by jacksoncarter | Hacker News Reader

I added a link to the above, but here it is for you: http://design.qrimp.com

It is a cloud platform that enables application development using only a browser. No IDE's to download, databases to configure, servers to manage. Upload your data and Qrimp builds a relational model to support it and let's you customize reports, forms, build pages. Use AJAX to customize the interface of your app. etc.

Imagine MS Access for the web.

It seems more and more customers are looking to move their databases to the web and this platform helps make that happen easier than coding them from scratch with .net, ruby, even django and frameworks like that to some extent, because it's all on the web.

Of course there are lots of competitors: Salesforce, Caspio, Quickbase, even excel really -- the status quo. But the market is growing and will continue to grow.

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Looking quickly at your product - here is my advice.

Raising funding will be hard for this type of product. MS Access for the web is an extremely hard business model to raise any funding for. You have a platform you can build stuff in - what is your market for sales?

So they may be worried for good reason. Your product has a lot of uses, but no clearly defined market.

What I would do is take your product and figure out what the top 10 tiny niches are for it and do some testing/analysis. A good example here is the guys who do the restaurant ipad/mobile sites. Why are they just attacking the restaurant space and not any website? Surely the technology is the same. The reason is they chose the best battle they could. Consider doing the same approach - you have a general platform that could be very useful for many individual uses.

Then when you have a very clear concise business, market, customer growth strategy, basically a good story in one little niche - you could have more success with funding.

That's pretty much what I'm doing now. Building apps on top of it and selling those as customizable CRM's, intranets, etc. I have lots of ideas: catering businesses who want to put menus online, online stores, warehouses with lots of inventory, things like that.

I think at this point, it may be easier to sell a product for a specific niche than to sell the platform itself, which is why I wonder about funding at all.

People don't want to build a custom system. They either want a system that is up and running or to pay someone to build a system for them.

And then there is the market who has very specific needs for which there are no niche apps for them. They are left stranded, because the cost to build from scratch is too high. The goal of the platform is to reduce development costs and help more people who need information management systems get them.

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