

Show HN: A web-based Excel/Database hybrid - longneckdeer
http://www.ragic.com/intl/en/home

======
andrewcross
It took me a long time to figure out what it actually is. Similar to what
other commenters have mentioned, the three things I'd recommend focusing on
are:

1) Stupidly simple messaging. To do this, talk to the people that are already
using it and ask them how they'd describe it to someone who's not that tech-
savvy. Try and phrase what they say as close to word-for-word as you can.
"Supercharge your database development" meant nothing to me.

2) A very clear list of use cases/examples. I didn't actually get what it was
until I saw the expense report example at the bottom of the page. These
examples need to be called out very quickly.

3) A stupidly simple demo before requiring any input. I'd have the call to
action say "Try a simple demo" and definitely don't require registration
before seeing it. Trying to get me to start a 30-day free trial right away
makes me leave the page before I even try a demo.

~~~
longneckdeer
OK, let's try this for a title.

"Build your database with online spreadsheet"

I've already updated this to the website.

~~~
kinlan
That doesn't quite read correctly. "Build your database with _an_ online
spreadsheet" or "Create your database as easily as a spreadsheet" or "Build
with the power of a database and the ease of a spreadsheet"

Ps. Love the idea for the project, I have been looking out for something like
this for a while.

~~~
longneckdeer
I changed to the first suggestion: "Build your database with an online
spreadsheet"

We try to make the sentences as short as possible.

------
stuffihavemade
I strongly recommend you offer a demo without needing to sign up. I was
intrigued enough to take a look, but not enough to go through a sign up
process.

~~~
longneckdeer
We had a sandbox account log in at the registration page, but after some
testing we found that it made a lot of people who would have signed up just go
to the sandbox instead.

The original page is here: <http://www.ragic.com/intl/en/registerSandbox>

For people who would like to use the sandbox instead.

~~~
sidmalanado
You could generate a unique key for each visitor as a sandbox user and then
give the prompt to convert to a full account once the user has started
interacting with the site. Be sure to make it non-intrusive though.

See how they have done it on <https://hollyapp.com/>

It took me a while to find that link again, but I thought it was worth it as
an example.

Good luck.

------
obilgic
Great idea, I have been actually thinking about something like this for a long
time.

Great product, but weak marketing. It is targeted for non-technical small
businesses, but homepage and everything looks complicated, and makes less
sense for these people. There should be a one sentence which clearly explains
what the product is meant to do. Customers are more interested in the end
result, show them some examples of what they can do with this product.
Unfortunately , this looks like a product for developers by developers.

------
jimmytucson
Here's the discussion from the last time he submitted this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959486>

Would be interested to hear how the product has evolved since then. Have they
incorporated any of the feedback they received the first time around?

~~~
longneckdeer
Yes, we've worked on A LOT of items from the last submission.

The biggest problem was that it's not really easy for people to get started on
how to build applications with Ragic. People don't like to read documents, so
we added an "Interactive Tutorial".

The interactive tutorial takes new users step by step to build a simple
application on Ragic, pretty much like how you do it on a flash game or online
game. If you click through the tutorial, you will have built a simple Ragic
application. We really hope that this can help our users get the hang of it.

~~~
chj
I love the idea. the interactive guide is horrible. far from simple. Sorry for
being blunt.

~~~
longneckdeer
Hi, did you run into some problems in the tutorial? Or because the steps of
the tutorial is too complex?

~~~
DeepDuh
Trying to answer here for him: I ran into troubles with the third field added
- the demo didn't react anymore, I couldn't type in the field name. Also I
agree that it should be a bit less restrictive. For example it only accepts
the step when I actually type in "Customer". I'd prefer arrows and a fixed
help box instead of the overlays - as it is at one time had to look around
where it wants me to go next.

A few more things:

\- It was hard for me to get into design mode again after having tried the
form view. I'd make that more prominent. Right now I think it's only in the
context menu for the entities, not for the whole db however.

\- I see forms, but do you have (dynamic) list views as well? How do I format
/ generate them?

\- Try to get rid of all the "leave this page" browser warnings.

\- paragraph text fields behave very odd in Chrome (graphical issues after
resizing, I think it also cut some pasted text). I also think rich text
capability might be critical there, but I can understand that you wanted to
avoid that beast at first.

In general I like the approach - I think it's a very valid business idea to
try to give benefits to all those businesses with Excel 'workflow
applications'. The ability to do multiuser editing might be a big enough
benefit alone to get some customers - maybe you could accentuate more on that.
IMO however the UX from the developer end needs a lot of streamlining.

~~~
longneckdeer
Hi,

1\. What browser/OS version are you using? I would like to reproduce this
issue.

2\. It's in the context menu you mentioned, and in the upper right corner of
the form. We should find some way to make it more prominent.

3\. The dynamic list views are generated automatically. When you finish
designing a form, just click "<< Back Listing" and it will take you to the
listing page.

4\. We added the "leave this page" warning because a lot of users have
mentioned that they accidentally click on the exit button.

5\. There's some special feature that we added to the copy and paste function
that might confuse new users. I think we need to disable it by default. The
feature is mean to match the field names from the source with the field names
in the Ragic form, and put values from the source to their corresponding
fields.

Really appreciate the feedback, please let me know if there's any other
advices. I can be contacted at jeff at ragic dot com

~~~
DeepDuh
1) OSX 10.8.x, latest Chrome (omw right now, can't check)

4) How about a save-by-default stance? is versioning and rollback hard to
implement on your stack? (those two characteristics should be used together
IMO) Alternatively I'd just implement a message that asks whether to save,
forget changes or cancel.

------
EwanToo
A couple of thoughts:

Is Javascript really the language to use when you're seemingly trying to talk
to non-developers - either small business owners or business analysts at
larger companies?

I can see lots of uses for Ragic, but I don't know any business analyst types
who'll just knock out some Javascript code to do a function, when they're
fairly happy to use Visual Basic for Applications.

Finally, your samples all seem relatively small, which is understandable, but
you don't mention how large a data set you can cope with - a lot of Excel
based apps now seem to have 100,000s of rows of data (which is why they end up
so slow).

------
hayksaakian
It seems like this would be most useful for non-developers, but the use cases
(I'm assuming that's what 'regic solutions' are), sit obscured at the bottom
of the page.

Look at how Twilio markets their paas to non devs.

~~~
longneckdeer
Great suggestion. I think Twilio is a great role model for development tools.
We'll try to learn a thing or two from it.

------
sidcool
I think I don't want a registration process before trying the demo. That's the
whole meaning of demo!!!

Not trying to take away anything from the app. It might be wonderful, I didn't
try it because of the unnecessary registration.

------
EastCoastLA
DabbleDB again. Don't break my heart.

~~~
smiler
Exactly. Before a company invests in moving all their processes into a system
like this, there needs to be some kind of legal statement that says 'should we
ever get acquired / close down, we'll release the code to paying customers'.

------
p0wl
1\. works like excel 2\. looks like excel 3\. has reports -> everything basic
"business" data application needs

seems like you will swim in money in a few months if you reach the right
target market...

------
polskibus
The app seems pretty slow, it cannot be perceptibly slower than Excel for this
project to kick off. You can find lots of low hanging fruits by running the
Chrome audits.

------
bromang
I think you can also charge a lot more than you currently do

------
abrkn
I am unable to receive a demo key at derp@derp.derp at this time. Please re-
think your demo process.

------
razfar
Google Fusion Table is very similar to this, however, their API documentation
is not very good in my opinion. I think a product like this is very useful if
you want to give a client access to their database in the form of a
spreadsheet.

------
Johnyma22
Also see <http://ethercalc.com>

------
eps
Let me just compliment the design of your website, with design being not just
the visuals, but the structure, presentation and the content as well. It is
clean, simple (but not simplistic) and comes across as a frontend of a company
with a substance. Not to technical, not too fluffy, good balance. I would
however expand the About section to add some specifics - where and whos.

------
rb2k_
The speaker in the intro video doesn't seem to be a native english speaker.

There are some grammar mistakes and you can hear mouse clicking when he
switches slides.

The information is there, but I think it needs a bit more polish in terms of
phrasing ("Special need is nothing special.") and a proper speaker.

------
clark-kent
It would be great if the software was open source, you can also still run a
SAAS based on it. I wouldn't want to depend on a closed source Database for my
data. And I say this because I like the Excel/Database hyrid idea.

------
bromang
you should hire a native english speaker to write your marketing copy

~~~
longneckdeer
We hired a native English speaker to edit most of our copies.

~~~
bromang
Then you should not hire them again! The quality is very poor. There are many
grammatical mistakes and the style is quite clunky. It makes your company seem
a lot less professional.

