Phiona

For the past two years, we have been building Phiona, a no-code data automation tool. Our goal is to empower busy, non-technical professionals to create powerful data transformation workflows without having to learn SQL or Python.

Finally, after multiple betas, hundreds of user conversations, and many late nights, we're in the PH arena looking to hit #1 against some decidedly not indie companies, ha.

Would appreciate any feedback the community might be able to provide! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/phiona

I'm sure most folks here have felt the rollercoaster of emotions when you release that first alpha or beta of this idea that you had. You've been thinking about it for months (or maybe years), you've refined designs and potential market segments, and you've talked to hundreds of customers about pain points. You figure that if you release early, you'll get some great feedback, but feel trepidation because it will certainly be at the expense of some of your pride?

But, you gird yourself for the next step, and it initially feels pretty good. That feeling like you're at the top of the rollercoaster feels wonderful (you get those first IH or Betalist customers), but what happens next is exactly like the rest of the ride- bumpy, unpredictable, and exhilarating.

That's where we were at Phiona a few months back- got some great feedback on a "released way too early" beta on Betalist, and needed to go back to the drawing board on a few things necessary for a data automation product. Not gonna lie- the feedback was valuable and essential, but it felt like a bit of a punch to the gut. Now I know why everyone on a similar journey respects the view of the market and the customer above all else!

So we put our heads down and started building more integrations with top databases and products like Airtable and Dropbox, worked to change our interface so that users could trust their data more through exploration and trial and error, and trust that any actions that they took to transform the data were working correctly before they finalized their work. Plus, we heard loud and clear that doing this data work automatically in the background, either on a schedule or triggered via web hook, was the biggest timesaver for most people.

So maybe this time around, we'll get to that next peak in the rollercoaster- a bit more feedback that shapes the future of the product, that same punch to the gut, and the respect for the journey once again. This time, it hopefully won't take me by surprise as much! If you're interested in what we're doing - https://phiona.com.

As always, so thankful for this community- we've learned so much from hearing others' experiences, both good and bad. If we can help in any way to validate your ideas, please reach out- would love to pay it forward in any way we can.

Well, we certainly didn't expect Phiona to be posted on Betalist this morning, but that's the way it goes sometimes! Guess I'll need a few extra cups of coffee!

Honored to be in the same excellent company as folks like @kacper and Scrapbook, always good to have more than one IndieHacker representing!

Hope the community might be able to give us support and feedback today, we've already been so overwhelmed with thoughtful suggestions from so many people here on our landing page, app usability, and functionality.

https://betalist.com/startups/phiona

Thanks to all for helping us hit 🥇!

Over the past few months, we've been refining Phiona's MVP to better serve the needs of no-code makers working with data. It isn't always realistic to learn SQL and Python just to ensure that data is clean enough and transformed to be accessible in the right format.

Phiona is a bit different than other no-code, API-oriented solutions. We not only enable automation of the ability to manipulate large quantities of data, but we also store and expose the newly changed dataset as it's own virtual data table for easy access. For example, you can upload an Excel spreadsheet, connect it to a Google Sheet and a table in your MySQL database, and then combine, clean and transform it into one dataset that's easily accessible through it's own API.

Phiona's main differentiator is that we automatically determine whether there are issues with the data - dates might be inconsistent, there may be blank white spaces before or after text, etc- and we automatically bring those to your attention rather than you having to manually search for them. Plus, once you create a workflow to find these issues, you can have Phiona automatically look for new data in your MySQL table, or Google Sheet file, run the workflow again, and expose this new version in the API or through email.

We'd love to get your feedback on our homepage at http://phiona.com, and if you're interested in accessing the closed beta, please join our waitlist and we'll reach out to you!

Steve