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1. Contextual design, holzblat How to understand and structure a user's life and environment and what to look for when they are struggling with a problem or using your product.

2. Lean Customer Development, Cindy Alvarez Practical and immediately useful guide to interviewing and talking to users. Read after the Contextual Inquiry book above. If that book teaches what to understand about a user's workflow and environment, this one teaches how to elicit those answers from customers when talking to them.

3. About Face 3, alan cooper If the previous two are about (a) what to look for when understanding a customer and (b) how to get the info you need to build solutions for those customers, then this book is about translating those learnings into user journeys and experiences.

A project to help my developer friends save time from sending reports from our databases to business oriented folks who will only consume data in spreadsheets.

Any thoughts on how useful this might be for others?

If you're willing to put in the effort for some serious study, then try these 2 books. They worked very well for me.

a. About Face 3 by Alan Cooper

b. Contextual Design by Karen Holtzblatt

These two will set you up.

One more thing I wanted to add is that it sure does look like a catch-22 but the counter-intuitive thing here is that you cannot solve for revenue by gaining more users.

Revenue is a lagging metric that is a result of many things that you do in the business. You could increase revenue by increasing MRR by improving retention,reducing churn. You could increase expansion MRR by increasing value add for customers that enables you to translate that into upgrades/upsells.

Mostly, increasing users via acq only works when you have strong retention and thats a product problem, not a marketing problem.

I would suggest the Lean Analytics book to understand this in more detail and also this 6 part series from Social Capital.

https://medium.com/swlh/diligence-at-social-capital-part-1-a...

"To increase users, we need to spend more."

Its great that you left the sentence ended at "more" because generally the answer isnt in spending more money, its about discovering those channels that help you get your message and value prop to your target audience at very low cost. Ideally, the cost should really be "time" in that you should be able to spend more time on discoverig the channels than spending money(ads for eg) on such discovery.

My opinion veers towards revenue and hopefullly from existing customers rather than new users because its less expensive, you already have a relationship and a strong basis for this relationship is the value you are already adding for them.

This is really really useful idea.

I've been looking for something like this for a while. I generally like to take my YT playlist of mostly talks, etc and hear while driving.

Would love to see this turned into a mobile app.

And the live demo is here. No need to sign up to check it out in action: https://app.cirkulate.com/demo