[drenvuk]

Gonna be negative but truthful here, I wouldn't use your thing, ever. I would google my problem then google alternatives then search hackernews or reddit for opinions and pick the one that seems best from there.

Why should I use appsolite?

[danielmarkbruce]

You probably shouldn't. But, you probably aren't the target customer either. "I would never use X" is often a bad proxy for "no one would ever use X". All those stupid ads, stupid billboards, stupid ideas - often they aren't stupid, they are just pitched at someone else.

[tarunkotia]

Fair question, that’s not negative at all.

The product is built for businesses. Every product category has on an average 100s of products and each of those products have at least a few dozen features. There are about 139 apps/user in a mid-size organization. Even on a rolling basis, that’s a nightmare to evaluate. Companies usually evaluate 40 categories of product each year. Appsolite harmonizes those features across the whole category and you can creat requirements traceability matrix across the whole category.

[skynet-9000]

You are in good company.. there are dozens of similar startups/companies out there that address some form of this problem in various ways (ranging from the AWS marketplace to libhunt, producthunt, etc etc).

Even though I would handle this much like the GP, I still do rely on those sites for some of the alternatives. (and many people don't know about the "productthatmightwork vs " trick to see what happens on autocomplete on DDG/goog)

[nirushiv]

Hey! Where does the 139 apps/user number come from? Not saying it's incorrect, but very curious about the source

[caseysoftware]

Okta does similar analysis and found a lower - but still big - number with huge variance:

> With an average of 88 apps per customer, we see some interesting breakdowns:

> Larger customers deploy an average of 175 apps, and smaller companies average 73

> Tech companies deploy the most apps with an average of 155

Ref: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2021/ under "Apps here, there, and everywhere"

[tarunkotia]

https://financesonline.com/saas-statistics/

[IgorPartola]

Unsolicited product feedback forthcoming. Feel free to ignore as I don’t know what I’m talking about.

First, the site is clunky on mobile. Highly recommend you fix that up before anything else. Mainly small things like margins and fonts.

Second, and I realize I am not exactly the target audience here, but I went to your site and had no idea what to do with it because search was the main thing I saw and I didn’t recognize a lot of the categories you already listed as something I would know anything about. So I searched for “CRM” which my phone initially unhelpfully corrected to “Cram”. I got a listing of names of CRMs some of which I knew and some which I have never heard. Oh I also go how long it took to execute the search which I found amusing but entirely unnecessary.

Here is the first problem: so far I don’t know what I can expect from the site and what value it’ll give me but I spent time interacting with it. I paid a cost but didn’t yet get much value.

I ended up clicking on one of the last CRMs I recommended to a customer and what I got was essentially a short description and a grid of features that the CRM has. This is problem number two: you are building a system like an engineer, but you need to think like a sales person or a support person. I am not here to find out if Zen Desk has a chat widget. And even if I am, I can do that just by going to their own site. I am potentially here because I currently use ZenDesk and want an alternative. But the site isn’t super helpful beyond giving me specific names of products.

The experience I actually would find useful: I tell the site that I want a CRM. It gives me a listing of the CRMs it knows about each with a line next to the name that says “Use when you need XYZ.” That’s it. For example “Use ZenDesk when you want a general purpose CRM.” Or “Use LiveAgent when you need the best on-page chat app.” You don’t need to give a million features in a comparison grid. They likely already have those on their sites. You want to do a part of the work evaluating these products for the customer. That way when they are picking out the next bit of software they’ll come to you again for the next recommendation. When the boss asks the assistant to find a new chat widget, you are the assistant, just automated.

Now, I will say that I wouldn’t want to try to monetize this product. You can make it free and try to make money off referrals which feels to me like an uphill battle. Or you can charge a paid subscription and essentially be the Consumer Reports of SaaS, which I think is an easier option but you need to provide value that’s commensurable with what you plan to charge. How much time can you save a boss’s assistant or a boss on doing these evaluations by doing them yourself (or hiring someone else to do them), then resell this consolidated knowledge? That’s how much you can charge.

Short version: you are selling data and I want information.

[tarunkotia]

Thanks for taking the time to go through the site. I agree a 100% with every feedback and I am being very sincere when I say that I am sorry you had to go through this bad experience. My focus has been on the core product and now I am going to be focusing on marketing site. To that end, the product I have built is requirements management for SaaS applications. It's behind login page. I have taken some screenshots with some description and posted here https://imgur.com/a/XZoVUZR

[IgorPartola]

Ah that makes a bit more sense. How closely does this UI mirror a report that might be prepared by someone working on a requirements management project? Or did you design a new format for this?

[tarunkotia]

The requirements traceability matrix is usually built in excel cross-referencing requirements with tests. It’s a matrix at the end of the day. I am following industry best practices for this.

[IgorPartola]

Gotcha. In that case disregard everything I said above except the part about making the site mobile friendly. As I said, I know nothing :)