Edit: After my first attempt at using the platform and leaving a one-taco review here, Ezra from ViableView reached out to me and asked me to give the platform another shot.

After a failed first attempt to connect, I managed to catch up with Ezra last week and he walked me through the platform to show me how to make use of it. Ezra is a very passionate founder, and although I had a rough start with the product, I do believe he truly wants to build something that provides value for his audience, though unfortunately, I don't think it's for me.

The platform essentially pulls Amazon product sales data and helps to calculate total addressable market, serviceable market, and obtainable market for major product categories. In the end, the data it produced wasn't super useful to me, as I'm not looking to compete with other sellers on Amazon in the very broad niches products are typically categorized into, but the searches Ezra conducted did give me a couple ideas that I might consider for accessories I could carry on the specialized e-com shop I'm building.

Although the updated interface Ezra demoed for me was a bit easier to navigate, the team has also added tons of features that take away from the product's focus as a research tool (now it has team chat, project management, and a website builder built in). Although Ezra's pitch was "you don't need slack or Shopify," the capabilities built into ViableView (IMO) in no way compete with these other major platforms, and I'm afraid that trying to make ViableView a "do everything" e-com platform might take away from it's ability to be good at just one thing.

In the end, I don't feel ViableView was super helpful for my purposes, but other less focused e-commerce entrepreneurs might fight some of the basic niche and product research useful as they figure out what they want to sell.