What do you think about it: A website to do API calls from CSV / Excel sheet
Hey there,
I want to share my MVP with you and get early feedback about my tool. Would you have a few minutes for me?
The concept is the following: As a developer, working for many startups, I've been asked many times to import tabular data, from excel sheets, CSV files, and JSON, ... into APIs. Most of the time, I'm able to do it using code, but I would have loved to have a tool to do that. And, I'm pretty sure many people also shared the same need.
My main questions are
Does it ring a bell to you? Is this something that you already had to achieve?
If yes, would you have paid for a tool to achieve that when you needed it?
I've drafted something: http://sheet2api.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/
It's still very draft, doesn't use HTTPs, is hosted on a tiny EC2 machine that reboots often, so, don't consider it's reliable yet. But, do you think it's worth extending it and making it a real product?
Thanks a lot :)
I have also come across a few situations in which I had to import data from a csv/excel file.
It is great that you directly provide a demo to gather feedback. I think you could improve it more by adding a clearer explanation (maybe using an image representing the workflow). I currently find it too easy to confuse whether you provide an API to read spreadsheets or whether it calls your API. There are hints on the page, but they are quite subtle. The API dialog could, for example, also just be a wrapper around your service.
After thinking about your idea a bit, I came up with two points you might want to look into:
Privacy
The files might contain sensitive data that not every company wants to share. Maybe providing your solution as a tool that developers can run locally on their machine would allow you to obtain more customers.
Advantage over other solutions
Writing a hacky python scripting that reads data from a spreadsheet and posts it to an API isn't that difficult. If you want to charge money for your solution you might want to look into parts that aren't so easy to implement. Maybe things like authentication flows, handling of time outs and ratelimits, data conversion etc. You could maybe even provide a free version with the base features and only charge for the more advanced features.
I hope this helps!