

Ask YC: Review our new product - avibryant
http://cleanupdata.com/#video

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markessien
Good idea, nice implementation, wrong medium. There is no reason this should
be a web application - in a perfect world, I want something like this directly
integrated into my database tool, and not have me open my browser and all
that.

At the same time, considering that the data work may be large, having this on
a server is not too bad of an idea.

What I suggest to you is this - spend a day to make a version of this wrapped
in a web browser in a .exe file. Put a price on the .exe, and sell it directly
to businesses. It's an easy sell, and it's way more convenient to have a
"local" application for a tool like this, than a website.

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tocomment
Any tips on how to make such an exe file?

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markessien
Yes, it takes about 10 minutes using C#. Drag a web browser control to the
.exe, call browserControl.navigate(url), and there, you have a native
application. Use NSIS for the installer, add some license key routine, and
sell your B2B copies for $299 a seat.

~~~
tocomment
Plus you need to do all the stuff to set up a local server, no?

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tomsaffell
I think you're trying to solve a valid problem - i.e. allowing Excel type data
to be manipulated/formatted more easily than Excel (or similar tools)
currently allow. And I think you have a cool product, but...

But I don't think this is a solution to that problem for _most people_ who
have that problem.

My previous job involved _a lot_ of Excel work (so I became fairly good at it)
and it also involved interacting with people (often clients) who used Excel
occasionally and really werent very proficient at using it. So for simplicity,
lets imagine the world of excel users is made up entirely of those two types,
and lets call them A and B respectively.

Types As don't need this service - they can do all the things you showed in
Excel quickly (using keyboard shortcuts etc), using formatting codes (even
though Excel format codes are clunky. eg. SSN format code is: ###-##-####).

Type Bs do need your service. But will they use it? If they use Excel rarely
then is it worth the overhead of knowing how to use a separate service (even a
simple one)? If they can't figure out how to use Excel codes then are they the
_type of person_ who will be interested in exploring new services? (note, this
is about the _type_ of person, not about how simple _your service_ is)

OK, so the world of Excel users is not as simple as the A/B world that I
describe. There is no doubt another type C somewhere between the two who might
value this - but how many of those are there? My gut says 'not many', but I
don't have data. Can you describe to me your archetypal customer?

Making this an Excel plug-in might solve this overhead problem somewhat, but
even then, the latter issue still remains.

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stcredzero
Google should buy this and incorporate it into Google Spreadsheets.

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avibryant
This is largely a technology demo, but we think it's pretty neat. Curious if
anyone here has thoughts about where to take this from here. And yes, using
SSN as the example was probably a poor choice - the example is from
[http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/11/12/manipulating-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/11/12/manipulating-
and-massaging-data-in-excel.aspx) .

Tip of the hat to LAPIS/Potluck/MassEdit from CSAIL for getting us thinking in
this direction.

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psyklic
An undo button would be neat in case I accidentally type-in rather than cut-
paste, then end up losing what I manually deleted. (I didn't read the
instructions, as you can tell!)

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avibryant
You can always copy and paste from the From row, but this probably isn't
obvious.

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mwinters58
The examples are pretty basic and can be done with 4-5 excel functions and no
scripting. Do you guys have any heavier duty examples in the works?

What market are you going after? Soccer moms managing team phonebooks?
Entrepreneurs who have other things to worry about than cleaning up data?

It'd be cool to see see prompts that inspire better uses/structure to your
data. E.g. if a company is managing their sales pipeline (as in the dabble db
8 min demo), analyze that data further than excel easily allows.. track how
the data changes over time to deliver insights that people wouldn't see by
just producing graphs. What common trends exist among sales that actually
close? How long does a sale stay on the table before closing? Does this vary
by salesperson/location?

It makes sense for people who know little about spreadsheets [like my mom who
would manually add dashes to dozens of rows :) ], but they may also be the
type who wouldn't think to seek out a web app to help them clean up the data.

I'm probably a poor sample b/c I spend 5-6 hours/day in excel (finance @ tech
company).

Color-logo feature is sweet!

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tomsaffell
lol - looks like we wrote pretty much the same comment at the same time..

~~~
mwinters58
haha yup. You win on clarity

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cridal
Nice solution to a nagging problem. Has a lot of potential for building data
transformations for reporting type applications. And it does make sense as a
web app if it leads towards the path of "hosted data warehousing" or "data
warehousing as a service", where a client deliberately makes a decision and is
comfortable with entrusting their data to a third party in exchange for easier
path toward some type of reporting/analytical capability. As a matter of fact,
I would think about using/licensing it for a system I'm working on...

However, for those advanced use cases (when it's not a one-off), there is a
need for saving/editing/copying/versioning of transformations. Are you guys
thinking about providing such capabilities?

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sh1mmer
Please founders put intro videos on a CDN. If I didn't have an interest in
reviewing your site as part of this community, I would have left without
trying a thing.

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mattmaroon
No need for a full-on CDN. Even just blip.tv or youtube or something would be
great, plus then you get the occasional read from a searcher there.

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13ren
Business model is the question: (1) Trade sale to spreadsheet makers. (2) Sell
a plug-in to spreadsheet users. (3) Or... let users lead you to a problem that
only you can solve.

I don't think it's patentable[1]. It's a cute idea, kind of obvious; I'm not
sure how well it really generalizes on all the cases that come up in huge
datasets. If you continue along this path, you might come up with some
patentable detail. I think in the US, you can file up to a year after
inventing, so public demos don't destroy novelty (IANAUSAPA).

I think your strength is less the technology than the interface, which is
nicely wrapped up and works[2].

You'll get interesting _user_ leads from this demo. Maybe: _who_ is suffering
from _what_ problem in what specific _context_ who really _needs_ your help.
It's hard to get this market research any other way,

I can't see a really neat or natural way to monetize it - it's just not big
enough. But _the world's imagination is greater than my imagination_. If you
stick at it, I think something will come to you. That would be really cool!

[1] a patent isn't for suing people, but to have something to sell to
Microsoft or Google etc.

[2] of course, you can improve the GUI further once you know what people need
- imperfection is a good thing, because a head start on the competition is
worthless when you run out of track.

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patio11
I like it.

Suggestion for getting more helpful feedback -- the first post on this thread
should have been this:

My name is Avi Bryant and I'm the chief bottle washer at X. We are going to
release a product which performs automatic transformations on data, with an
easy-to-use interface based on building examples.

For example, let's say you have a data entry team which has painstakingly
transcribed 100,000 customer entries over the years. Their phone number field
is an absolute mess -- some customers write 4567890, some write 123 456 7890,
some write (123) 456-7890, etc. You want this to be consistent. You could
either hire a DBA to do some database/regexp wizardry for you, or you could
just write a single example of the proper canonical phone number and our
software will _just work_.

For an example, try playing directly with this test data:
<http://www.example.com/i-go-to-test-data-not-a-video>

We would particularly appreciate feedback about ease of use and ...

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psyklic
He posted the description as a comment which happens to (currently) be below
yours.

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theantidote
Really cool. I've been waiting for an easy to use spreadsheet app that would
let me do this for a while without having to figure out formulas or vbscript.
This looks useful and I'll definitely use it as needed in the future.

What's your business model for this? Are you just doing advertising or are you
also offering a rush fee or maybe charging extra for files over 5MB or
something?

~~~
andrewcatton
It almost certainly won't be advertising, though we'll make it easy to get to
Dabble DB from here, which seems to be a good way of monetizing traffic.
Otherwise, we're pretty open-minded at this point -- I'd be interested in
hearing what people think makes the most sense..

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mikeyur
The business model that makes the most sense to me is to sell the solution to
businesses. Companies that deal with a lot of databases and want an easy
solution to do mass edits. They probably could have their IT guys write some
crazy Excel macro to do a lot of this, but your product is so simple my mom
could use it, which is a great thing.

You could keep it as a web service and/or charge to license it to businesses
and make residual income off support/updates/installation on their network.

~~~
jeroen
It might be interesting to offer repeatability to businesses. Have them create
an account and save their transformations. The challenge might be how to allow
the editing of a transformation in the same simple UI.

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cabalamat
Some random suggestions:

1\. the icons that appear under a column when you're editing it should have
tooltips so you can see what they mean

2\. there should be an undo function

3\. it should be able to figure what you mean if you retype as upper-case
rather than using the buttons. (Perhaps asking the user "do you want to put it
in uppercase"). This is not exactly hard to code, e.g.

    
    
        if (toUpper(originalField) == editedField) assumeUserWantsUppercase();

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davidw
The "Magic/Replace" thing should be clickable. It's confusing not to have an
obvious way to go 'home'. Worse, 'dabbledb' is clickable, and sends me off to
some other site. _I_ know that other site is related, but you might want to
make that more obvious with 'created with dabbledb' or something like that.

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nickb
Cool stuff but I wish I had data that:

1) I could easily paste like that (most of my data is large and too big to be
pasted)

2) Since the data I have has been collected under a Privacy Policy, I can't
upload it to other sites.

But for small jobs of flipping things around, this is a cool app.

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orionlogic
as nickb stated, you should add a Privacy Policy as soon as possible. People
will definitely hesitate do upload their data to an unknown server.

~~~
andrewcatton
agreed.

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rksprst
This is great. Very useful for itunes connect reports since they changed the
way they handle dates (went from 20081128 to 11/28/2008) halfway into this
month. Now, I can easily change it without going through hundreds of rows.

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frazerb
A good demonstration that excel needs some very-easy-to-use macro-ing
capabilities. And perhaps a better business model for this stuff would be to
wrap up this functionality as a $20 set of excel macros. There's a healthy
market for excel macros - it should do well.

I do this kind of manipulation quite a lot, but use my lovely emacs to do it.
snip snip - easy peasy. But I know it's not reasonable to expect regular excel
users to use emacs.

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tocomment
Trying to fix a similar problem of how to explore Excel data, I made this XLS
to MySQL table utility: <http://utilitymill.com/utility/csv_to_create_table>

Feel free to include the code in your tool if you want to offer MySQL as
another download option when users get their results emailed to them.

(I copied your pasting instructions. I hope you don't mind.)

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neilk
I'm not sure this works as a website (the copy/paste/email cycle is probably
too much effort for interactive editing.).

But if it was an Excel add-on of some kind I bet you could sell it. Maybe to
Microsoft. Or, sell the underlying technology to Google Docs. It's got a wow
factor that could inspire upgrades or switching.

Anyway I doubt you hadn't thought of that already. Cool stuff.

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herdrick
This is pretty cool.

The amount of data will nearly always be tiny so you ought to just process and
display it interactively unless the dataset is huge. And speaking of
interactivity, it really needs an 'undo'.

I'd like to read a blog post about the details of how you did it.

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MrFantsyPants
A common problem with data manipulation is normalizing data in different
formats: 5198826788 (519) 822-6238 1 519-454-1234 905 999 1234 +1 905 787-1912
x2234 are all phone numbers. Give me a way to make them all look the same.

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uuilly
I could see our shop using this a lot. Thanks! I may even link to it for our
customers.

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koraybalci
I think it's a very handy application, and nice presentation.

Just curious though, why does it have to be a web app? Why not just a plugin
to my favorite spreadsheet application, or just a small standalone app that I
can use on my PC..

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andrewcatton
It doesn't have to be, and we've talked about going down one or both of these
paths in the future. Doing it web-based is a nice way for us to demo it,
though. Also, since it's possible that we'd want to somehow integrate the tech
with our main app, doing it on the web is a natural first step.

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mikeyur
604/778 numbers, Vancouver Starup? Can it be?

You guys looking for an intern? lol

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avibryant
Yeah we're in Vancouver - drop us an email and we should at least grab a
coffee.

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mikeyur
Sounds good - emailed.

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mattmaroon
Where was this 2 days ago when I was using Excel macros to reformat some data
pasted from the county assessor's office? This would have saved me a good half
hour.

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swdesignguy
This reminds me of ASAP Utilities for Excel (Windows): <http://www.asap-
utilities.com/>

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bemmu
Anyone made one where you could provide some examples and out comes a regexp
that does the changes? :)

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siong1987
No one is going to watch your tutorial video if you tell no one what's about
your website first.

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jgrahamc
I did. It took seconds to realize that this was interesting.

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avibryant
Damn, whole seconds? I gotta work on that.

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jgrahamc
It reminded me quite a lot of ItemField and so I was instantly intrigued to
understand what had been done.

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thomasmallen
I didn't much appreciate the video ambush...looks like a solid product though.
Good luck.

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trevorturk
Looks awesome to me. I'll bookmark it and come back if I have need for it.
Thanks!

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poshj
one big undo button to undo the last operation will be nice

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jasonmcalacanis
ummm.... this is very cool.

