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How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and compa

How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and companies trying to compete in this space.

maxmusing 6y ago
We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves. Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All the best. [0] database is the app?
  - maxmusing 6y ago
    We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database hosting early on in development, but it was super janky. Might look into this again in the future.
  - brainless 6y ago
    I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.
MattGaiser 6y ago
There is no way that my current organization would buy this, but it would free up a lot of developer hours if customer support or even operations analysts could do this instead of needing a dev every time they wanted to run a custom report.
- brainless 6y ago
  I would be really interested in knowing why your organization will not buy this. I am the founder of a product in the same space, not launched, not in YC. But it is open core and on-premise and will integrate deeply with existing business logic with APIs or RPC. So I am really curious.
  - Closi 6y ago
    I can think of a few: - Companies where editing the dB can have a large impact (eg banks) - Companies affected by privacy regulations (eg GDPR) - Companies where outages are expensive (eg Operations systems) - Companies where the database is valuable and export risk is high (eg customer data).

How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and companies trying to compete in this space.

maxmusing 6y ago

We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.

ignoramous 6y ago
> We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves. Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All the best. [0] database is the app?
- maxmusing 6y ago
  We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database hosting early on in development, but it was super janky. Might look into this again in the future.
- brainless 6y ago
  I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.

MattGaiser 6y ago

There is no way that my current organization would buy this, but it would free up a lot of developer hours if customer support or even operations analysts could do this instead of needing a dev every time they wanted to run a custom report.

brainless 6y ago
I would be really interested in knowing why your organization will not buy this. I am the founder of a product in the same space, not launched, not in YC. But it is open core and on-premise and will integrate deeply with existing business logic with APIs or RPC. So I am really curious.
- Closi 6y ago
  I can think of a few: - Companies where editing the dB can have a large impact (eg banks) - Companies affected by privacy regulations (eg GDPR) - Companies where outages are expensive (eg Operations systems) - Companies where the database is valuable and export risk is high (eg customer data).