Traindex

I am not sure if AWS launching a similar service to Traindex is a "milestone" or not . It certainly feels like an important event in the life of Traindex.

I feel a little nervous about the competition, but also excited about the validation. I only have one paying customer. My landing page isn't even ready yet (it's just some generic stuff that needs to be improved a lot). It's safe to assume that AWS already has a lot more traction here.

I started working on a product that a former consulting client needed. I saw potential in the product beyond the first customer and so I started building it.

I had no landing page, no sign up feature, no stripe billing, nothing. I just had an API that they could query and get back some query results. They asked me to invoice them when the results met their acceptance criteria.

It felt great to send the first invoice two weeks ago and the payment finally landing in my account last week.

Things started happening after years of silence. The client reached out to me with a list of projects, including request to reboot Traindex.

We did not have an agreement. It required a bit of leap of faith on both sides to work together to get this done.

We took a small sample of the client's data set and created a proof of concept API to prove to them that the technology worked for their business problem. The product people and engineers were satisfied with the accuracy of the results, but I still would not have my first paying client for a while.

I identified the need for Traindex as a result of a long-term consulting job. My client at the time had a need for the product because the previous solution was too expensive and difficult to maintain.

I pitched building it for my client, and when it was clear they didn't have the budget for it, I proposed running it as a service for them.

Nothing happened for over a year and the idea was shelved for a while.