Should i keep building and maybe sell these Python guis or move on?
I’ve been learning Python and started building a few simple GUI tools to automate boring stuff; things like web scraping, API orchestrator, and small workflow tasks. I mostly learned from YouTube and Medium, and got a bit of help from AI too.
I shared a few of these tools with my team, and they’ve actually been using them a lot. They said it saves them tons of time, which feels really good to hear.
Now I’m wondering, should I keep doing this and maybe try selling some of these tools someday? Or is it just something to do for fun and learning?
I’m still pretty new to coding, but I really enjoy making small things that help people work better. Would love to hear what you all think.
Check out this website - product hunt
It will give you an idea about how to sell a product
Thank you very much. The apps on this website are interesting; they totally have a different perspective on looking at a problem
Find a more common problem, solve it and host it on a website, publicise on twitter/linkedin
- It gains a lot of traction: monetise it
- Not much traction, still good for portfolio and networking
Yeah, I am planning to do it on LinkedIn surely, it will grab some attention, but I feel like there are many others solving the problem in a better way; that is what's stopping me
You miss 100% shots you don’t take!
Yeah, I'll give it a try. Thank you!
Make sure to market well within in your team/organisation. If not paid directly, can help you in appraisal and promotion discussions.
Try to quantify FTE/man hours saved because of these tools.
Yes @Rasgulla, I'm already writing a few documentations for these and giving them to the team. The SMEs are currently testing for edge cases.
It really saved a couple of hours, but I'm still not sure how to phrase it, as all of these tools are not for the same team, so I'll have to properly frame the time aspect.
Also, a small question here: I'm planning to switch, so will that appraisal make sense, or should I start the hunt as early as possible?
Thanks for your insightful comment.
Any tools like these which can be used across organisations and people are most likely are going to be open source, i think you are better going that route and have a freemium model maybe
Yeah, I'll check and make it work dynamically apart from our application then it would make sense in other workplaces as well.
What exactly you are able to extract using a webscarper and does that work for all the websites ?
Well, for scraping, my use case generally involves logging in and navigating to a section. There, we have data in tables, and I'll have to manually click on sublinks, take the data, navigate back, and continue.
Generally, we can do the same thing for all the websites as per our requirements, but we have to look for a way that lets users decide what data they want.
I wish I had thought of this!
Well, even I wasn't sure about fixing problems. I thought something like making the current process a bit easier for me to save time and improve quality. I did take some aid from AI, but the logical approach was fixed to solving the problem and it worked
Just some advice: In a data engineering role, you can think of tasks around data validation, scheduling, monitoring, or similar things you can look up on internet
Maybe try releasing the small tools on github (I myself have written 1-2 tkinter/pyqt based tools). One thing I realized is that these tools usually have a very specific scope, and cannot be used by everyone. Putting it out on github helps in understanding if the tool is sub-team specific useful vs broad scoped
Yeah, that makes sense, but I think I'll have to build something more dynamic to show the problem these tools are solving. As of now, these work according to the workflow needed for our process, so I'll have to put something more common so that people can relate it to their workflows or problems
