Ask HN: Review My Startup - Hypernumbers The Team Spreadsheet | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review My Startup - Hypernumbers The Team Spreadsheet

44 pointsgordonguthrie78 comments

Please review my startup: http://hypernumbers.com

We finally have a ‘quantum of utility’ - a product like a spreadsheet but better at doing some things...

I would love to get your thoughts and opinions on what a native-web spreadsheet should be like - and in which ways hypernumbers meets (or fails to meet) your expectations.

BACK STORY

When I started writing this submission I googled for Paul Graham’s 'Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund' No 22 - web spreadsheet (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html) from 2008 – so I could point out we started full time work on it in 2007. Through the miracle of Google I found this article of Paul’s from 2005 (http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html) which predates us. I have no idea if I read that article at the time :(

That got me thinking. Reading Paul’s articles today it all seems so simple and obvious, but it took 6 years for me to come to think that thought – and it has taken another 4 years to execute it.

In Web 1.0, I was Chief Technical Architect at if.com – a bank on the internet. There was an anti-pattern around called ‘how come it takes me a day to do this on a spreadsheet, but it takes 10 developers 4 months in Java?’ to which the answer was just a shrug. We had a pile of innovative product designs prototyped in Excel a mile high which we actually just could not implement.

One day I stumbled across the Functional Programming FAQ which used spreadsheets as an example of a Functional Language: Eureka! We left to start our own bank with an offer engine written in an (initially undecided - later Erlang) Functional Language on the 4th September 2001 – turned out not so good...

‘spreadsheetieness of Erlang’ to ‘spreadsheet in Erlang’ took another 5 years...

3 hours sleep, filthy hangover, rural airport in Sweden, yet another failed (Erlang) start-up, depressed, I knocked up the first prototype of hypernumbers in sort of migranetic/hungover ecstasy of coding just to cheer myself up.

Another 4 years later – here we are...

I don't like the name. It sounds too technical. How about "Insteadsheet"? Because that's really what you are, right?

Edit: Some elaboration. I'm a branding guy, and this site has a branding problem.

Hypernumbers doesn't really describe the product.

There's two elephants in the room that the site doesn't even address: Excel and Google Docs. A name like Insteadsheet addresses that all by itself. It becomes the fun, easy alternative.

The complaint of "too technical" gets downvotes here on HN, but I feel like that isn't the market they're after.

To be honest, Insteadsheet sounds a lot worse than Hypernumbers.

Names don't have to describe products. It's funny you talk about Excel - the word Excel itself does not describe spreadsheets!

Is a negative of another product really the best way to go about branding? I can't think of a single good example.

You're right. I really meant to say that Hypernumbers implies something else (an app dedicated to advanced math, perhaps?), not that it isn't descriptive.

Insteadsheet would indeed be a ballsy name, incorporating the "We're the anti-Excel/Google Spreadsheets" feel right into the name. LessEverything is closest to the approach that I can think of.

I stand behind it. And I doubly stand behind not being the guy who just says "The name sucks!" without offering any alternatives.

The more I think of it, the more I like the name Hypernumbers. It has the word hyper in it - it's exciting!

And the acronym is HN. A tribute to Hacker News, perhaps?

"Insteadsheet" sounds stilted and dead on the tongue. "Hypernumbers" has rhythm and asonance.

Also, can we please have some care over use/mention here, Quine's turning in his grave!

Am I the only one that likes them both?

It's easy enough to stick with Hypernumbers (the better URL) and use "insteadsheet" as a catchy tongue-in-cheek description of what the product actually is.

good name, please don't change it.

Hypernumbers describes the product pretty well to me. To me, Hypernumbers implies a union between numbers and hypertext. Isn't that what it is? It also sounds pretty cool.

I came to the web page and looked around a bit. I was asking myself what problem does this solve that Excel or Google Spreadsheet doesn't solve? If I was just someone casually browsing I think I would have left your page then. I then watched the video. The typing overlay is annoying.

I'm still not clear what problem it solves that those other solutions don't... I mean, I get what you're trying to convey by your initial message in the video, but still. So it's a wiki spreadsheet? Is that the value proposition? If so, you need to communicate that better.

I also don't like the landing page. It looks a bit unprofessional.

I'll answer the part about Excel. A lot of company finance depts shuffle Excel files back and forth via e-mail and shares, and merging out-of-sync data becomes an issue. You would be surprised how many finance departments of large companies still do this in a Mickey Mouse fashion.

There are enterprise products that address this, like Cognos Planning, Hyperion (not sure of the specific product name), Cognos TM1, Jedox Palo. But they are expensive (5 figures and up) for licensing and expensive for customization (>150/h consultants). Not so expensive that you wouldn't get ROI from the wasted person-hours, but the sticker shock is there, and in the case of the Cognos products, the usability leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm not sure that Hypernumbers can match the functionality of the enterprise products I mention above (today at least), but for the modest to light use cases, it seems to be satisfactory.

There's another product that I've been meaning to look at, RsolverOne, mostly cause i learned a lot from the guy's python blog:

http://resolversystems.com/

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2009_11_21...

The landing page is built inside a spreadsheet - which is a bit painful, but... yum, taste the lovely dogfood!

That intro video is about 30 seconds too long, and it needs a voice over rather than the annoying typing sound.

My voice tests as 'bloody awful' and the video needs to work in the office with the sound off...

I'm not saying you can't use the in-video text, but the keyboard clicking nearly made me turn the video off, not just the noise.

You can get someone fairly professional to do a voice over here: http://voice123.com/

I've used the service before and the quality of people I got was very good. For a 30s clip you can get someone pretty good for about $100-$200

Cheers, I'll check it out.

The demo is pretty clunky w/ all the views in separate frames, and I'd prefer a full working demo w/o entering an email address. It doesn't concisely make clear what it is & how it's different from other offerings, like others mentioned. A point-by-point comparison vs Google Docs might help. Or emphasizing that the direction you're taking it and the way you're asking for user feedback is just completely different from the way Google would ever do things. Hard to do w/o negative messaging but currently doesn't leave one feeling confident that it's a great idea to start using it as a collaboration tool on a serious project.

You can click out of the frames to a full working demo without an email.

I am optimizing for communication with potential users not conversion to paying customers at this point in time.

All the testing we have done shows that people only 'get' it when they see the three views together.

The direction that we are going in is a spreadsheet that supports team collaboration - is that too vague or is it not coming across clearly enough?

A definition of "team collaboration" would be good. Again, Google Docs has team collaboration, but I assume you mean something more, or more specific. E.g. does it have per-cell ownership? Like person A controls their numbers in column A, and person B controls their numbers in column B, etc. Are permissions more granular? Is access easier, by obscure URL instead of username/password? What sets it apart from other team collaboration spreadsheet offerings?

Its 2 part permissions: * pages * views

So I can see: * a page as spreadsheet view (change everything) * a page as a wiki page view (only change cells that have been wikied) * a page as a webpage view (change nothing)

Toggling between them is one-click.

Access is by e-mail sign-up.

"only change cells that have been wikied" - this seems like a core strength, is "wiki" the most intuitive way to refer to cell-level permissions? I would not have concluded this meaning from the work wiki.

Gordon - really like the sound of this. Obviously the challenge is of overcoming Googles dominance of the online spreadsheet. However having a spreadsheet that you can link cells from other spreadsheets, sounds like it adds real value, and the ability to publish in more of a wiki or actual web page is really appealing.

Good luck and look forward to hearing some reviews of it over the next few months.

Colin

Google dominates with the tech-minded public and in-the-know businesses. Having said that, and being in a related business that sells to finance departments, I can tell you that a lot of the companies in the market for this type of product haven't heard of Google Spreadsheets (yes, really).

Now the challenge for Hypernumbers is going to be getting awareness. A lot of the target market isn't going to actively look for a product like this, so you have to find ways of getting your name out there, i.e., buying mailing lists and even doing snail mail campaigns. It's an uphill battle, but if they can tell the right story to their prospective customers, it can be an easy sell.

Hierarchical nesting of spreadsheets mirrored in the URL seems like a very useful model; kind of blew my mind. Is nesting a common capability of Excel, etc?

Some other thoughts:

- The always-published (to web) functionality could replace 80% of Excel use where I work.

- I do feel the application could use a designer's touch, especially with regard to typography in the header and dialog boxes. Things feel a bit disjointed.

- I wasn't able to import an .xls via: Site > My Pages > Import To >

- Does .hn have the ability to work with comma or tab delimited formats?

Thanks for sharing; I look forward to seeing where this goes .

Excel and Google Docs are both non-heirarchical...

I'm pleased to see that 80% of your Excel use could be done with publish to web - I would like to set up a call with you to understand that comment better if that's OK.

If will look in the error logs to see if I can find out what happend with file upload.

We do have a csv file importer - I am kinda thinking of having it auto-upload from a dropbox folder so that you can easy-publish data - but we are also totally REST based so (with the right permissions) you can post to cells or appending rows.

Anyway get in touch and we can have a longer discussion.

What this reminds me of more than anything else is a cheap-n-cheerful version of Oracle Hyperion - no bad thing as Hyperion is the market leading financial consolidation system.

However, finance users are pretty much wedded to Excel (Hyperion's SmartView interface for Excel is pretty slick) - what kind of integration do you have with Excel?

I've been kind of toying with the idea of building a SaaS OLAP database with an Excel plugin - but that is project #2 at the moment.

NB I'm in Edinburgh as well and saw you present at the Techcrunch event...

Yeah, the first thing I thought about reading the summary was hmm, this could be a nice low-end alternative to Cognos TM1 or Jedox Palo. It lacks the analytics, but for a good number of use cases, that's actually fine.

Slanytyyz - tell me more... Can we arrange a 15 minute call sometime? + 44 7776 251669

Check out http://www.jedox.com/en/home/overview.html

You can download a free copy and install it on a server to see what I mean.

Jedox is an open source alternative to TM1 - they run on the support service model. Both Jedox and TM1 do in-memory cubes (think pivottables on steroids on even more steroids) that let you dice and slice large volumes of data very quickly. For a lot of co's, that's overkill, but a nice-to-have.

Hey Gordon, send me a note at information [at] braintapper [dot] com, and we can arrange a skype voice call or something.

It took me a while to find but the real value proposition is presented on this page - http://hypernumbers.com/more/

I didn't even see this page. I just played with demo and thought: nice start, but it'll be tough to beat officelive, google apps, or Zoho. You need to strongly differentiate between these solutions. This page actually does a good job but it should be front and center.

I'm always using google spreadsheets for this sort of rudimentary team accounting so I was interested to check out the video.

To be entirely honest, I'm not sure what you're offering that google spreadsheets isn't.

EDIT: I didn't even post that first part of my comment yet, but that is how long it took me to find your demo.

Honestly, this is very nicely executed. Please make the demo VISIBLE. Neither the video not the copy on the landing page showed me how this actually works.

The big orange button isn't visible enough? Is it the text 'Free Trial' that is the problem?

No I meant the demo button. I was skeptical about the idea but seeing the demo really sold me. IMO, I would throw that video out and place a nice big demo button.

The video was cute, but really does not show any functionality, value prop or a call to action. Meanwhile, the demo is neat and clearly shows why this product is worth using.

I think it's the small tiny gray "demo" button thats the problem, it should be just as big as the orange button imo.

If we were optimising for conversion/sales there wouldn't be a signup with e-mail button at all - it would be a big instant demo button.

At the moment I am optimising for conversation - and I need an email to trigger that.

So now I would rather have 10 people sign up that I can talk to and 90 walk away because of the email than 100 anonymous sign-ups.

So the little demo button is just a little add-on...

I like this. Could fill an interesting niche between emailing spreadsheets around and a full-blown SAP system!

Ok. I like this idea but here's my issue: How is this different from Google Docs spreadsheets?

It doesn't look like you mention it on the landing page and Google Docs is pretty well known at this point. As a consumer I'd like to know how it's different and why I should use your spreadsheet instead of theirs.

I guess I see where you are coming from. But at least on HN, I expect people to be a bit more imaginative.

How is this different from Google Docs? I can't speak for the creator but here's what I can think of:

It's created by a clearly passionate founder who's directly reachable for feedback and support. The guy's put up his cell phone number!

Hypernumbers has this strange-seeming idea of converting a spreadsheet into a wiki/webpage/table. That's pretty interesting and could be very useful.

Even a quick look through the app suggests there are a lot of features. Now I know it's fashionable to say features don't sell software, but hey this is an Excel competitor. Features rule.

It costs money, which suggests it's a serious effort, not another big-Co project which can be shelved if it doesn't get enough eyeballs.

Right, because the best way to sell your product is to get defensive when potential customers ask how your offering is different from a competitor. ;)

Haha, and that's exactly what I meant.

Jokes apart, I do see your point. Maybe I just got too excited about this app from the technical point of view. But I thought most people here would be more like that than potential customers.

I doubt anyone here would be a potential customer.

Sorry I haven't got defensive about my product anywhere (I don't think so).

Sorry it was me who got defensive on your behalf!

No worries Gordon. I was really only looking for an answer to my question. Congrats on your launch.

Speaking from the perspective of a Finance department (small or large), this product's competitor is Excel. Google spreadsheets is not really a direct competitor.

Most finance departments use less than 20% of Excel's functionality. Where they waste the most person hour cycles is syncing data in spreadsheets and recreating formulas that got blown away by someone who emailed back the spreadsheet.

From a Finance department perspective, the hard part is getting their attention. The pricing seems reasonable, compared to the stuff in my world, i.e. Cognos, Hyperion, etc. but Finance departments can be weird about money. They're ok wasting person hours that are worth more than the cost of software that will pay itself off quickly.

I think this is an interesting product, but the challenge for it as a business is more of a marketing problem than a technical problem.

Isn't data security also going to be a problem with Finance departments? Surely they don't want to put their sensitive data on a third party server?

It can be. I doubt any public companies would consider Hypernumbers for SOX reasons.

I know of a few companies who had no problems, however, having their finance data on a third party external server, but in a different context. I believe that GoodData (hosted business intelligence) is doing quite well, and I would think that a large portion of their clients are sending finance data to them.

One of the reasons Salesforce penetrated the enterprise space is that they priced under the pre-approval limit for corporate credit cards.

People signed up, loaded up their data, claimed the money back and then told IT/compliance by which time the hens had flown the coop...

There is no way any seriously large company would put us on their approved list (at the moment) which is fine.

Nice one. I can imagine this being huge. But please work on the UI and UX.

Which bit of the UI/UX...

The spreadsheet bit is all kinda - make it like Excel/Google docs as much as you can...

The main frontpage is because Hypernumbers self-hosts on Hypernumbers. Laying out a product page inside a spreadsheet is a bit of challenge as you can imagine :)

We are still figuring out how to make that part of it easier. Its more of a meta-problem than just polish it up...

erm, pretty much everywhere. one example - you have a "free trial" button, but below that a required form field, swap them over, surely?

the free demo button doesn't work - goes to a page not found or sits there saying "building your site"

i feel like this "Making it easier to collect, collate and consolidate data and figures." is a really really poor description of what your product is. have you tested that it resonates?

i don't seem to be able to drag charts to move them, if i click the graph once it shows me formula, i click away to change view and it selects whichever cell i clicked in, i press cmd + z to undo and nothing happens.

everything feels like a lot of work, for example all the buttons need much much faster tool tips. why when i hover over one doesn't it tell me what that button is in the silver bar to the right?

why are some things formula and others lightbox ui controls (eg: add a link) feels like consistency for that stuff is ++

Site > Settings > Pages is honestly terrifying. draw some inspiration from Numbers.app? :)

I agree. It's a good idea, and I can see it having advantages over your competitors, but those advantages are negated when hard to access. UI needs to be cleaner and following all expected conventions (this isn't a new UI).

Is there a reason the landing page is 730px wide? It feels like everything got crammed in pretty hard.

I'm excited about what this could do, but it needs some time on the design before I'm comfortable playing around with it to evaluate properly.

I will not respond to these point by point - but I will transcribe them into my review list.

The graphs aren't like Excel - we create graphs in cells (or merged cells) with a function like =graph(rows, cols, options) - so you can't drag them...

That's an interesting way to do it. Although the ability to move graphs around in Excel seems useful, I do it mostly to get the graph out of the way. How about having a cell/column on the side dedicated to graphs so that you can still use your =graph() implementation but it doesn't obstruct the spreadsheet view? You could even have a toggle button to hide it.

The reason for sticking to the =function(params) approach is it makes it easy to build things like =twitter.button("hypernumbers") <-- actual function and =google.maps(points) and other cool inline stuff - which then seamlessly clicks over to webpages/forms.

You do want to be able to create dynamic webpages and putting graphs out on separate tab/page/things is a bit tricky because it all gets tangled up in permissions. You can always put them on their own page..

Why does it self-host the front page on Hypernumbers?

Either:

1. Hypernumbers offers this kind of web page as a feature, in which case you've got a problem because the pages have trouble looking good (and therefore won't virally advertise the service in the way they might if they had a little more style cred).

2. Hypernumbers doesn't offer this kind of web page as a feature, in which case you shouldn't try to make it fit - I'd suggest dropping some money over at 99 Designs for a more professional-looking front page. You're going to need something slicker to sell this.

In either case, it's non-obvious that the page is self-hosted. It's obviously a pride point, so you might want to point that out! I'd also love to be able to play with the spreadsheet UI, or at least a little piece of it, directly on the front page. Show off what makes you awesome!

I'd also take another look at your copywriting, both on the page and in your video. You've described it as "the Team spreadsheet" - why is "Team" capitalized? Also, the contact details in the top bar makes it sound like there's only one person in the company. Is that true?

(I should say that this isn't a comment on the product itself, which sounds very handy.)

1 - yes hypernumbers allows you to publish a spreadsheet page as a webpage with a single click (as mentioned in the video, on the demo and on the front page).

Its not a pride point it is practical. We try and use hypernumbers everyday for as many tasks as possible to feel as much customer pain as possible.

We are a very small company - my name is on it because we are optimising for communication from customers and I want people to phone/Skype me...

Those typewriter noises in the video are incredibly annoying.

albertsun - this is valid feedback I have upvoted you

I don't know if there's a consensus on using ellipsis in today's communication but it really, really annoys me.

Where about?

Your post and the intro video on the page, e.g. "Hypernumbers : the Team spreadsheet...". Also, requests to team members to update their figures in a spreadsheet do not end in sad smilie faces unless it's a team of girl scouts.

Clickety click - http://hypernumbers.com

Great job, Gordon! And a truly inspiring story too. I shall be calling you soon for feedback.

I raise my coffee cup to you - and look forward to your call...

Sorry folks we seem to be having some DNS problems - let me get onto it...

You're all creating sites quicker than the DNS can handle them at the moment - I'm working on fixing that.

That's it back up - but I need to make some changes to stop it happening again...

OK - the problem was that the pool of new DNS entries was draining too quickly - so I increased the size of it.

Unfortuately that's not in our site management API so I had to code it up and test it - but 'tis done now... :)

Could you use wildcard DNS to avoid the pool issue?

No because we provision across a pool of servers based on load.

Can you use a hybrid approach? Point the wildcard to the next server you plan to provision on, but add A records for all your accounts when they're created.

My vote is for teamxls.com - I think it's more fitting than Hypernumbers.

This is a pretty great idea. Nice work!

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