Would you use this product?
Hi i am starting a new side project and would like to validate my idea before spending months working on the product.
Basically the product would let's you easily automate your database reports. Let's say for example that there is a query that you need to run every day and send to your marketing team, you could simply use the platform to schedule the query to run every day at a specific time and the the result sent to multiple parties using the different integrations that we offer (email, slack etc). You could also combine different queries in a single report.
Is this a problem that you currently have and would you pay for a simple service that solves this problem?
We face this problem at my job actually - we have reports that run weekly. I don't know if we as developers have this problem - the marketing team I'm sure would love this. An easy interface to drag and drop to get the data they want...would be a lot faster than talking to the developers.
Thank you, for the MVP I think I'll just focus on letting people write SQL queries but I have plans of building a simple GUI and visualization tools for non-technical people. What do you currently use for those weekly reports?
I'm a developer, so I wrote some small scripts that run on a cron job that output a csv which is then emailed to each person. It isn't bad, but if there ever has to be a change it has to come through me.
I don't currently have this exactly issue, but I can see it coming in the future. I would suggest you to have companies as your target customers. Good luck!
isn't it a bit like what you are trying to do ? https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/my-partner-and-i-finally-released-our-first-serious-project-and-we-are-looking-for-feedback-08fca0913d
Since they did it already, they can do the validation for you :) And if it works you can spin it to implement your own product vision.
I wouldn't use that. Since my back-end is Elixir, I just use a GenServer to do it. That literally takes less time than learning how an external product works!
Here's a six minute video that goes over two different ways I've implemented recurring work. Sending the results via email would take one more line of code (since I've already hooked up Amazon SES).
I suspect that a large percentage of people who know how to write SQL queries would find this equally trivial to build the feature. A lot of people might find Kevin's idea useful, though!
It's a common problem, which is why there are lots of potential solutions already - the category is Business Intelligence.
Classically this has been SAP Business Objects at the high end, but now there are Looker, Domo, PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik and a host of other products. They're all based around interactively developing reports and then having them scheduled or runnable on demand.
It's an enormous market so there are always opportunities... here's a list of free and open source options to have a look at to see what the landscape is like.
https://blog.capterra.com/top-8-free-and-open-source-business-intelligence-software/
My guess is you're thinking much smaller scale than this, but without a clear vision of what you compete with you'll have problems, so it's worth reading about 👌
The company I work at built this solution for inhouse purposes.
From technical point of view, I imagine difficulty generalising the product to fit wide range of customers. Our company is predominantly MS SQL based. But other companies could be using any combination of different SQL vendors and NoSQL.
There are other technical challenges with this. Generating reports from databases with terrabytes of data require a lot of engineering design considerations. Scheduling reports need to be carefully thought about because some reports are expensive to run and could cause database to get out of sync with others.
I keep wondering, are there any hard data about the real efficacy of products build by asking around for "validation". People are that reliable when answering what they would do? (It kinda reminds me a bit of online dating, where many girls YES would date me but they ended up fizzling out.)
Of course much better than directly building the product, but I think I would shift the risk equation toward a smaller product first.
https://stackingthebricks.com/why-you-should-do-a-tiny-product-first/
Good luck with your product!
This sounds useful but, in terms of scope, it feels more like a feature of a larger reporting tool than a stand-alone project. What else could be added (various formats (pdf, xlsx, pptx)? Report formatting?) to compose a larger product?
I think you should spend a few days building a MVP, pitch the result to some leads identified beforehand and see how they respond.
Why spending months on it from the get-go ?
A product is not validated by people discussing an idea.
Only cold hard cash does. (or a Stripe/Paypal payment)
Yes! Yes to that last line.
That's exactly why I built https://trolley.link , to make it easy to get that $$$ validation.