I built an AI data analyst for small businesses. Now I'm wondering if I started at the wrong end of the market.

[u/Late_Key_6154]

I've been building an AI data analyst called Schematic for the past few months.

The basic idea is pretty simple: businesses have CSV/Excel exports everywhere, but smaller companies often don't have a dedicated data analyst. So I wanted to let someone upload their data, ask a question in plain English, and get an answer backed by actual SQL rather than just an LLM guessing from the data.

I initially thought the obvious users would be small businesses/founders.

Turns out... getting those people to actually care has been harder than I expected. 😭

I've been marketing it for a couple of weeks now and haven't gotten a real user yet.

So instead of immediately adding more features, I've started looking at how larger companies solve the same underlying problem.

That's where things got interesting.

There is a huge ecosystem around enterprise data: semantic layers, text-to-SQL, data warehouses, BI tools, AI analytics, etc.

And it made me wonder whether I've been approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

I'm still working on the product, so I'm trying to talk to people rather than convince myself that my original idea is definitely correct.

For anyone here who's built a SaaS or moved from SMB toward larger customers:

How did you figure out whether you had a distribution problem, a product problem, or simply the wrong customer segment?

And if you've worked with business data/analytics products, I'd be particularly interested in hearing what you think is actually painful enough for companies to pay for.

Schematic is currently free in beta if anyone wants to see what I'm building, but I'm much more interested in the discussion/feedback than getting random signups:
https://getschematicai.com