Listen to this articleSpreadsheet.com is a new online spreadsheet that maintains the simplicity and flexibility of traditional spreadsheets while introducing a new set of features that give it the power of an easy-to-use database and project management system, all with real-time updates and messaging. With Spreadsheet.com, all you need is basic spreadsheet skills to quickly and easily create your own solutions for collaborative work. Below is our recent interview with Matt Robinson, CEO of Spreadsheet.com:
Q: Matt, what made you go this way? How did you get the idea for Spreadsheet.com?
A: We like to say Spreadsheet.com makes spreadsheets come alive as applications! The new features found in Spreadsheet.com come from years of observing how people work together in traditional spreadsheets, and from doing research on how to make them more effective for collaborative work. We didn’t want to build something that requires people to replace the spreadsheet they already know, which is what all other collaborative work management (CWM) platforms have done.
Our belief is that people need a spreadsheet that works a lot better for the way they use it rather than a whole bunch of different tools that take them away from spreadsheets. Based on this, Spreadsheet.com blends the familiar interface and features found in traditional spreadsheets with a new set of easy-to-use database and project management capabilities that go far beyond traditional spreadsheet products, along with real-time updates and messaging to make work more collaborative.
Recommended: Q: Can you tell us something more about your background? What were you doing before Spreadsheet.com?
A: Before starting Spreadsheet.com, I co-founded and built two enterprise SaaS companies. The first was a SaaS talent management platform called Recruitforce.com, which was acquired by Taleo, now part of Oracle. That product grew to over 10,000 customers and $100M ARR. The second was a cloud application development platform called Rollbase, which was acquired by Progress Software (PRGS), where I served as CTO before starting Spreadsheet.com.
Bootstrapping these two companies from concept through to acquisition, and then helping to take them forward within the parent companies, gave me a lot of the experience I needed to think strategically about building a product and company like Spreadsheet.com, which is both more technically challenging and also a much larger market opportunity.
I also took a year off to go to business school between Progress and Spreadsheet.com, which is something I had wanted to do for a long time. I was totally immersed there for a year — lived on campus, the whole thing. My goal with that was to change my mindset about what is possible and to get myself comfortable with setting much bigger goals. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to build next but I knew I wanted to start another SaaS company and I felt I needed to take time out to prepare mentally to go all in for the long term rather than being open to an early acquisition like I had been with the others.
Q: How long have you been working on this project? Was it hard to develop?
A: We’re now into our third year of building Spreadsheet.com and we’re just about to release the first early access accounts. It’s been a long road. There is a very high bar for an online spreadsheet. We didn’t have the luxury of building an MVP in a year and then iterating on it. This is the most complex system I’ve ever worked on, but it’s also been the most inspiring because nobody has ever created a real standards-compliant (XLS and XLSX) spreadsheet-database hybrid before so we kind of see ourselves as pioneers in this respect. Once we solved for some of the hardest things we knew we were truly on our way to doing it. We only recently found out that this is one of the “Startup ideas we’d like to fund” that Paul Graham wrote about 11 years ago, and as far as we know we’re the first to do it.
Q: Can you give us insights into your features?
A: Spreadsheets are used in the workplace to manage not only budgets and financial models, but also a wide variety of things ranging from customers and contacts, inventory and assets, projects and tasks, job openings and candidates, employees and vendors, and much, much more. Virtually every organization has a fabric of spreadsheets that runs through it for managing all kinds of information and work. However, they were never designed to be used as business applications like this.
This is why we built Spreadsheet.com as the spreadsheet everyone already knows, with additional capabilities to also make it work like a modern SaaS business application. Each row can simultaneously behave like a traditional spreadsheet row and record in a relational database-driven application. The implications of this are pretty open ended and it enables use cases not possible with any product that has come before it.
Key features include:
A rich set of cell data types that go beyond numbers and text, such as ratings, icon sets, collaborators, and attachments that live in cells with drag and drop upload and preview.
Rows that link together across worksheets.
Row hierarchies with parent-child relationships for things like project plans, task lists and org structures.
New ways to work with worksheet data that go beyond the traditional grid of cells, such as Kanban views for managing workflows and responsibilities.
Shared views with powerful filtering and sorting criteria to keep people focused on the right information.
A growing library of pre-made templates to get started quickly with common use cases such as Agile Project Plan, CRM, Employee Directory, Asset Management, Inventory Management, Applicant Tracking with Hiring Budget, Due Diligence Checklist, and Cap Table with Shareholder Database.
Standards compliant: one-click import of XLS and XLSX files from Excel and Google Sheets without loss of data, styling, formatting and function.
The best way to learn how it works, and to see how it is different from traditional spreadsheet, is to view the 4 minute overview video here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTfWiIK3AdU
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Spreadsheet.com is in early access now. We’re looking for beta users to try it out and give us feedback before it launches commercially next year. Our near-term plans after it has become commercially available are to add features like workflow, automation, integrations, reporting and dashboarding. We also plan to offer mobile and tablet apps, and eventually offline viewing and editing.
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