What We’ve Been Up To Since Hitting the Hacker News Frontpage
About 6 months ago, Gridmaster landed on the frontpage of Hacker News. At the time, the product was a way to learn spreadsheet skills right inside of a web browser.
The most popular bit of feedback we got from the HN community was clear: users don’t want to learn a web-based spreadsheet tool, they want to learn Microsoft Excel.
What we’re now building is like Codeacademy for Excel. And the last few months have moved us closer to that goal of being the best way of learning Excel.
Today: We’re Launching an Excel Add-In
The web-based demo used an open source Javascript library called Handsontable. It was a great way of getting users started with spreadsheet skills.
However, we kept running into limitations of what was possible with Handsontable. We were constantly implementing fixes just to imitate Excel’s functionality.
The combination of feedback and limitations made the path forward clear: build Gridmaster to work with Excel.
Today, we’re launching an Excel Add-In version for learning Excel. This installs directly inside of Excel and lives in the sidebar. Even the video lessons play inside of Excel.
Best of all, the lessons will populate a spreadsheet with exercises for the user to complete. We’ve implemented a way to check answers that lets the user move onto the next lesson when they’ve written formulas correctly.
We’re confident that moving Gridmaster to an Excel approach will help build a sustainable, bootstrapped business that will be useful to companies and employees that want to build Excel skills to advance.
We Won a Microsoft Contest
There’s a bit more to the story of how and why we switched to an Excel add-in. In January, we found a Devpost contest sponsored for Microsoft. This contest was basically a call for productivity software that worked with Office 365.
In the last few years, Office products like Excel and Outlook have really evolved. They now have entire “app ecosystems” that let you extend the functionality of the app. We saw a lot of opportunity for how Gridmaster could work, directly inside of Excel itself.
In a little over a month, we hustled to rewrite Gridmaster as an Excel add-in. There were a ton of great entries, so we were surprised when we won 3rd place! This contest win brought some much needed exposure, connection to Microsoft, and a cash prize to help us keep building Gridmaster.
Best of all, this contest proved that we could collaborate remotely and sprint to a major release.
The Team Doubled
After seeing the post on Hacker News, I (Andrew Childress reached) out about the project. I work in finance by day and, by extension, Excel all day.
I also teach Excel and other skills for Envato Tuts+. Gridmaster caught my eye as a new way to teach and train people on the skills they need to advance their careers.
After a few Skype calls and discussions later, it was clear that I wanted to work with Bryan long term on the project.
Joining the team doubled the size of Gridmaster, bringing the total team to two. 😀
What’s Next
We already have several other courses in the works and a product roadmap to keep improving the add-in. We’ll be launching another course soon on the AVERAGE function in Excel.
If you have any feedback for us, feel free to reach out at info (at) gridmaster.io or join our mailing list to stay up to date.
