Graphitup

Shipped a major UX improvement for authors: allowing them to upload their spreadsheets without changing them.

It may seem obvious that Excel authors wouldn't want to change their spreadsheets just to work with Excelkits. However when I built the MVP that was not at all obvious to me 🤷‍♂️. In order to ship quickly and start getting feedback I largely punted on this massive UX problem.

This release allows users to author charts just as they do in Google Sheets/Excel, so was a no-brainer step towards quick & easy publishing. A key quality of Excelkits needs to be making authoring easy. While this feature came at great cost (litterally months of work) it was a critical step towards my goal of attracting 100 paying users.

After recreating the charts on Before Tax in Excelkits I wanted replace the old charts on Before Tax. For one this would harden Excelkits as a product, but more importantly it require me to add features desirable by content creators (which lucky for me I am).

Before Tax already has a cool dashboard UI that I didn't want to change. Especially since it's monetized with affiliate links placed in strategic locations. I'd need to modify Excelkits widgets to be flexible enough to support the existing visualizations without compromising the monetization of site.

I came up with a pubsub approach that allows users to place a "reporting" widget that would populate the visual widgets anywhere else on that page. Good luck doing that with an iframe. Web Components are pretty cool.

Well it wasn't pretty, but it was done. Leveraging as much code as possible from Before Tax I made a bare bones widget: a form with a two-column table. Technically speaking it was a big fat blob of HTML, but it was more or less what the team at Amy Northard CPA needed for their project.

I was using this whole experience to glean as much user feedback as possible. To my surprise all the "critical" features in my backlog were an afterthought. Users wanted pragmatic, unsexy, widget UI's and easier installation.

What matters most at this stage is simplicity. No fancy charts, no endless styling options, just presenting the data right on user's sites. After talking with other prospects, another key concern was ensuring they don't lose hours struggling to publish their widgets.

So in effect the biggest concerns where surprisingly... boring: present spreadsheet results simply and make installation fast/easy. Everything else is a bonus.

The inspiration for the project came out of a project called Before Tax (indiehackers.com/product/before-tax). While trying to figure out a monetization strategy (spoiler: never happened) I connected with some amazing entrepreneurs in the tax space. A few of them even offered to buy Before Tax (spoiler: for pennies), however everyone seemed to be fans of the charts on the site.

After a really positive brainstorming session with one of the heads of a cutting edge CPA firm called Amynorthardcpa.com, I decided to turn the charts on Before Tax into embedded widgets. They would provide product feedback and in return get widgets they would publish on their site to help them educate their clients and drive sales.

It sounded simple enough, so I got to work on a prototype.