This is Gordon Guthrie on attracting customers to his start-up:
it's also like teenage romance, because things seem to go well, we're getting on, you casually say "would you like to buy the software?" and they sort of coyly go "Ooh! Looks very interesting, but I'll need to speak to my friends and we'll see what's happening," and then you go home and sit by the phone, and you're waiting for this: "Please, please, phone up and tell me. Phone up and say you want to buy, you want to buy!"
-- Gordon Guthrie on the BBC World Service
Surprisingly lucid description for a software developer, I thought. ;-)
So I went and checked out his site. My first impression is that they really need to do a better job of conveying what the thing does. The front page says "build your own Web apps, without programming", but that's way too vague. What kind of Web app can I build? Facebook? It turns out that Hypernumbers is two things: a Web-based spreadsheet, and a way to build a Web-based interface to that spreadsheet. You can produce views which come from data in your spreadsheet, and you can also produce Web pages containing HTML forms which let users modify or add to your spreadsheet.
For example, their sample app is a small Web-based poll which lets you choose a favourite band from a drop-down list, but also lets you select options using radio buttons, or using free-form entry. Submitting the form adds the entries to the spreadsheet. Everything about the Web page and the spreadsheet can be customised (for example, the introductory text on the page is a reference to a cell in the spreadsheet containing text). My only beef with it is a counter they added indicating the number of respondents who have "bad taste in music": this is simply a count of the number of people who selected "Queen"! A particularly egregious error given one of the other options is Bananarama.
All in all it seems like quite cool tech, but it doesn't have a real-world use case. Or rather, it has too many: nothing for people to latch on to and say "this is for me!" Also, although the spreadsheet is very nicely done, the demo site is decidedly spartan to the point of looking a little out of date. I realise they want to keep things simple, but some reasonable CSS styling wouldn't hurt that goal at all.
To be honest, my favourite part of the site is nothing to do with the tech itself: it's the way it automatically picks a password for you, by combining two words and appending some numbers. It's more than secure enough (particularly if you do some kind of tarpitting after multiple log-in attempts), but also much easier to remember than the standard 8-random-letters-and-numbers copout. I wish more sites did it!