The Features I Almost Built (And Why I Didn't)
When you're building a product solo, every feature is a trade-off. Time spent on one thing is time not spent on another.
While building HTML Table Exporter, I had a running list of "great ideas" that never made it to the final product. Some were technically impossible. Others were possible but wrong for the product.
Here's what I almost built—and why I'm glad I didn't.
The Big One: Parquet Export
Parquet is the darling format of the data engineering world. Columnar storage, excellent compression, blazing fast queries. When I started building a table export tool, Parquet seemed like an obvious addition.
I spent a weekend researching it. Then I stopped.
Why I didn't build it:
Memory limits: Browser extensions run in a constrained environment. Parquet libraries are memory-hungry. For large tables, the browser would choke.
Privacy principles: Making Parquet work reliably would require a backend to handle the heavy lifting. But a core promise of HTML Table Exporter is that everything happens locally. Your data never leaves your browser. Adding a server would break that promise.
Target users: The people who need Parquet are data engineers with pipelines. They're not exporting tables manually from websites—they're writing scrapers. My users are analysts who need quick exports to Excel or CSV.
Parquet would have been impressive on the feature list. It would have been wrong for the product.
Column Reordering (The One I Did Build)
I actually built this one. Drag-and-drop column reordering. It took about three weeks.
Usage so far? Less than 5% of PRO users touch it.
The lesson: I built what I thought was important, not what users actually needed. The feature works fine. It just wasn't worth three weeks compared to other improvements.
If I could go back, I'd have spent that time on better table detection algorithms instead.
Auto-Scheduling Exports
The idea: set up a schedule, and the extension automatically exports tables from specific pages at regular intervals.
Sounds useful, right? Analysts tracking stock prices or sports stats could automate their data collection.
Why I didn't build it:
Extensions can't run in the background: Chrome extensions need the browser open and the page loaded. True scheduling would require a separate app or service.
Scope creep: This turns a simple export tool into a web scraping platform. Different product, different users, different support burden.
Legal gray area: Automated scraping raises terms-of-service questions that manual, user-initiated exports don't.
Browser Sync for Profiles
PRO users can create export profiles—saved configurations for different use cases. I considered syncing these across browsers using Chrome's sync storage.
Why I didn't build it:
Sync storage limits: Chrome gives you 100KB for synced data. Profiles with custom column configurations could exceed that quickly.
Conflict resolution: What happens when you edit a profile on two computers? Building proper sync is a rabbit hole.
Limited demand: Most users work on one machine. The complexity wasn't worth the edge case.
The Decision Framework
After a few false starts, I developed a simple filter for new features:
Does it work in the browser? If it needs a server or background process, it probably doesn't fit.
Does it serve the core use case? Quick, clean exports for analysts. If it's for a different user type, it's a different product.
Can I build it in a week? If not, it needs to be 10x more valuable to justify the time.
Will more than 20% of users benefit? Building for edge cases is how scope creeps.
Most "great ideas" fail at least one of these tests.
What I'd Tell Past Me
Say no faster. The features you don't build define your product as much as the ones you do.
Every feature has ongoing costs: documentation, support questions, edge cases, maintenance. A focused tool that does three things well beats a bloated tool that does ten things poorly.
The Parquet export would have been technically interesting. It would have made the product worse.
Building something focused? Learn more at gauchogrid.com/html-table-exporter or try HTML Table Exporter free on the Chrome Web Store.
