

Ask YC: Feedback on startup: shouteureka.com - scroyston
http://www.shouteureka.com

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murrayh
Don't be disheartened by the lack of response. The product looks extremely
impressive, but I suspect many here don't have a use for it.

I like to give feedback by thinking "if I were king of the zoo, I would do
<this>". In this particular case, I have no idea what I would do, because the
software is not something I need or want to use. So I don't really have any
feedback to give you.

However, I can certainly imagine business folk using this tool and being very
happy with it, particularly if they are already using Google Spreadsheet, so I
think you've got a winner on your hands. Try asking for feedback on the JoS
Business of Software forum (<http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz>). There
are probably some potential customers there as well.

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LogicHoleFlaw
This looks very, very slick. Visualization is a difficult problem and there's
a huge number of Excel / pivot table users who would be better served by your
product. I work extensively with people who take reports and data subsets from
our database software and then manipulate it in excel for visualization rather
than calculation. I think you've got a hit.

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systems
have you seen <http://www.tableausoftware.com>

I see tableau doesnt support google docs as a datasource, but still, your
software seems pretty close to what they offer

the BI (business intelligence) arena have man big players Cognos, MS, SAS ....
so watch out

my suggestion is you might wonna consider supporting more datasource other
than google docs

most data that ppl seriously work on, is usually stored into a db, of course
people do use spreadsheets sometimes as an export format for this data for
adhoc querying but nevertheless you do need to support more datasources

so my suggestions would be, watch tableau software demos, add support to more
datasource, make it open source and good luck .. there are so many way to go
:)

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scroyston
Yes, I've seen tableau, I think they're awesome. However, their client
application is desktop based (though they have recently started doing stuff
online, see Tableau does Web 0.2:
[http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/11/t...](http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/11/tableau_does_we.html)).
I'm primarily targeting this at Excel pivot table/analytic users, who usually
end up emailing 40MB files around to distribute the views they've built.

The idea is with Eureka, you can do it online, and easily distribute what
you've built via a simple URL.

Thanks for the feedback.

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lucasoman
If you're going to put your email address at the bottom of the page, there
should be something more than a parking page at the domain. The first thing I
always do with a new email address is check out the domain in my browser. I
expect to find a site about you, your company, or your project.

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fuelfive
How well does this scale to big data sets (like millions of rows)? My
impression was that companies who get the most value out of this type of
product are very large, and deal with lots of transactions.

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scroyston
It scales fairly well, but my target market is all the Excel analytic users
who end up emailing around their views (and end up with version issues, data
issues, etc.) I have a good deal experience with large enterprise DWs (SAP BW,
Cognos, etc.) It's amazing how often people end up extracting the subset of
information they need, and then do their work in excel. (Usually because of
performance, and IT bottlenecks).

Thanks for the feedback.

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wave
Good job. It looks nice and useful.

suggestion: remove "Email us at info at conceptual-clarity dot com" at the
bottom of your website. It gives your site unprofessional look. Replace it
with a form.

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cstejerean
I don't think spelling out the email address makes the site look
unprofessional. And I'd much rather have an email address than a form for
contacting someone (unless somehow your form provides me a nicer interface for
editing a message than my email client).

The alternative is to render the email address to an image, but that makes it
hard to copy and paste.

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johns
Or the alternative is get a decent spam filter. I have email addresses on
public sites as actual links and with decent spam protection, its not an
issue. Making users decipher your email address or work to send you an email
is a barrier you don't want between yourself and getting feedback.

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cstejerean
you make an excellent point. Most mailing lists I use have public archives and
my email address is all over the web, yet I still feel the urge to obfuscate
it where I can. maybe I should be less paranoid.

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thingsilearned
link to vid: [http://www.shouteureka.com/index.php/product/video-
intro.htm...](http://www.shouteureka.com/index.php/product/video-intro.html)

Wow! Some slick tools. Looks like a really great way to make some easy
visualizations. Seems very slick.

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sharpshoot
this is very very cool. did u apply to yc? you should

