Would you buy such tool?
Hello everyone!
A few months ago I stumbled across this site and the concept of indie hacker. Since then I keep thinking about bootstrapping a few projects along with my brother, hoping that one of the project will be successful.
Here's a problem we hit in our day job: How to periodically import identical (or near identical) excel/csv files into a database table?
Solution: A standalone command line application that one can use to perform fast conversion & imports from an excel/csv file to a database table. Some features:
- cross platform win, osx, linux
- easy and flexible csv column to db column mapping
- fast bulk import
- data validation
- success/error notifications
- various other options: truncate table before import, how to deal with special fields (numbers, dates), post import actions like archiving imported files.
I know usually this is a task where a developer will create the script himself, but I found it is a pretty generic thing that can be packed together and sold as a lifetime license, for a small fee like $9,99. After writing and adapting the same script several times I know I would pay for a an already existing and robust solution.
This won't make us rich, but I'd be interested, what do you guys think of such problem and solution idea? How would you market this?
Thank you!
I think you might have problems finding customers for this. You're talking about a very general-purpose tool, but for a very specific type of customer - people with a particular technical requirement (importing CSVs), but without the technical skills to automate it themselves. That seems like quite a hard set of people to identify and then market to.
Maybe you could find an industry or a particular job title where importing CSVs (or entering data from spreadsheets) is a frequent task, and then target those people.
This sounds like a problem that one of the people interviewed by IH also spoke about. I dont have the link or remember what his name was. However, he ultimately didnt persue this idea because he couldnt find users to help him validate the product. He said it was hard to find this type of users out there. One thing I do remember is then we went on to making a product that help you schedule to send emails via a chrome plugin for your gmal account and seems to be doing well with it.
I think the point im trying to make is. I would go through the IH interview section and find this interview. You might even want to reach out this guy for some advice because this is very similar. It might help give you more insights to a product like this.
Thank you, will try to locate the IH interview.
I'm not sure I understand the idea, but...
I feel like a JavaScript plugin of some sort people could add to their sites that would instantly create a nice UI for CSV uploads could be useful. Something that would create a UI like this (https://pageflows.com/post/desktop-web/csv-import/mixpanel) with the mapping etc steps.
Kinda like https://uploadcare.com/, but specifically for CSV uploads.
Personally, if I was building CSV uploads into my site that required mapping to columns etc, I'd probably use something like this if it was fairly easy to set up and the price was tied to usage. So $x per month per 1000 uploads.
In terms of marketing, answering questions on Stack Overflow about CSV uploads would probably work to some degree.
It certainly depends on how it would work. I am a developer so putting something in a and database by writing a script is not hard for me. But something that crossed my mind is that i have used a tool that imports data from a csv/excel file and puts into a table for a wordpress website. Its a wordpress plugin called wpdatatables https://wpdatatables.com So my opinion is if you can solve a specific problem targeting people that may not necessarily know how to import something into a database maybe you could have a customer base. Good luck
I have worked in data mangling quite a bit, so like another hacker mentioned below, I'm comfortable enough to automate this myself with technologies I've used day in day out.
That being said, a common use case that we come across is needing for data to be imported into a database when dropped into a folder.
Typically we would use an ETL tool for this, say SQL Server Integration Services, though naturally a license is required for this.
So a quick and easy tool that allowed the dropping of a file into a cloud based file store, and then moving into a database is a pretty common use case we come across.
Like I said, I wouldn't be a customer of the product, just sharing a common issue that I solved on a daily basis.
That's exactly the uses case in my day job.
However, as other posters it seems that developers prefer to write their own script, or at least adapt an open source solution. This was my "fear", and the actual reason I posted. Judging from the responses until now, such tool would be open source.
Thank you.
Good
Hi, I work with datasets very frequently, and normally when I have to import a CSV file into a table I just use mysql workbench (which supports mapping, creating a new table and inferring types, etc), also I remember using MYSQL directly:
LOAD DATA INFILE 'file.csv' INTO TABLE table
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"'...
But doing a quick search, there are other command line open source tools for that.
I don't know if there is a market willing to pay for a tool only for this use case, this is normally something that most people just write their own scripts and are happy with it.