When all roads lead (back) to spreadsheets
GRID doubles down on spreadsheet modeling
Today, we’re launching new pricing plans and premium features for GRID. These new plans mark a significant change in business strategy for us, and a shift in focus to those that are getting unique value from GRID’s unique capabilities: spreadsheet modelers.
Interestingly enough, this is very much where we originally saw an opportunity to make a dent in the world, so you could say we are going back to our roots. It’s been quite a journey, so here’s the story:
Spreadsheets run the world. We run spreadsheets.
GRID was founded around the fact that spreadsheets are the oxygen of the business world. They are what knowledge workers turn to when they need to get stuff done in the heat of the day. Meanwhile, the software industry had been busy building fantastic solutions for Data Scientists and other data and analytics experts, while very little attention had been paid to everyday spreadsheet users.
We also quickly realized that of all of the gazillion things people do with spreadsheets, their use-cases can be divided into two categories:
- Using spreadsheets as small databases
- Modeling and calculations
The first category was actually getting some attention, and the likes of Notion and Airtable were covering the bases quite well when people realized that their “database” needs went above and beyond what could easily be served with a spreadsheet.
The modeling and calculations bit — arguably where spreadsheets shine and are quite irreplaceable — was however not getting much attention, and in talking to spreadsheet modelers we repeatedly heard the same story. They love their spreadsheets, but the moment they needed to communicate their thinking to anyone else was a moment of anxiety. Spreadsheet modelers don’t like to share their workbooks, and the more important the message and the audience, the less likely they are to do so. So what happens is that they copy-paste charts and tables from their spreadsheets into presentations, PDFs, emails and other messages.
This is tedious work, that then must be repeated every time anything changes and what’s worse, these screenshots are disconnected from the model and don’t allow for any exploration or answering questions other than those presented. “Let me re-run the numbers and get back to you” is typically the answer.
So, this is the moment we decided to focus on. Giving modelers a way to present, share and publish their models interactively. For that purpose we built the most powerful spreadsheet engine that’s ever run in a browser, making interaction with even large and complicated models a delightful experience. We also built a highly capable WYSIWYG editor for spreadsheet modelers to build user interfaces and guided narratives on top of their models, and finally we integrated with Excel and Google Sheets in a way that makes working on top of existing spreadsheets a seamless experience, even when you’re making changes to the model as you go along.
All of this was quite a feat technically and we had built something very unique — even today — totally unparalleled.
Commercial launch
With this, we went to the market. We’d tested extensively with our target audience in Alpha and Beta phases in 2019 and 2020, landed an empowering round of financing in 2020 and in March 2021 we got rid of the Beta-label, opened a generous free tier up to everyone and started selling a modestly priced subscription plan that gave access to some premium features, especially with regards to custom look and feel of GRID documents.
Now, here’s where you’ll probably expect a plot twist, but the next few months actually went really well. We were successful in attracting the right type of users — spreadsheet modelers. They found the product themselves, learned how to use it themselves, published their documents themselves and quite often bought a subscription themselves.
A stereotypical customer started to emerge: the “multitasking manager”. Typically someone in a small to medium sized business. And the most common use-case was also quite clear. Most of them were using GRID to turn existing spreadsheets into calculators to embed on their websites: Mortgage calculators, pricing calculators, ROI calculators, bike-configuration calculators — you name it — often for lead-capture purposes.,
The curve was up and to the right, with an upwards curvature, exactly the way you (and the start-up literature) want it. Over the course of a few months, we had attracted thousands of successful users, a couple of hundred paying customers that were truly using the product to meet valuable business needs, and a Product-led growth engine that was working.
A bigger market, a bigger opportunity
Here’s where the story takes a twist.
Before I go there, I’ll say that the only way to look at decisions that you know — with the benefit of hindsight — would have been better made differently, is to ask yourself if they were taken in good faith given where you were and what you knew at the time. If so, there should be no regrets, only an opportunity to reflect and learn.
In the fall of 2021 we take a deep, good look at where we are. As you can imagine, we’re quite proud of ourselves for what we’ve built, both technically and commercially. However, it felt like we were very much becoming a “calculator company” and projecting from there — even if we became a clear leader of that market — we could not convince ourselves that this was a big enough opportunity to maximize our — and our investors’ — outcome. We wanted something bigger.
The productivity tool market was heating up, and we could see companies like Notion, Airtable, Canva and Slack take on their respective parts of the productivity suites, meeting needs of next generation of knowledge workers in a way they preferred over the tools offered by the traditional productivity suites and thereby becoming some of the most successful startups of their times. Notion was reinventing the document, Airtable the light-weight database, Canva not only illustrations but also presentations and Slack the internal email. But nobody had claimed this stake for “numbers and calculations”, i.e. the other half of what people use spreadsheets for.
Looking at this trend and what we had built, we were convinced that this was the biggest opportunity we could go for. Over the next few months we modernized our UI, transformed our onboarding, made integrations to the most relevant of these tools, notably Notion (aiming to be “Excel to their Word”) and all but abandoned our old and hitherto successful target audience.
In terms of user acquisition (“top-of-funnel” in go-to-market speak) this did wonders. We went from signing up 200–250 users a week to a stint in early 2023 when we signed up over 2000 users per week. For Notion users in particular we were plugging a gaping hole in the product — a complete lack of visualization capabilities to go with their database efforts. Onboarding was also largely successful. A very healthy proportion of acquired users were successfully building charts and embedding them back in Notion. With the addition of our Chart Builder and associated AI capabilities we clearly had the most capable visualization solution integrated with Notion and by now we’re likely the best known tool for visualizing Notion data.
But there was a problem. Retention was low as these were usually simple, one-off use-cases, and often casual or personal. These users were typically only making use of the most basic functionality of our product (rarely do they e.g. have models or calculations) and conversion to paid subscriptions was very low. The users we were attracting were quite price sensitive and had low propensity to pay. To boot, limitations in Notion’s APIs meant that some of the more serious use-cases — that were more likely to have business value — were impossible to meet, leading to frustration by the most important potential customers in this pack.
While overall the numbers trended in the right direction, the modest traction, coupled with changing market conditions meant that we could not land the type of funding to keep building towards the vision of “Numbers tool for the next generation” at the same pace as before. By the end of summer we had no choice but to make some painful changes to the team, letting go of more than half of our team and huddling around the core of our product to rebuild from there. I’ve shared a bit about this and how we approached this for the departing team members elsewhere, and plan to write another post about it from the standpoint of a startup founder soon. But that’s a story for another day.
I still believe that there is an opportunity to build a mass market “numbers tool” for this market, but that product probably has only 20% of the features of GRID, is streamlined around making the most common use-cases super-simple and sold to a massive amount of people at a very low price point. The type of business that needs the type of funding that was only available in 2020 and 2021.
Love is growth
Having to go through these changes, and realizing that the big vision would not be built from here, called for a thorough and honest introspection. Where are we really? Where does the truly unique value in what GRID has built lie and to whom is it valuable? In addition to deep analysis of our user and usage data (we’ve always been very data-driven in our approach), we also had discussions with many of our super users; those that are truly using the unique aspects of our product to fulfill valuable aspirations, many of whom use GRID for hours every day.
The long and short of it is that the people that *love* GRID are spreadsheet modelers. They are also the people that are using GRID in their “craft”, often for something very close to revenue generation, ranging from the lead capture calculators we saw early on to directly selling access to GRID documents in the form of a “Model-as-a-Service”. I wrote a blog post with some more details on these types of use-cases last month. It turns out GRID empowers modelers to do so much more than just calculators, we just didn’t see it early on.
Of our paying customers a vast majority (>80%) are using spreadsheet models. This is despite our 16 month push in the “Next gen” world where the use-cases are primarily static visualizations. And many of these paying modelers have been with us for a long time. In fact we still have an incredible proportion of the early subscribers from 2021 still with us.
There is a lot more, all leading to the same conclusion. In short, spreadsheet modelers use GRID to build important tools that can hardly be built using any other product, while those with static data build visualizations where other methods exist. Additionally, the models usually have significant business value while the static Notion visualizations often do not.
As a result, we’re changing our efforts on all fronts:
Product development: We’ve doubled down on features that are especially valuable for spreadsheet modelers and those with more serious use-cases. Many are highly requested features that we’ve pushed in the name of focus on the next-gen users. On the one hand they’re related to interactivity and on the other to embedding and users’ ability to control the look, feel and behavior of their embeds and documents — including for lead capture and analytics.
Sales and customer success: We are becoming more “sales-y”, helping strong leads over the finish-line with their GRID projects, but with clarity on that there is a subscription sale on the other end. We will also be selling “one-off” consulting where we help customers building out their first document(s) to completion.
Pricing: In line with the above, we are today making a big change to our pricing and — as mentioned in the beginning — business model.
- Free tier: The biggest change is that users will now have full access to all GRID features and functionality on a free tier — as long as they are building only for themselves. This gives them ample opportunity to get to know the product, make sure that it meets their requirements and in fact build out their solution in full. However, they will no longer be able to share documents on the free tier.
- 7 day trial: As soon as a user shares their first document with others, they start a 7-day free trial. Again, this allows them to see what they have created “in production”, whether embedded on a web site or by providing others with direct access. However, if they don’t upgrade within 7 days their documents will cease to be accessible by others.
- Pro ($49/mo): Customer gets the ability to share with some limitations to the number of monthly views and form submissions as well as restrictions with regards to advanced features.
- Premium ($215/mo): User gets access to a range of premium features and a generous amount of views and form submissions. Most of the features have to do with professional web development needs, such as highly tailored look and feel, event tracking for granular web analytics, and (shortly) APIs for direct interaction with the GRID documents and their underlying models for programming purposes.
Despite having just now released the plans, we already have commitment from several customers on both plans giving us confidence in the direction we’ve taken.
We are quite excited about this, and the amount of love and affection we are hearing after doubling down on this user group again is truly invigorating.
The phrase “love is growth” (paraphrasing Sean Ellis in his book Hacking Growth) has been thrown around a lot in the office these last few weeks, and we strongly believe that focusing on the users that love GRID will pay dividends fast — and provide a basis to grow — albeit initially with lower top-of-funnel numbers, but a lot more paying and retained customers.
After all: Spreadsheets run the world. And with GRID, you can run spreadsheets!
