[danielstudds]

I work in the DOCCM (Document Output for Customer Communications Management) space, which in a certain light is just generating PDFs (well, perhaps a bit more complex than that...). Enterprise deals in this space will have 6 or 7 zeros, so yes, there is a market for generating PDFs. There are already some cloud providers out there (like exari - it's been a while but I remember their stuff being pretty cool.)

That's a bit different from vanilla PDF generation, but perhaps a good portion of that is down to marketing. How you position this could be important. You've got your salesforce version - nice :-) That should mean you're selling direct to a business user, so have you worked out what their pain point is? Do they think of it as "generating PDFs" (you've branded it as "Great Reports", so obviously you think they don't!) I don't know anything about report generation on SF, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't already some competition - have you looked in to that? What's your point of difference?

Down to your assumptions: 1) I've only ever used FOP & yes it is tedious, but it gives you a lot of power, and that power is going to be hard to replicate.

2) Generating large no of PDFs is hard to scale. For a cloud service, though, you need to work out how you're going to deliver a large number of PDFs over the wire. (You'll easily be able to generate more bytes of PDF per $ of CPU than you'll be able to transfer per $ of bandwidth.)

3) That sounds like a safe assumption (almost a tautology).

4) I'm not so sold on this. If I can get equivalent functionality from a library, I'll use the library. I don't want to add a dependency on an external service (making my own service more fragile) unless it offers a significant benefit. Stripe saves me SO MUCH TROUBLE it's a no brainer. There's is no way I would even think of trying to replicate what they've got. The barriers are significant. What are the barriers to me using a library instead of Pagify? Not nearly as great.

Gut feeling, the SF report generation product is much more compelling, but check out the competition in that space.

[knkella]

Thanks for the feedback. We are going after the SF market, but there is already competition. As far as pricing model is concerned we would do that on the no of pages one generates. Do you think developers are not the right market? Can we offer it to developers in some form?

[danielstudds]

PDF generation is a complex business... you're not going to be all things to all people, you need to choose a particular niche (at least to start with) and make that work. I can see the value prop in report generation on SF. "PDF Generation for developers" is too broad: I don't think you can do it (because there are so many different types of of PDFs to generate) and I can't see the value prop (because it's going to cost you more to provide a generic PDF generation service than it will cost me to use an existing library.)

That said, there might be a market there for developers, but you'll need to identify a very particular challenge that devs have and provide a much better solution than what they can achieve with a library in a day.