It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative- I never liked how Numbers handles filters, sorting, and views all different… all agentic AI stuff sound like a bonus to me
All these “is this ethical” comments remind of similar discussions happening in the IMG_0416 articles, about YouTube video that were most likely not meant to be scene publicly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506
Never heard of this! This would’ve saved me a blog post. I tried all sorts of queries to see if this philosophy existed, and “domain” didn’t pop up in my head. Thank you!
This is a great point. I did bring up the relationship exercise in the post, but admittedly I didn't give it enough respect.
In college, my database teacher told us to design a database with at least 50 tables and 100 relationships by the end of the lecture. "It will be easier than you think", he said. And it was! And I thank him for that, because that lecture alone probably got me through more progress in product design discussions than anything else.
Something I'm really good at is ending my articles with half-baked ideas :) so thank you for challenging it
Regarding "entities", totally understand. I like to write in ways that my mom would understand- not the HN community. In fact, I have a post called "Everything is a Spreadsheet", where I explicitly defined that Entity<->Noun relationship. Should have linked it!
Back to the Saaspocalypse... my startup is reckoning with this like all others. My next blog post will be titled "What's Preventing Me from Building Your App in a Weekend?". The ultimate "what's your moat" question. I think every SaaS should be forced to answer this on their marketing site. Thinking aloud, I'm considering good answers companies can say to this question... I think a perfectly legitimate answer is still "our prompts are better than your prompts". There are some companies where I simply believe the founders/engineers when they say they understand the problem better than I, because they've explored it more deeply. This is kinda what I was hinting at at the end... softwares that go mega-vertical in one or two nouns accrue more subject matter expertise than I ever will. Thus, that gives me more reason to trust their infrastructure, their configurations, and their prompts. This is not new but rather an extension of what created the SaaS economy in the first place.
I will definitely check out your profile- thank you for the thoughtful reply!
I used to write 5 things to be happy about on a whiteboard outside my dorm room every day. I wanted to get back into it! So I built a site purely for that purpose.
The coolest part is the "Bonus". Anyone online can contribute to the Bonus Thing. What's there at midnight will be saved permanently (unless I think it's inappropriate).
I built this with Vercel, Convex, Vite, and Blocknote.
Makes sense. The fact that my SQL Editor puts tables and views in the same section on its left sidebar was the main reason I did a double-take.
The idea of deleting and recreating views is an interesting one. I see that as a really cool approach- considering we can go without it as a v1 then include it as we scale.
Thank you for all your advice so far! This has been truly helpful.
Gotcha. Yeah- I was thinking of working with my engineers to figure out a permissions layer, but I understand enforcing that at the DB-level would guarantee security.
Dumb question- is creating a set of Views for each customer even efficient for my MySQL database? I could realistically see us having ~12 customer-facing views- is having 12*N views a smart and scalable way to architect this?
Okay- just spent the whole day tinkering wit this:
1) I create a baseline set of views I want my customers to have
2) For each new customer, I’ll run a script that create a replica of those views- filtered by their customer ID
3) I’ll allow my customers to write pure SQL- limiting them to only SELECT queries and a couple niche business rules, as well as masking any DB-level errors, because that just feels wrong
We do have a single-tenant DB. That’s one of my architecture challenges- how to handle permissions and clean up the schema a bit to entities that only my users need.
Finding a co-founder, plus making those first few hires, is easily the most challenging part. You're going to realize you can't solve every problem, and you'll need help. Finding your team is like finding a life partner- a great one that complements your strengths and weaknesses could set you up for life. The wrong one will result in mismatched effort, finger-pointing, and time spent away from the customer.
It's one thing to ask a user to give you $20/mo. It's another thing to ask another human to wake up with you every day and spend their prime working on your vision in opportunity cost of working on something else. It's going to be the most important sell of your life!
Given two Goodreads accounts, BookBlend uses a combination of web scraping, data analysis, and LLMs to calculate a blend score from 0-100. It shows you shared books, authors, and genres, as well as recommends books for the two to read together!
It's 100% free, and the source code is available on the "info" modal in the top right.
I'm the only Customer Success guy at the company. Currently onboarding ~15 customers. I come from a more technical background and not the domain of my customers.
How would you augment them to keep the high touch experience you've had?
If I had a wishlist, it would be another hire, and they would complement me by providing more domain knowledge than I do. Sometimes, Im anxious that I'm not "asking the right questions" during onboarding.
Do you need to keep that high touch experience?
Our sales team really leans into our high touch experience, because that where our competitors fall short. Recognizing that "white glove support" is a real advantage, I'm trying to figure out if I can keep that. What I guarantee is that no customers would be live without my support (not trying to sound important- it's just that we seriously have no self-service abilities). Since our customers are so nontechnical (think floor operators in healthcare), the product team furloughed self-service in exchange for my white glove services.
Have you had an engineer roll with them through onboarding to see where technical efficiency gains through software and automation could be found?
We have not done that! Our tech team is very flooded with tickets on future product creations, that it's been tough to capture their time.
A analysis of Notion (a platform) and Linear (a point solution)... how both go about defining their brand and product decisions, and which queues my startup should take instruction from.
