(I'm the author)

That is AWESOME! Nice work!

If I can offer a button nitpick - I suggest "Try it out for free!" in big text, and "Version 1.5.248.1, 2016-04-26" in small text. Maybe as simple as wrapping the version info in a <small> tag.

Thanks a lot, I'm pretty proud of it!:) That's a good point, the version isn't really the important part, will do.

Wow I just checked and you already updated - fast work!

Also this is a really nice piece of work, great job

On HN stories are treated as dupes if they have had significant attention in about the last year, which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022 did. If there's something significantly different, it would be best to post specifically about that.

Hi Dang. That's true, it's been less than a year:( It was a hobby project back then and I've switched to full time now. Trying to launch it properly now. I've done serious work in the meantime and lowered the price, and I think it's worth another go. Rules are rules though. Should I remove it?

Ok, we restored the post and put the price back in the title. Good luck.

Also, I wasn't the one posting it back then. I had posted it on reddit, and someone from there crossposted it to hn. Does that count?

That person was me, sorry!

Looks like it is Windows only. Is it likely that there will be a Mac version in the nearish future?

Unfortunately no. The way it integrates into Excel is only available in Excel for Windows. Excel for Mac just doesn't have many ways you can talk to it (that I'm aware of).

super bummer! I clicked on purchased with paypal and then decided to check and make sure if there was mac option or not. It's too bad there is not. I was ready to buy. That said, great work!

Dude. You seriously need to market an enterprise edition of this (offer support or something). It's a great idea with exceptional execution. At least half the companies I work with (oil & gas companies—they are addicted to Excel like it's crack or something) would buy this for quite a bit if it were marketed at them.

Thanks! Something like a site wide license? Any suggestions on a price point for this? I'm decent at development, but I'm a complete noob at marketing and business.

Site-wide or per-seat, I'm not really sure which would be better. For the companies I work with, which are by-and-large pretty small, I think a per-seat license would be better (several of them only have 2-3 production analysts). You could do ~$600/head including support+updates for a year (might want to cap hours of support, however) pretty easily I think.

I'm not any better at marketing, I just know a lot of people that would use this if it were pitched at them correctly. Unfortunately, most of sales involving enterprisey companies is in the pitch and not actually in the product....

Alternatively you could just get bought by Microsoft like that other guy mentioned.

Best of luck!

Yes, good idea. Put "call" in for the price for now and be prepared to negotiate. All the big companies think they're special and will want a "great deal." You can give all of them a great deal and at the same time find out what the market is willing to pay while not underselling.

Just a thought, you may want to think about changing the name if you're going after enterprise. Feels a bit amateurish/not serious.

That's what I thought at first too, but I suspect it's too late and most companies won't care much. Key is to have an enterprise edition with a support agreement and a higher price (as identified elsewhere in this thread).

Absolutely true. Having trouble coming up with a name. Open to ideas. Currently I'm thinking "Tabularity", I've bought the domain. Not 100% set on it, but I'm definitely set on changing the name.

SQExcel? The domain sqexcel.com is available.

The name is playful and plays on collective conscious of "thingamabob". I think the name is clever and succinct.

Nice to hear definitely. That's the vibe I was going for, but it feels a bit clumsy. Maybe I should have use QueryThingie instead:)

Also consider a license like JetBrains old "personal purchase for professional use". I've carried Resharper around with me from employer to employer as my own "hammer" resulting in multiple new enterprise licenses when other people see me use it. I imagine this is exactly that kind of software. Scratching an itch the business doesn't yet realize is there.

I've been around the block in corporate. Here's a guidebook (sorry I can't spend more than 15 minutes on this)

1: Get insurance for your product. It will run really cheap for something low-risk like this. (Our firm pays less than 10 grand a year for General Liability, All-risk, and Professional Liability up to 10MM, which is more than good enough for nearly every company out there.)

2: Like Patrick said, the second you throw "HIPAA" compliance up there you have the ability to charge 10 (IME, more realistically, 25x -- but your expenditures increase as a result of that (incurred labor costs of additional support, etc)). At your 20 dollar price-point, you're undervaluing yourself by literally 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. Find an industry (say, that dude who mentioned oil, find out what regulatory institutions dominate), get vendor certified and insured and you're looking at Oracle-esque money + 30% maintenance fees per year + support fees + modification fees.

Corporate sales is all about the steak and strippers (and nepotism) but it's wildly lucrative, even now when oil is trading at like 40/bbl due to SA flooding the hell out of the market. To put it in perspective, Parker hydraulic gear commands a 3 or 4x premium over other brands of nearly-comparable quality. It's a lot like medicine or finance, huge markups but huge barriers to entry re: regulatory certs/risks. I wouldn't sell a site license for the product itself (per actual site, not per corporation, that midtown Manhattan office is billed separately from the LA office) for less than low 6 figures. (Sales cycles are long and expensive, your net on that will probably be 30%, which is why Oracle is always pushing for you to go buy that RAC license, it's only 30% more!)

3: Along the veins of having industry compliance, obviously, offer support. Lets say you want to target the mid-market, Bob the engineer won't be able to do buy the software until his manager sees a support contract available. You're basically not going to maximize revenue targetting this demographic. Supports a must though. (Joel Spolsky factioned software sales off into the "under 1k, petty cash" and "above 100k, gotta take it to the board". Supports a must for either one, at 400 a seat or 400/k/year/seat) I'd target niche oil + board approval market with a relatively long sales cycle (especially if that other HN'er who mentioned oil can get you in for a round of golf with the CIO and give him the 30% rip or whatever's standard now in enterprise sales).

4: Just a note, I take things apart for fun and your product isn't well protected. I'm sure you know that since you left little fun notes around your code base (ps. I do snoop around, and I like you also! haha).

Just another why targeting the "Oracle" demographic (where they literally give copies away with no license keys or anything to everyone on their website), and corporations comply with the fee policies because it's wiser to pay the fees now than have the BSA audit come in and have a 5x fine imposed.

---

I made a really long post about here[1] re: medical hardware (another tightly regulated industry with high margins and a sales team that makes or breaks) -- the relevant information is in the last few paragraphs.

There are also .NET licensing components if you make the (imo unwise) decision of targeting the mid-market, which uses USB keys + a network server to limit your trial functionality, but as I'm sure you know, the second those bits hit the hard-disk, someone like me is going to take Olly to it and have it smashed into pieces within a few hours to a few days. Those keys just keep the honest honest (i.e. a company might forget that their trial ran out, or the note to authorize the purchase didn't make it down to their AR/AP dept, etc).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543670

Haha, glad I didn't write that class for nothing:)

Anyway... wow that's some comment! It's a lot of info to unpack! Would love to be able to hit you up with a question or two later if possible, but this gives me a sh*tload of stuff to research, you have my thanks!

I'm a marketer :-) Also, I have purchased a non-trivial amount of BI, Analytics, and Marketing software at total contract values as high as $X00K.

I suggest that you offer at least two tiers (personal/education and corporate). You can keep the personal tier low to drive adoption as part of your growth strategy and price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points. If it will increase productivity, just buy it.

Lastly, consider an enterprise or site option for users with more than X licenses.

price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points

Come work for government, then despair.

I used to work for a Japanese multinational making networking gear. Excel was part of the mandated SOE, and was used for everything (even unit testing frameworks in VBscript), so this would be a no brainer for their environment. The engineers would have difficulty getting this purchase through as it is too cheap for the enterprise version... In the accountant brain, cheap == a toy for a number of companies.

I think the logic is like "they can't possibly support this product at this price point, we would rather depend on something which may be inferior but well-supported".

Or not. Selling to enterprise is very different from selling to individuals. If you enjoy networking and the process of selling, go for enterprise sales.

If you prefer to just work on your project, you can make a decent amount of money from selling to individuals. I make around 10k a month from an SQL client app that is targeted at web developers, and I spend very little effort on sales.

I'm totally amazed by this (10k/month from postico, mac app only).

What _is_ your selling point for postico? I'm genuinely curious since there are other SQL client apps out there that either: 1) free or 2) F/OSS or 3) cross-platforms. Granted they may not look as "beautiful" as yours but gosh... they work out of the box...

Man I need to do more market research....

When you use an app professionally, it doesn't matter if it is free or if it costs $40. If it saves you one hour of work, it's worth the price.

It also doesn't matter if the app is cross-platform. Most people use only a single platform, and it turns out that Macs are very popular among my target audience (web developers & data analysts).

It also doesn't need to support a lot of features. I focussed on features that are important for web developers and data analysts, and I made sure they work really well. Yeah, pgAdmin has more admin features, but my users don't care about that.

I discovered most of what I know of the market as I went along, by talking to customers. Nobody bought the early versions of my app; it took three years of iterating on customer feedback to get to 10k a month.

Talking to (potential) customers is really important. In the beginning, I thought that DB admins would be my target audience. But from talking to people at pgConf, I discovered that most PostgreSQL admins don't care about GUIs, but web developers do. So that's where I put my focus.

I think the most important choice I made in the beginning was to focus on PostgreSQL rather than MySQL. The latter might be 10x as popular, but PostgrSQL is gaining popularity and growing, and there's lots of interest in PostgreSQL -- perfect conditions for starting a business.

Thank you for this great advise!

I guess I hang out with the wrong circle ;). Most developers around me typically would just download something that is free (if it's cross-platform it gets +1 added-value since often we switch between Windows and Ubuntu). Case and Point: Eclipse vs IntelliJ. I bought IntelliJ during the Doomsday discount (75% discount) but people around me still using Eclipse until some event where they decided to move to the "free" (community) version of IntelliJ. I haven't gone back to Eclipse after that...

I'm just amazed with your story. I need to "get out" more and talk to more people... seriously...

This is amazing. Microsoft is going to buy you for a TON of cash. I said it first! (?)

If it happens, I will find you and make sure you get TONS of beer delivered to your doorstep:)

Shit, can I opt in to this as well?! On topic: downloading

I am so down for this. I'm also down to grab a beer at any point on your journey. You should be really proud of what you've built.

I'm recommending this to all my friends in the office not only because it's a great idea (playing with the free trial now), but because you have an awesome attitude!

This ought to be a part of Excel. Microsoft, bring out your wallet for this fine gentleman!

Very very well done! I have no use for this right now but I'm buying it anyway because you deserve the support. Congrats on launching!

This is quite impressive! Congratulations! Its cool stuff such as this that makes the life of a lot of people easier. Good work!

Am I misunderstood somewhere? Did you provide a sql interface to excel? are you asking a DBA to use excel instead of a real database?

For me, it seemed to be more interesting to provide an excel interface to database.

Looks great, but your pricing sucks. $19, seriously? Multiply that 10-20-50 fold.

I would not say 10 fold, but $99 has ring to it ;)

Well, $99 seems fair to me as well:) The reason for the low price now is I need the users and word of mouth. I'm well aware it's worth a whole lot more than $19, but right now I just don't know how to get it in front of potential customers other than by keeping a low price for a month or two.

http://fcell.io/

They have a product like yours but will do C#/F#/VB instead of SQL (in your case). Their pricing is pretty heavy ;).

I like your comment:) That's the home version of it, the commercial is $149/year per machine. Basically I need traction, and a community of users, so I'm aiming for it being affordable for people to use at home. I'm hoping this will transfer into people wanting to use it in their companies which is where I charge money. As I mentioned before, I'm a complete noob in business and marketing so I might be going about this very wrong. In any case, I'm very open to suggestions.

Get rid of the "home" version. Your market is business. Up your prices 2-3 fold per license. Rename it.

P.S. And quit claiming you're a noob. You're in business now. So get to reading on positioning your product and doing some direct outreach.

Just an FYI...Exact software offer a similar tool like this to enable power users to query their data. It's not fully loaded as this so you might be up for grabs if the price is right. Why not connect with them after you review your value.

Any idea what the tool is called? Can't seem to find it on their website

If you support the .NET Framework Data Provider for OLEDB, it's worth mentioning. That opens up a bunch of additional data sources for folks, potentially including Active Directory, and suddenly you're (maybe) getting the attention of enterprise IT folks as well as the business side.

Are you open to re-selling? Maybe white label it? If you don't want to talk about it publicly please email me (check profile). :)

Would have to think about it, I think I'd say yes to re-selling, not sure about white labeling though, to be successful with it I need to build the brand. Too late here to say anything more, barely awake at the moment:)

So... pivot tables?

It's not every day that you come across such rave comments about a "Show HN" kind of thing. Congratulations to the dev.

I'm not familiar with enterprise / Excel requirements & use cases. Could someone explain why is this such a great product [1]. I wrongly assumed that excel champs won't be comfortable dealing with SQL because they are either non-engineers or have been away from programming for way too long.

[1] No offense to the author, I'd love to understand what the enthusiasm is all about.

Can I use window functions like partition by?

This is an awesome product, but: the name and price-point will not encourage customers to take the product seriously.

For a while I've been thinking about how hard it is to wean corporate analysts off Excel (it's their frame of reference) and on to something more 'Enterprise-y', and the solution is to go the other way and scale Excel instead.

This product is an excellent start at that.

Little bit of advice:

1) Obfuscate your deliverables

2) Don't store the Licensing information in plain-text in a XML file; it's trivial to create a generator to generate a valid license for the current product. Make sure to use a public/private key you sign it and check it, not giving the client the information to create a valid license if they know the CPU Id, Hdd s/n's and Nic Mac Adresses.

Other than that: well done, looks great and as others have said: market it for enterprises and buy a boat :)

Thanks!

1 - much debate about this, it's certainly safer to do so

2 - if you take a look at the license again you'll notice the digital signature field, to make a generator you would need my private key:P

Boat is good, I like boat. :)

OK, good; I just did a quick decompile and skip through the code to see; glad you have it covered :)

It's cool to see you stuck with it; looking at your history, it really is a shame it hadn't got the attention it deserved earlier on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic