To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:
1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.
2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1
3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1
4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.
5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.
6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.
I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!
To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:
1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.
2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1
3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1
4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.
5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.
6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.
I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!