
Ask HN: Validate whether my side-project could be profitable - polygot
Hi everyone. I created a side-project which scratches an extremely niche itch that I have--having to fill out forms with data that I&#x27;ve already entered beforehand. This app extracts your name from your email address (in ~20% of the emails in my dataset, the first, last, or both names were included in the email) and puts them in the form for you. I&#x27;m hoping that this app can also increase conversions by offering a more personal experience to filling out forms, and reduces the number of fields the user has to enter.<p>For example, I signup for a service on a website. The website wants my first name, last name, and email address. Normally, I would have to fill in all of these boxes separately. However, I created an app which takes your email address (for example sarahjane@example.com), and converts it into a first and last name by using a modified sliding-window algorithm to maximize the match (I get around 90% accuracy on some test data with 100&#x27;s of pairs.)<p>You&#x27;d only have to fill in the first email box, and the other boxes (first name and last name)  automatically fill in with Sarah and Jane. It can also handle some complex cases (such as johnimble@example.com and converts it to John and Nimble, as &quot;joh&quot; is unlikely to be a name.)<p>It also properly capitalizes the first and last name based on previous data (e.g. MacDonald, McDonald, deJoan) and correctly places accent marks over your name if needed.<p>The problem: autofill. Autofill is very popular (included in all major browsers), but I can&#x27;t find any hard stats on how many people use it. Of course, this would reduce the usefulness of this app to around zero, since all of the information would already exist.<p>Would you pay for this if you were a website owner? Would you find this useful if someone were to implement this on their website? Perhaps it could customize the login flow after you&#x27;ve entered in your email address (so it&#x27;ll say &quot;Hi Sarah&quot; after automatically extracting your first name.)
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tlb
You should ask your potential users this. Not with an email, but by sitting
down with them and talking through the plan. You should have mockups for the
flow.

If they really like you, they'll say "OK, we're willing to try an A/B test on
a small sample of users. When will it be live?"

The big challenge with any kind of conversion rate improvement tool is that
the difference it makes is only significant across large numbers of users.
That means you have to target large companies, who tend to move slowly. Also,
you have to make it easy to deploy and reliable. You'll probably need to give
it away free to some medium-sized customers in order to get some data on the
change in conversion rate.

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cannedslime
Would I pay for this? No.

Who uses auto-fill? Everyone and their grand mother.

I think it would be kind of a strange idea to auto fill name by E-mail. I
don't even use my name anywhere in any of my E-mails except for my initials
(Good luck getting my name from them).

I can't see why anyone would pay for this as a service... Maybe if it was
free, opensource and client-side only you would find somebody who would use
this... I can see the interresting aspects of making this and I hope you had a
lot of fun and learning doing it.

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polygot
I can see where you're coming from. It is a hyper-niche product so it's hard
to find the right audience. Unfortunately, I can't make it client side because
the database to capitalize names and such would be unreasonably large for a
user to download. However, it was very fun to build!

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mtmail
The website owner would send a user's email address to a third party (your
service) before the user can give consent. For European websites that's tough
with GDPR regulation.

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polygot
Yeah, that would be a problem. I'm thinking it could just send the first part
of the email address (before the @ sign) or instead just license an encrypted
blob to the company which they can run.

