
Ask HN: Review My Startup - Hypernumbers The Team Spreadsheet - gordonguthrie
Please review my startup:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypernumbers.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypernumbers.com</a><p>We finally have a ‘quantum of utility’ - a product like a spreadsheet but better at doing some things...<p>I would love to get your thoughts and opinions on what a native-web spreadsheet should be like - and in which ways hypernumbers meets (or fails to meet) your expectations.<p>BACK STORY<p>When I started writing this submission I googled for Paul Graham’s &#x27;Startup Ideas We&#x27;d Like to Fund&#x27; No 22 - web spreadsheet (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycombinator.com&#x2F;ideas.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycombinator.com&#x2F;ideas.html</a>) from 2008 – so I could point out we started full time work on it in 2007. Through the miracle of Google I found this article of Paul’s from 2005 (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;ideas.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;ideas.html</a>) which predates us. I have no idea if I read that article at the time :(<p>That got me thinking. Reading Paul’s articles today it all seems so simple and obvious, but it took 6 years for me to come to think that thought – and it has taken another 4 years to execute it.<p>In Web 1.0, I was Chief Technical Architect at if.com – a bank on the internet. There was an anti-pattern around called ‘how come it takes me a day to do this on a spreadsheet, but it takes 10 developers 4 months in Java?’ to which the answer was just a shrug. We had a pile of innovative product designs prototyped in Excel a mile high which we actually just could not implement.<p>One day I stumbled across the Functional Programming FAQ which used spreadsheets as an example of a Functional Language: Eureka! We left to start our own bank with an offer engine written in an (initially undecided - later Erlang) Functional Language on the 4th September 2001 – turned out not so good...<p>‘spreadsheetieness of Erlang’ to ‘spreadsheet in Erlang’ took another 5 years...<p>3 hours sleep, filthy hangover, rural airport in Sweden, yet another failed (Erlang) start-up, depressed, I knocked up the first prototype of hypernumbers in sort of migranetic&#x2F;hungover ecstasy of coding just to cheer myself up.<p>Another 4 years later – here we are...
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rriepe
I don't like the name. It sounds too technical. How about "Insteadsheet"?
Because that's really what you are, right?

Edit: Some elaboration. I'm a branding guy, and this site has a branding
problem.

Hypernumbers doesn't really describe the product.

There's two elephants in the room that the site doesn't even address: Excel
and Google Docs. A name like Insteadsheet addresses that all by itself. It
becomes the fun, easy alternative.

The complaint of "too technical" gets downvotes here on HN, but I feel like
that isn't the market they're after.

~~~
revorad
To be honest, Insteadsheet sounds a lot worse than Hypernumbers.

Names don't have to describe products. It's funny you talk about Excel - the
word Excel itself does not describe spreadsheets!

Is a negative of another product really the best way to go about branding? I
can't think of a single good example.

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rriepe
You're right. I really meant to say that Hypernumbers implies something else
(an app dedicated to advanced math, perhaps?), not that it isn't descriptive.

Insteadsheet would indeed be a ballsy name, incorporating the "We're the anti-
Excel/Google Spreadsheets" feel right into the name. LessEverything is closest
to the approach that I can think of.

I stand behind it. And I doubly stand behind not being the guy who just says
"The name sucks!" without offering any alternatives.

~~~
revorad
The more I think of it, the more I like the name Hypernumbers. It has the word
hyper in it - it's exciting!

And the acronym is HN. A tribute to Hacker News, perhaps?

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jonpaul
I came to the web page and looked around a bit. I was asking myself what
problem does this solve that Excel or Google Spreadsheet doesn't solve? If I
was just someone casually browsing I think I would have left your page then. I
then watched the video. The typing overlay is annoying.

I'm still not clear what problem it solves that those other solutions don't...
I mean, I get what you're trying to convey by your initial message in the
video, but still. So it's a wiki spreadsheet? Is that the value proposition?
If so, you need to communicate that better.

I also don't like the landing page. It looks a bit unprofessional.

~~~
slantyyz
I'll answer the part about Excel. A lot of company finance depts shuffle Excel
files back and forth via e-mail and shares, and merging out-of-sync data
becomes an issue. You would be surprised how many finance departments of large
companies still do this in a Mickey Mouse fashion.

There are enterprise products that address this, like Cognos Planning,
Hyperion (not sure of the specific product name), Cognos TM1, Jedox Palo. But
they are expensive (5 figures and up) for licensing and expensive for
customization (>150/h consultants). Not so expensive that you wouldn't get ROI
from the wasted person-hours, but the sticker shock is there, and in the case
of the Cognos products, the usability leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm not sure that Hypernumbers can match the functionality of the enterprise
products I mention above (today at least), but for the modest to light use
cases, it seems to be satisfactory.

~~~
gtani
There's another product that I've been meaning to look at, RsolverOne, mostly
cause i learned a lot from the guy's python blog:

<http://resolversystems.com/>

[http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2009_11_21...](http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2009_11_21.shtml)

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trickjarrett
That intro video is about 30 seconds too long, and it needs a voice over
rather than the annoying typing sound.

~~~
gordonguthrie
My voice tests as 'bloody awful' and the video needs to work in the office
with the sound off...

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TheFro
You can get someone fairly professional to do a voice over here:
<http://voice123.com/>

I've used the service before and the quality of people I got was very good.
For a 30s clip you can get someone pretty good for about $100-$200

~~~
gordonguthrie
Cheers, I'll check it out.

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nickseedorf
The demo is pretty clunky w/ all the views in separate frames, and I'd prefer
a full working demo w/o entering an email address. It doesn't concisely make
clear what it is & how it's different from other offerings, like others
mentioned. A point-by-point comparison vs Google Docs might help. Or
emphasizing that the _direction_ you're taking it and the way you're asking
for user feedback is just completely different from the way Google would ever
do things. Hard to do w/o negative messaging but currently doesn't leave one
feeling confident that it's a great idea to start using it as a collaboration
tool on a serious project.

~~~
gordonguthrie
You can click out of the frames to a full working demo without an email.

I am optimizing for communication with potential users not conversion to
paying customers at this point in time.

All the testing we have done shows that people only 'get' it when they see the
three views together.

The direction that we are going in is a spreadsheet that supports team
collaboration - is that too vague or is it not coming across clearly enough?

~~~
benvanderbeek
A definition of "team collaboration" would be good. Again, Google Docs has
team collaboration, but I assume you mean something more, or more specific.
E.g. does it have per-cell ownership? Like person A controls their numbers in
column A, and person B controls their numbers in column B, etc. Are
permissions more granular? Is access easier, by obscure URL instead of
username/password? What sets it apart from other team collaboration
spreadsheet offerings?

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gordonguthrie
Its 2 part permissions: * pages * views

So I can see: * a page as spreadsheet view (change everything) * a page as a
wiki page view (only change cells that have been wikied) * a page as a webpage
view (change nothing)

Toggling between them is one-click.

Access is by e-mail sign-up.

~~~
benvanderbeek
"only change cells that have been wikied" - this seems like a core strength,
is "wiki" the most intuitive way to refer to cell-level permissions? I would
not have concluded this meaning from the work wiki.

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ceecph
Gordon - really like the sound of this. Obviously the challenge is of
overcoming Googles dominance of the online spreadsheet. However having a
spreadsheet that you can link cells from other spreadsheets, sounds like it
adds real value, and the ability to publish in more of a wiki or actual web
page is really appealing.

Good luck and look forward to hearing some reviews of it over the next few
months.

Colin

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slantyyz
Google dominates with the tech-minded public and in-the-know businesses.
Having said that, and being in a related business that sells to finance
departments, I can tell you that a lot of the companies in the market for this
type of product haven't heard of Google Spreadsheets (yes, really).

Now the challenge for Hypernumbers is going to be getting awareness. A lot of
the target market isn't going to actively look for a product like this, so you
have to find ways of getting your name out there, i.e., buying mailing lists
and even doing snail mail campaigns. It's an uphill battle, but _if they can
tell the right story to their prospective customers_ , it can be an easy sell.

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snsr
Hierarchical nesting of spreadsheets mirrored in the URL seems like a very
useful model; kind of blew my mind. Is nesting a common capability of Excel,
etc?

Some other thoughts:

\- The always-published (to web) functionality could replace 80% of Excel use
where I work.

\- I do feel the application could use a designer's touch, especially with
regard to typography in the header and dialog boxes. Things feel a bit
disjointed.

\- I wasn't able to import an .xls via: Site > My Pages > Import To >

\- Does .hn have the ability to work with comma or tab delimited formats?

Thanks for sharing; I look forward to seeing where this goes .

~~~
gordonguthrie
Excel and Google Docs are both non-heirarchical...

I'm pleased to see that 80% of your Excel use could be done with publish to
web - I would like to set up a call with you to understand that comment better
if that's OK.

If will look in the error logs to see if I can find out what happend with file
upload.

We do have a csv file importer - I am kinda thinking of having it auto-upload
from a dropbox folder so that you can easy-publish data - but we are also
totally REST based so (with the right permissions) you can post to cells or
appending rows.

Anyway get in touch and we can have a longer discussion.

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arethuza
What this reminds me of more than anything else is a cheap-n-cheerful version
of Oracle Hyperion - no bad thing as Hyperion is the market leading financial
consolidation system.

However, finance users are pretty much wedded to Excel (Hyperion's SmartView
interface for Excel is pretty slick) - what kind of integration do you have
with Excel?

I've been kind of toying with the idea of building a SaaS OLAP database with
an Excel plugin - but that is project #2 at the moment.

NB I'm in Edinburgh as well and saw you present at the Techcrunch event...

~~~
slantyyz
Yeah, the first thing I thought about reading the summary was hmm, this could
be a nice low-end alternative to Cognos TM1 or Jedox Palo. It lacks the
analytics, but for a good number of use cases, that's actually fine.

~~~
gordonguthrie
Slanytyyz - tell me more... Can we arrange a 15 minute call sometime? + 44
7776 251669

~~~
slantyyz
Check out <http://www.jedox.com/en/home/overview.html>

You can download a free copy and install it on a server to see what I mean.

Jedox is an open source alternative to TM1 - they run on the support service
model. Both Jedox and TM1 do in-memory cubes (think pivottables on steroids on
even more steroids) that let you dice and slice large volumes of data very
quickly. For a lot of co's, that's overkill, but a nice-to-have.

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revorad
It took me a while to find but the real value proposition is presented on this
page - <http://hypernumbers.com/more/>

~~~
equark
I didn't even see this page. I just played with demo and thought: nice start,
but it'll be tough to beat officelive, google apps, or Zoho. You need to
strongly differentiate between these solutions. This page actually does a good
job but it should be front and center.

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dzlobin
I'm always using google spreadsheets for this sort of rudimentary team
accounting so I was interested to check out the video.

To be entirely honest, I'm not sure what you're offering that google
spreadsheets isn't.

EDIT: I didn't even post that first part of my comment yet, but that is how
long it took me to find your demo.

Honestly, this is very nicely executed. _Please_ make the demo VISIBLE.
Neither the video not the copy on the landing page showed me how this actually
works.

~~~
gordonguthrie
The big orange button isn't visible enough? Is it the text 'Free Trial' that
is the problem?

~~~
cjbos
I think it's the small tiny gray "demo" button thats the problem, it should be
just as big as the orange button imo.

~~~
gordonguthrie
If we were optimising for conversion/sales there wouldn't be a signup with
e-mail button at all - it would be a big instant demo button.

At the moment I am optimising for conversation - and I need an email to
trigger that.

So now I would rather have 10 people sign up that I can talk to and 90 walk
away because of the email than 100 anonymous sign-ups.

So the little demo button is just a little add-on...

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maukdaddy
I like this. Could fill an interesting niche between emailing spreadsheets
around and a full-blown SAP system!

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fjabre
Ok. I like this idea but here's my issue: How is this different from Google
Docs spreadsheets?

It doesn't look like you mention it on the landing page and Google Docs is
pretty well known at this point. As a consumer I'd like to know how it's
different and why I should use your spreadsheet instead of theirs.

~~~
revorad
I guess I see where you are coming from. But at least on HN, I expect people
to be a bit more imaginative.

How is this different from Google Docs? I can't speak for the creator but
here's what I can think of:

It's created by a clearly passionate founder who's directly reachable for
feedback and support. The guy's put up his cell phone number!

Hypernumbers has this strange-seeming idea of converting a spreadsheet into a
wiki/webpage/table. That's pretty interesting and could be very useful.

Even a quick look through the app suggests there are a lot of features. Now I
know it's fashionable to say features don't sell software, but hey this is an
Excel competitor. Features rule.

It costs money, which suggests it's a serious effort, not another big-Co
project which can be shelved if it doesn't get enough eyeballs.

~~~
fjabre
Right, because the best way to sell your product is to get defensive when
potential customers ask how your offering is different from a competitor. ;)

~~~
gordonguthrie
Sorry I haven't got defensive about my product anywhere (I don't think so).

~~~
revorad
Sorry it was me who got defensive on your behalf!

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pclark
Nice one. I can imagine this being huge. But please work on the UI and UX.

~~~
gordonguthrie
Which bit of the UI/UX...

The spreadsheet bit is all kinda - make it like Excel/Google docs as much as
you can...

The main frontpage is because Hypernumbers self-hosts on Hypernumbers. Laying
out a product page inside a spreadsheet is a bit of challenge as you can
imagine :)

We are still figuring out how to make that part of it easier. Its more of a
meta-problem than just polish it up...

~~~
pclark
erm, pretty much everywhere. one example - you have a "free trial" button, but
below that a required form field, swap them over, surely?

the free demo button doesn't work - goes to a page not found or sits there
saying "building your site"

i feel like this "Making it easier to collect, collate and consolidate data
and figures." is a really really poor description of what your product is.
have you tested that it resonates?

i don't seem to be able to drag charts to move them, if i click the graph once
it shows me formula, i click away to change view and it selects whichever cell
i clicked in, i press cmd + z to undo and nothing happens.

everything feels like a lot of work, for example all the buttons need much
much faster tool tips. why when i hover over one doesn't it tell me what that
button is in the silver bar to the right?

why are some things formula and others lightbox ui controls (eg: add a link)
feels like consistency for that stuff is ++

Site > Settings > Pages is honestly terrifying. draw some inspiration from
Numbers.app? :)

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gordonguthrie
The graphs aren't like Excel - we create graphs in cells (or merged cells)
with a function like =graph(rows, cols, options) - so you can't drag them...

~~~
revorad
That's an interesting way to do it. Although the ability to move graphs around
in Excel seems useful, I do it mostly to get the graph out of the way. How
about having a cell/column on the side dedicated to graphs so that you can
still use your =graph() implementation but it doesn't obstruct the spreadsheet
view? You could even have a toggle button to hide it.

~~~
gordonguthrie
The reason for sticking to the =function(params) approach is it makes it easy
to build things like =twitter.button("hypernumbers") <\-- actual function and
=google.maps(points) and other cool inline stuff - which then seamlessly
clicks over to webpages/forms.

You do want to be able to create dynamic webpages and putting graphs out on
separate tab/page/things is a bit tricky because it all gets tangled up in
permissions. You can always put them on their own page..

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albertsun
Those typewriter noises in the video are incredibly annoying.

~~~
gordonguthrie
albertsun - this is valid feedback I have upvoted you

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fbcocq
I don't know if there's a consensus on using ellipsis in today's communication
but it really, really annoys me.

~~~
gordonguthrie
Where about?

~~~
fbcocq
Your post and the intro video on the page, e.g. "Hypernumbers : the Team
spreadsheet...". Also, requests to team members to update their figures in a
spreadsheet do not end in sad smilie faces unless it's a team of girl scouts.

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revorad
Clickety click - <http://hypernumbers.com>

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revorad
Great job, Gordon! And a truly inspiring story too. I shall be calling you
soon for feedback.

~~~
gordonguthrie
I raise my coffee cup to you - and look forward to your call...

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gordonguthrie
Sorry folks we seem to be having some DNS problems - let me get onto it...

~~~
gordonguthrie
You're all creating sites quicker than the DNS can handle them at the moment -
I'm working on fixing that.

~~~
gordonguthrie
That's it back up - but I need to make some changes to stop it happening
again...

~~~
gordonguthrie
OK - the problem was that the pool of new DNS entries was draining too quickly
- so I increased the size of it.

Unfortuately that's not in our site management API so I had to code it up and
test it - but 'tis done now... :)

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bensummers
Could you use wildcard DNS to avoid the pool issue?

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gordonguthrie
No because we provision across a pool of servers based on load.

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bensummers
Can you use a hybrid approach? Point the wildcard to the next server you plan
to provision on, but add A records for all your accounts when they're created.

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TAGMentor
My vote is for teamxls.com - I think it's more fitting than Hypernumbers.

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joystickers
This is a pretty great idea. Nice work!

