Pitching MinuteBI
2024-10-10
I'm Joe, the author and maintainer of MinuteBI.
This article is formatted as a pitch, but I don't actually intend to raise money for MinuteBI. This is more of a personal thought exercise than anything else. Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to go through the questionnaire and publish my answers.
Notice the terseness in my answers here compared to my pitch for my previous attempt at a product, Hyperjoin EntiPy. I'm sure it means something, but I haven't sat down to unravel it yet.
Summary
What is it?
MinuteBI is a web application that lets you make dashboards from spreadsheets in minutes.
Why now?
A lot of services are enshittifying. I thought it'd be refreshing to offer a straightforward service for charting data with straightforward value and pricing. Though honestly, I'm not convinced this is a super time-sensitive value offering.
Why me?
I run the dashboarding software and data engineering teams for two of Ateneo BUILD's consultancy engagements. They are our oldest two retainers, and the scope of our services has only increased over time. We're experienced in this field and we're good at it.
Details
Problem
Most businesses have data they want to chart. There's a huge jump in implementation complexity between charting data on Excel and charting data on a business intelligence app like Tableau or PowerBI.
Under the second setup, it's horrendously slow and expensive to bring a new dataset online, at least compared to how fast it would be with Excel. (I know because I'm the one that brings new datasets online for my clients.) If the dataset comes from a database, this is to be expected. There's a lot of inherent complexity involved in that, and I'm not out to solve that problem. However, many datasets actually come from loose flat files sent over email. There's no reason why charting should be this hard for those flat files.
Idea
Users should be able to simply upload files and have those files be available as datasets. In their ideal world, they shouldn't have to talk to me, the data engineer, to do that.
Progress
Competitors
MinuteBI seems to be going up against:
- Excel. Spreadsheets are devastatingly effective for a wide variety of data tasks. Whenever you're in this space at a small scale, you're going up against them somehow.
- Dashboarding apps like Tableau and PowerBI. A lot of them seem uninterested in serving the entire data engineering value chain.
Money
MinuteBI is a SaaS that costs $50 per month per user.
Ambition
Not gonna lie, I'd be happy if this brings in a steady $10,000 MRR, especially if I can keep the required staffing down to me, myself, and I.
Moat
After giving it some thought, I've decided that I don't really care about a moat. MinuteBI was a pain in the ass to write -- a lot of fun, sure, but still a pain in the ass. I'll just ride on that fact while I do my first launches.