I tried to correct some of these mistakes with my latest venture. In the past, I would build something that I thought was a pervasive problem with a demand, only to learn later that I was wrong. Ideas are worth very little until they are verified in the real world. You can get a lot done by just talking with people.
This time, I've spent a lot of time asking people what they thought of the idea, and hashing it out. I got a lot of positive feedback. People understood the problem. I got a feeling that they "got" the solution. When I sat down to build it, I had more confidence in it than prior projects.
There's still a lot more selling work ahead. The project is just starting to garner interest. I feel so out of my element selling, but I realize it is just another
P.S. The project is goodgrids.com. It's an API for converting CSVs to beautifully formatted Excel spreadsheets, and extracting data from Excel spreadsheets into CSVs for uploading into legacy systems.
I was working on something similar this weekend! (Well, kinda)
Basically, I had an ugly CSV from my bank and importing it into Excel yielded horrible results. So I wrote a processor with customizable rules that splits values into defined colums.
In the end, I had all my payments for past 3 years split into defined categories, added some stats, got rid of useless or empty fields and nicely formatted it.
Excellent! Building tools to automate and solve your own problems is such a satisfying endeavor. Unfortunately, the majority of people lack the skills you have and remain frustrated.
This time, I've spent a lot of time asking people what they thought of the idea, and hashing it out. I got a lot of positive feedback. People understood the problem. I got a feeling that they "got" the solution. When I sat down to build it, I had more confidence in it than prior projects.
There's still a lot more selling work ahead. The project is just starting to garner interest. I feel so out of my element selling, but I realize it is just another
P.S. The project is goodgrids.com. It's an API for converting CSVs to beautifully formatted Excel spreadsheets, and extracting data from Excel spreadsheets into CSVs for uploading into legacy systems.