Show HN: A web-based Excel/Database hybrid | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A web-based Excel/Database hybrid

ragic.com

82 pointslongneckdeer41 comments

It took me a long time to figure out what it actually is. Similar to what other commenters have mentioned, the three things I'd recommend focusing on are:

1) Stupidly simple messaging. To do this, talk to the people that are already using it and ask them how they'd describe it to someone who's not that tech-savvy. Try and phrase what they say as close to word-for-word as you can. "Supercharge your database development" meant nothing to me.

2) A very clear list of use cases/examples. I didn't actually get what it was until I saw the expense report example at the bottom of the page. These examples need to be called out very quickly.

3) A stupidly simple demo before requiring any input. I'd have the call to action say "Try a simple demo" and definitely don't require registration before seeing it. Trying to get me to start a 30-day free trial right away makes me leave the page before I even try a demo.

I second this. Ran into the same problem.

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.

From a user's standpoint, I think you're focusing too much on trying to get me to register. I won't even get to the demo if it requires me to register.

I get it from your perspective, you want to get their info so you can follow up, etc. It's just risky since a lot of people won't get to the "Aha" moment and will just end up leaving.

This is correct. I didn't register, so I didn't demo.

In 15 minutes this app will disappear from my mind.

OK, let's try this for a title.

"Build your database with online spreadsheet"

I've already updated this to the website.

That doesn't quite read correctly. "Build your database with an online spreadsheet" or "Create your database as easily as a spreadsheet" or "Build with the power of a database and the ease of a spreadsheet"

Ps. Love the idea for the project, I have been looking out for something like this for a while.

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

We try to make the sentences as short as possible.

I strongly recommend you offer a demo without needing to sign up. I was intrigued enough to take a look, but not enough to go through a sign up process.

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.

You could generate a unique key for each visitor as a sandbox user and then give the prompt to convert to a full account once the user has started interacting with the site. Be sure to make it non-intrusive though.

See how they have done it on https://hollyapp.com/

It took me a while to find that link again, but I thought it was worth it as an example.

Good luck.

You should show some applications without having to subscribing. I wanted to see the kind of applicationd you can produce, but I do not want to register while it is just to discover your product.

edit: I just watched the video. I was expecting to see your product instead of a story board on CRM (Oh? what is CRM? But it is even better than Excel...)

Great idea, I have been actually thinking about something like this for a long time.

Great product, but weak marketing. It is targeted for non-technical small businesses, but homepage and everything looks complicated, and makes less sense for these people. There should be a one sentence which clearly explains what the product is meant to do. Customers are more interested in the end result, show them some examples of what they can do with this product. Unfortunately , this looks like a product for developers by developers.

Here's the discussion from the last time he submitted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959486

Would be interested to hear how the product has evolved since then. Have they incorporated any of the feedback they received the first time around?

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.

I love the idea. the interactive guide is horrible. far from simple. Sorry for being blunt.

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

Yes, I signed up and gave it a try. However, what I expected is a freestyle drag and drop, not a workflow fixed at every step.

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

Trying to answer here for him: I ran into troubles with the third field added - the demo didn't react anymore, I couldn't type in the field name. Also I agree that it should be a bit less restrictive. For example it only accepts the step when I actually type in "Customer". I'd prefer arrows and a fixed help box instead of the overlays - as it is at one time had to look around where it wants me to go next.

A few more things:

- It was hard for me to get into design mode again after having tried the form view. I'd make that more prominent. Right now I think it's only in the context menu for the entities, not for the whole db however.

- I see forms, but do you have (dynamic) list views as well? How do I format / generate them?

- Try to get rid of all the "leave this page" browser warnings.

- paragraph text fields behave very odd in Chrome (graphical issues after resizing, I think it also cut some pasted text). I also think rich text capability might be critical there, but I can understand that you wanted to avoid that beast at first.

In general I like the approach - I think it's a very valid business idea to try to give benefits to all those businesses with Excel 'workflow applications'. The ability to do multiuser editing might be a big enough benefit alone to get some customers - maybe you could accentuate more on that. IMO however the UX from the developer end needs a lot of streamlining.

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

1) OSX 10.8.x, latest Chrome (omw right now, can't check)

4) How about a save-by-default stance? is versioning and rollback hard to implement on your stack? (those two characteristics should be used together IMO) Alternatively I'd just implement a message that asks whether to save, forget changes or cancel.

A couple of thoughts:

Is Javascript really the language to use when you're seemingly trying to talk to non-developers - either small business owners or business analysts at larger companies?

I can see lots of uses for Ragic, but I don't know any business analyst types who'll just knock out some Javascript code to do a function, when they're fairly happy to use Visual Basic for Applications.

Finally, your samples all seem relatively small, which is understandable, but you don't mention how large a data set you can cope with - a lot of Excel based apps now seem to have 100,000s of rows of data (which is why they end up so slow).

It seems like this would be most useful for non-developers, but the use cases (I'm assuming that's what 'regic solutions' are), sit obscured at the bottom of the page.

Look at how Twilio markets their paas to non devs.

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

I think I don't want a registration process before trying the demo. That's the whole meaning of demo!!!

Not trying to take away anything from the app. It might be wonderful, I didn't try it because of the unnecessary registration.

DabbleDB again. Don't break my heart.

HA! Exactly what I was thinking, but couldn't remember the service's name. Thanks for the mental unblocking.

Exactly. Before a company invests in moving all their processes into a system like this, there needs to be some kind of legal statement that says 'should we ever get acquired / close down, we'll release the code to paying customers'.

1. works like excel 2. looks like excel 3. has reports -> everything basic "business" data application needs

seems like you will swim in money in a few months if you reach the right target market...

The app seems pretty slow, it cannot be perceptibly slower than Excel for this project to kick off. You can find lots of low hanging fruits by running the Chrome audits.

I think you can also charge a lot more than you currently do

I am unable to receive a demo key at derp@derp.derp at this time. Please re-think your demo process.

Google Fusion Table is very similar to this, however, their API documentation is not very good in my opinion. I think a product like this is very useful if you want to give a client access to their database in the form of a spreadsheet.

Also see http://ethercalc.com

Let me just compliment the design of your website, with design being not just the visuals, but the structure, presentation and the content as well. It is clean, simple (but not simplistic) and comes across as a frontend of a company with a substance. Not to technical, not too fluffy, good balance. I would however expand the About section to add some specifics - where and whos.

The speaker in the intro video doesn't seem to be a native english speaker.

There are some grammar mistakes and you can hear mouse clicking when he switches slides.

The information is there, but I think it needs a bit more polish in terms of phrasing ("Special need is nothing special.") and a proper speaker.

It would be great if the software was open source, you can also still run a SAAS based on it. I wouldn't want to depend on a closed source Database for my data. And I say this because I like the Excel/Database hyrid idea.

you should hire a native english speaker to write your marketing copy

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

Then you should not hire them again! The quality is very poor. There are many grammatical mistakes and the style is quite clunky. It makes your company seem a lot less professional.

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