Rows is now ready for the public
What an exciting time for Rows! After a few years in the making, it is now ready for the public! Last year, the Rows team worked closely with 1,000 beta users who helped make the product powerful and delightful. Over the last 2 months, Rows released its waitlist of more than 10,000 people, and at the end of February finally announced its launch into public beta: now anyone can create an account and use the platform! Along the way, the company underwent a complete rebranding (changing its name from dashdash), and raised funding from investors such as LakeStar, Accel and Cherry Ventures (and, of course, Armilar). You can read the latest press release here, but it’s also fun to read this short interview with Humberto, founder and CEO of Rows.
Armilar: Humberto, let’s start with the question on the mind of anyone who’s new to Rows: why does the world need a new spreadsheet?
Humberto: There’s a lot of spreadsheet users in a business setting who want to do more without learning new programs, installing add-ons, or toggling between tools. They also don’t want to wait for their engineering department to have the capacity. This is a missed opportunity for people, companies and the economy — and we try and fix that. Currently, we have business teams in Marketing, Sales and Operations departments using Rows for Lead Generation, Dashboards, and building actual tools like CRMs and ERPs. They’re quite happy.
A: But why not simply develop the integrations to be used within Excel or GoogleSheets, and take advantage of their massive scale and market reach?
H: Well, suffice to say, we love spreadsheets, and that includes Google Sheets and Excel. They defined what work was like for multiple generations of business hackers, empowering them to do more. But they’re kind of stuck in “old mode” and don’t provide a modern experience at all. Let’s start with Excel. Excel is pre-internet. It was created back when people moved files by disk — and I’m not talking about CDs, but floppy disks. Later, as the internet grew, people traded files via email. But Excel always suffered from synchronization problems, and files ending in v1, v2, v5_final still spread chaos in departments that use Excel. Now, Google Sheets is native to the internet, and it solves that big Microsoft Excel problem: exchanging files. With Sheets, people can collaborate on a single webpage. However, when it appeared in 2006, two pivotal events of the internet had yet to occur: the explosion of APIs and the App economy, on the back of the iPhone launch. The result of this is that Google Sheets has the old interface: filling out data in Google Sheets still requires switching tabs and grappling with a wild west of plugins. Sharing spreadsheets on Google Sheets is a pretty bad experience too — prone to deletions, ugly and not very mobile-friendly. Try editing a Google Sheet on an iPhone! Rows is the only true spreadsheet with built-in integrations and a beautiful sharing experience for multiple devices. A true spreadsheet means that, unlike other modern productivity tools, we fully support classic Excel and Google Sheets formulas, so that people can leverage their existing skills. With built-in integrations, our users can work with data from external sources like LinkedIn or their favourite business tools like Salesforce or Slack, just using spreadsheet functions. And then there’s our Sharing experience: besides the normal collaboration functionality of spreadsheets, Rows users can turn their spreadsheets into robust and beautiful web apps in one click. This includes everything from building forms, marketing reports, financial models and calculators. And these live spreadsheets are made to be consumed on any device.
A: That, of course, also meant that you needed to replicate in Rows the features and functions that have been used for decades in the other more conventional spreadsheets… That’s a tall order!
H: Yes, our platform requires a big investment. The benefit, though, is that with Rows people can build more things, faster, using their existing spreadsheet skills. We had to create our own “excel” computing engine, our own grid, cut & copy-paste, etc. Those are beastly features with hundreds of neat little details; after all, spreadsheets have been refined for more than 30 years. We are almost done, though, and we want to launch as a v1 before the end of 2021. Two big things we’re working on for v1 are Desktop Apps and Charts.
A: So, time and a strong team were definitely needed to develop Rows into being market-ready and the product that it is today.
H: Absolutely. We have two core assets: our spreadsheet platform, and the team who built it for four years now. Our product isn’t over, and neither is our team. Every week of every quarter we think about how best to do things: what are the challenges that will yield the best outcomes, how to solve them. We are very money conscious, but we experiment lavishly. For example, we have normal sprints, but have also done weeks where engineers and designers are the product owners, picking challenges and solving them in free form. Suffice to say, those weeks were a major success for everyone — teams, users, business. Then, management’s job is to pick those learnings and rethink how we can run a better company. These experiments and hard work are backed by our investors, who complement our talent. We couldn’t do anything without their excitement, loyalty — and money. Cherry, Accel, Lakestar, Armilar, they’re all a part of Rows now.
A: As you know, we at Armilar have been advocates for the low-code / no-code movement for a long time, which technologies like Rows’ take to a whole new level, enabling “citizen developers” to emerge — that was clearly part of our (and certainly others’) thesis investing in Rows. Can you comment on what your vision for Rows looks like, long-term?
H: In the long-term, we see Rows as the development interface for business teams. We are, first and foremost, a *translator*. The user manipulates simple elements & symbols that then get interpreted into powerful front-end and back-end components. Example: with a table and a handful of functions, you can create what is, in fact, a CRM. Each new element we add, say another function or a drop-down, compounds with the existing elements and opens up more new spreadsheet-apps you can build. Our 5-year vision is that Rows will become the spreadsheet that connects business to data and people. We hope to be the largest and easiest to use a collection of Integrations and first-party data on companies and places, so that users can fetch data about any business object instantly. Our spreadsheet sharing will empower teams to create new ways to sell their products and optimize operations. We are an everyday product: we want Rows to live on the docks and launchers of hundreds of thousands of users and teams.
So, we all have great expectations for Rows. Disrupting the established paradigm of spreadsheets is certainly no small order, but the company has the team, the product and the vision to achieve great things. If you’re wondering what the excitement is about, go to rows.com now and try it for yourself. Chances are the way you work will change for the better!
