Is the argument here that "if you know how to code, spreadsheets aren't useful to you?"
If so, that's false. Spreadsheets are a fantastic way to present visual data and analysis in a way that's auditable by anyone, regardless of technical competence. They are visual programming!
This also makes them a better way to do lightweight data processing. One of my most common workflows is to dump production data into a CSV so I can analyze it and build charts off it. This is perfect for business-as-usual questions, like basic segmentation analyses. Pivot tables!
A major issue with Google Sheets is that the DSL is terrible. Like, try to do any sort of string manipulation (extract the first two words)[1], and you'll see how bad it is. Adding native python support helps solve this.
I'm just a random HN-er who saw this, but I'm very excited about this product.
That makes two of us. We have a Cloudflare worker serve the content from Webflow (which is actually set up with a custom domain at https://webflow2.tremendous.com/. Yes, it's a little convoluted.
We still don't know what broke here - the Cloudflare worker or Webflow, or the combination of the two.
The eng team was extremely confused about what had broken our webflow setup (we do some magic with Cloudflare workers to point our marketing pages at at Webflow with a custom domain)... and then I saw that we were frontpage.
> I would guess there are many cases of solo founders shutting down their business other than founder death...
Sure, but it really only makes sense to consider cases where:
A) The business has paying customers
B) It's very important to the customers that this product remain available
C) The founder is unwilling to give or license the source code to those customers
In practice, all three of these factors being present is uncommon. Usually if the product is actually important to a customer, they just pay to acquire the assets. And there is usually no reason for a solo founder not to take that deal if the alternative is just shutting down the business.
For a venture backed business, maybe the lawyers decide there is too much legal risk or whatever. But for an indie hacker, that doesn't happen.
We hear stories all the time of folks getting burned when venture backed startups shut down without giving people any time to switch to another product, or sometimes even to expert their data. When is the last time you heard about this happening from the paying customers of a solo founder? Literally never.
You’re comparing apples to calculators. Solo founders go out of business literally all the time, every day. I’ve definitely heard of solo devs canceling. It’s also like the entire reputation of the KickStarter experience, pay a solo dev to do something, get nothing in return aside from a bunch of hopeful emails followed by silence or a sorry.
Software created by solo devs is used by many times fewer people, therefore it’s zero surprise that the total number of displaced customers is lower. You need to calculate the percentages, not hold up anecdotes of not having any rumors.
I don’t see how (C) can reasonably factor into any statistics. I’d love to hear how often you think this matters, but I’m extremely skeptical that shutting down a solo business and giving source to customers has happened enough times to even talk about relative to the number of times that hasn’t happened. I’d like to hear about when giving source to paying customers is even helpful. Depends highly on what kind of software we’re talking about, and depends highly on what kind of customers, but assuming that paying customers can generally do anything with source code seems like a really, really big assumption.
* we help companies pay people for things like user research, signup incentives, take-home projects, bug bounties, etc
* we are highly profitable (almost irresponsibly so), making $XXM revenue with 30 people, and growing fast
* we are bootstrapped, which means building with the long term in mind vs. VC rat race nonsense
email me at kapil@tremendous.com if interested.
we're hiring for literally everything, so even if there isn't a job that's an obvious fit, email anyway, because there's probably another opening up that will be
My company, tremendous.com, does this, including the tax form collection process if spend exceeds $600 / person. Our primary use case is user research incentives, but interview incentives is an analogous problem.
Basically no strings attached for both sides. We do complete a compliance review for businesses signing up for our site (given we're a payments company), but it's basically invisible at smaller volumes.
I would say it's more strings attached than handing a wad of cash to someone. A service aggregator like this certainly would reduce the headache for the hiring company but for the person being interviewed they still have to 'play ball' by entrusting some commercial entity with private information, no?
Kinda- for a $300 reward, for example, we only need an email address. So a recipient could just choose an Amazon.com gift card and apply it to their account, with only an email address provided.
Right on that payments is a challenge in implementing this. Companies need to pay candidates, who may be anywhere in the world, a small amount of money on a one-off basis without the hassle of paperwork.
Tremendous.com (where I work) does this.
Candidates can get payments, gift cards, or donate the money to charity.
(we've been paying candidates to take calls, do tech screens, and complete projects, and it's easily been worth the cost. at some point we'll do a blog post on the conversion rate differences)
