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Idea Validation: Can a small Python script be a product?

Where can a project like this be taken? I don't see how I can charge money for access, but I have a donation option.

I have a project called Mail Bale it's a Python script that formats email lists, that you can then paste into PgAdmin. It solves a problem at work, and I think others can benefit from it too.

I'd love your first impressions and concept critique: https://brandondh.github.io/mail-bale/

Thanks!

#landing-page-feedback #growth

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    Hey Brandon, seems to me that the target audience for a script like this will probably have the technical capabilities to do something similar (e.g. devs, DB admins). I'm also a developer and know I could perform a simple regex replace to get the same result.

    While the script is convenient, I think you might struggle to turn it into a product without it offering something more.

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      @ConsoleFreak that’s a good point. I’ll do a little more thinking about target audience too.

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    Hey Brandon,
    As the other comment says, it would be hard to sell something like this to someone with the ability to program. Therefore, for it to be useful there needs to be a UI built up so that someone doesn't have to know their is a python script running. This could be a website lets the user paste in, or upload, their email list and get back the correctly formatted list.

    I am not sure how you would charge for something like this. It feels like a feature for a product rather than the product itself.

    Good luck!

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      Providing a UI is a good call. Perhaps then a small income could be generated from non-intrusive ads, like those provided by Carbon.

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        Right now I am developing with Flask and Angular, but I think that would be over engineering for this project - what would you use to build a UI @ConsoleFreak?

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          To keep it really simple you could go with something like Bulma or other lightweight CSS framework, paired with vanilla JS (since there wouldn't be complex functionality involved). That would be low overhead and you wouldn't require a backend.

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    You could probably sell it on codecanyon.

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    Some things are better off as open sourced tools. This seems like one of those things.

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    I agree with the other comments below. It probably needs to be expanded to include other types of common transformations.

    As one small example, I have seen people build Excel models to ensure that account numbers have the proper number of leading 0's on an account number. For example - convert 1234 to 00001234. Obviously this is pretty simple to do in python.

    So, are there other types of transforms that enough people do that this would be a handy tool for a broad audience?

    I think the audience you need to target is people that don't know how to program and just want a simple way to copy in data in 1 format and spit out the result in another.

    The good thing is that if you can build it out a bit, you might be able to come up with a monetization approach. For example, free for lists of 100 or less but charge for larger. Or, you could only access some transforms via a subscription.

    Good luck!

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      That makes a lot of sense @cmoffitt - this could be a good time to find like r/accounting or somewhere where I can ask some questions about pain points with data entry like this.

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        This comment was deleted a year ago.

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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