| Hey HN. I wanted to share an update to our previous thread, “Notion with problem solving capabilities”. The Decipad public beta is now live. You can try it for free here. https://www.decipad.com/ We started building Decipad to make numbers more expressive and playful. It’s a notebook environment where you can combine text, numbers, data and calculations into a story. Our goal is to help people communicate with numbers more effectively and collaborate across diverse backgrounds. It’s feels a bit like Notion, but it’s for building interactive models and reports. A few things we’ve been addressing building Decipad… - A friendly modelling experience: You can express variables and calculations with quasi-natural language and connect them with tables, charts, pivot tables and other widgets. - Unit expression: we built Decipad on a powerful unit system. You can assign labels and units to your data, like, `Cost = $5 per month per seat.` - Dimensional Categories: Expressing relationships between variables and categories, making a model easy to adapt. We wrote about it here: https://www.decipad.com/blog/breaking-the-grid-overcoming-di... - Connecting Data: Ability to connect data sources directly to your notebook. Right now, it’s intended for technical users. You can use JS and SQL to run a query. We’re still exploring several areas like support for large data sets and building more UX interactions on top of our language to make modeling even more approachable and collaborative. We would love to get feedback or any thoughts on our approach. |
Ours was really tough sell as a product because it wasn't really a product. It was kind of a no code platform that worked with excel models. It was technically very capable and cool, converting excel logic to run in browser but no one really cares about the tech, but what are you supposed to do with it. And you can use it for a lot of things, like someone can embed it into an existing website to serve as a calculator (eg. Mortgage calculator), you can run Monte Carlo on workbooks easier or a solver, share simplified workbooks hiding the model guts, etc
But it wasn't a product. Every one of those problems (are they problems?) Could have been solved in a better way. No code space is also very competitive and we knew we couldn't keep up with the high bar of generalized no code platforms and the sell wasn't big enough. It was classic solution looking for a problem
Luckily we stumbled on one workbook people actually used and realized that we were held back by our old tech and built a solution to address that one problem the wb was trying to solve.
So all that's to say I think you should focus on a single very specific problem you're trying to solve (something a lot more specific than "data stories"). And think about the pricing and how many $15/mo subs you need to support your team.
I may be way off and you may already have a few thousand active users and are well on your way in case disregard what I said (we got maybe a dozen or so users at a higher price point but very little actual usage)
I have a lot of other stories to share if you're curious. But best of luck.