[thomasrognon]

I've been working on an enterprise SaaS startup and have the same challenges. Explaining a general purpose tool and new capabilities that no one has seen before is really daunting. I'd love to hear more about your experience and how it turned out, especially the sales side.

[chrisaycock]

I was pretty bad at explaining Empirical in the beginning. During alpha testing, I emphasized the technical merits (statically typed Dataframes!) rather than an application domain. Once I figured-out I needed to push time-series analysis, then the user feedback became more focused.

After starting the public beta, I heard the following sentence several dozen times: "This looks amazing! Does it handle streaming?" And thus began the quest I am currently on.

About the only advice I can give is to keep practicing and keep an open mind. The feedback will get less negative the more you hone your pitch.

[andrewnc]

Big fan of Empirical! I'm excited to continue following the development.

Do you have customers, or potential customers in the pipeline?

[chrisaycock]

The business model I've eyed is to license to service providers, like securities brokers and data vendors in the finance industry. That way, their customers can execute queries in the cloud.

For example, a crypto broker wants their traders to write their own models. A stock-exchange advisor wants their asset managers to compute their own transaction costs. Etc.

Basically, Empirical will be a value-add component for existing customers of these larger providers. Instead of shuffling market data over the Internet, the user will "send the query to the data."

Every firm I've shown Empirical to has had the same word-for-word response that most end users have had: "Does it handle streaming?" I put the sales calls on hold while I try to get this done.