How to make Googlesheets the King of your startup?

“It all started with a Googlesheet”: this could apply to many startups out there. Including yours, isn’t it?

Anytime I joined a new startup, a fair part of my first week was always dedicated to explore “the Drive” (ie. Google Drive) and go through the most important Googlesheets in there. At Stuart, we even used to have a document called “The Bible” listing all the Googlesheets we were using the most — so you can get a sense of how serious this is for us.

Googlesheets are the V1 of any process in startups. From Operations to Sales, with Customer Service included as well — it all starts with Googlesheets.

And there are good reasons for that:

• Googlesheets are free to use
• they enable easy sharing with teammates so that different people can work together on the same document at the same time
• you can use almost as many formulas as in Excel for data analysis
• you can easily transfer Googlesheets content to other tools once they are set up / your scale justify to pay their licenses (Salesforce, Zendesk, etc)

First advice: it is essential to set up some rules very early on about the Googlesheets used:

• set up clean and organised Google Drive folders with a structured architecture to enable an easy navigation for anyone looking for something. For instance 0) Old, 1) Sales 2) Operations etc. Nothing is worse than a super messy Google Drive where it is impossible to find any document and old and active sheets are put together
• make sure that each team member has access to the relevant Drive folders. Some might be a bit confidential, like the HR/payroll-related ones for instance, so be careful that not everyone has access to all the Drive folders as default setting
• give clear ownership to different team members to maintain the Google Drive folders organised — Head of Operations for the Operations one, etc — and maybe set up a “Bible”-type document (see above!) to maintain updated at any cost!

Second advice: Make the most of your Googlesheets by using as much automation as possible and linking them to each other. Formulas like “importrange” and “query” enable you to link different Googlesheets and tabs. I use to work with one document that is gathering all the data from the database, and linked to several other Googlesheets processing the data for different purpose, so that there is a clear system of dependency and one dataset that is used for all analysis and processes.

Now if you want to go further in Googlesheets automation, here comes in play scripts and several tools.

In many of the startups where I worked, we started out our Operations with a bunch of Googlesheets and very manual data imports processes. We then “upgraded” and hired some people with engineering background who are able to write Python & SQL scripts linking our Googlesheets with our database to avoid manual “copy-paste” prone to error and time consuming.

You don’t need to be technical and know how to code to be able to write Googlesheets scripts. I wanted to find a way to automatically send-out emails from a Googlesheet instead of doing it manually. I simply googled it and found a script for this, followed the instructions and one copy-paste later, tadam! My new automated emails sendout process was set up, and has proven to be very useful in my Account Manager life. No need to reinvent the wheel if lots of stuff has been done by others and is shared and available on Google — always think about this before spending too much time designing a brand new process by yourself!

We also found tools to integrate Googlesheet with other systems you’re using without any technical knowledge required and free of charge. I have been using Zappier for this: it enables me for instance to get data from tools like Woodtric for client NPS rating directly filling in a Googlesheet, that I can use as a tracking dashboard. I also use Zappier to send me Slack notifications whenever certain Google calendar events are about to occur.

So it all start with Googlesheets, often, but this doesn’t mean you have to be in a “startup garage” style with no organisation and structure. We are lucky enough to have a whole range of free tools to automate as many processes as possible without any technical skills required. So now go and have fun!!