GRID is now officially out of Beta, and our Pro Plan commercially available.
This is obviously a major milestone for any company, so I decided to jot down some reflections on the journey so far — and where we’ll go from here.
It’s been 2.5 years since two of us founders sat down in a small office here in Reykjavik and started typing away on our keyboards. $16.5 million in raised capital (most of which we still have at our disposal), 23 additional employees and more than 1000 deployments later (yes, we looked it up), we felt ready for prime time.
What took so long?
A friend wrote back on launch day with this exact question, and despite it being tongue-in-cheek it’s a fair one. Most startups nowadays release an MVP as soon as possible and iterate from there.
Well, firstly it’s not like we’ve been developing in a void. It’s 2 years since we let the first set of 10 alpha users in, watching in some horror as they struggled to get anything done. Through the stages of invite-only Beta, survey-based gating and eventually an open Beta we’ve gradually learned from more than 12,000 users that have signed up to give the product a spin. They have taught us not only about how to make the product more approachable and user-friendly, but also about the problems people are looking to solve, where they really see value in what we’ve built and how we should talk about our own product.
Secondly, we’ve had to solve some hard technical problems along the way. Getting those right takes time — but at the same time that has put us in a unique position to build on moving forward. The three key areas of innovation have been the following:
- Our own, complete, Excel-compatible spreadsheet engine. As one of our developers so elegantly put it: “It’s one of those rare software projects where there is real computer science involved!”This engine can run entirely in the browser (which is what allows for the super-fast interaction) and is arguably the most advanced JavaScript-based spreadsheet engine in existence. It provides us with a fantastic foundation to not only embrace existing spreadsheet models, but extend the capabilities to allow our users to do more leveraging their existing assets (spreadsheets) and skills. More on that later!
- A user-friendly WYSIWYG editor that enables every-day knowledge workers to build a wide variety of documents on top of the engine, ranging from long-form reports to embedded calculators. Editors are hard, and this is probably where the biggest effort has gone. In preparation for the launch, we totally redesigned the editor UI, and as a result have seen a major improvement in the success rates of first-time users. Making things simple can be very complicated!
- Seamless synchronization with cloud based spreadsheets through OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. Any changes made to spreadsheets stored in one of these services get immediately reflected in GRID documents built on top of them, so that as an author you can trust that your audience is always looking at the latest data. No need for re-imports or tedious copy-paste of anything.
GRID’s editor in action
And how did it go?
We’re very happy with the launch.
After silently releasing everything on Monday night, someone jumped the gun and we had our first paying customer all the way from Australia well before the official launch announcement on Tuesday morning. That meant we were no longer pre-revenue:
The launch activities have already grown our signed-up user base by more than 10%, and there’s more in stock for next week. The real measure of success however will be how well we’ve set things up to make these users successful so that they will make some great GRID documents, share them and in turn bring in new users — the key behavior to any product-led growth strategy.
As for paying users, we have modest expectations for the first few weeks, but it seems clear that most of them will convert based on the “embedded calculator” case, i.e. the fact that with GRID, any spreadsheet user can build a web UI on top of their existing spreadsheets and embed in their
own websites.
We’ll be creating a lot more material and getting-started examples, focusing quite a lot on this use-case commercially over the next couple of months.
As for what’s next for the product, we’ll be shifting our focus closer to the horizon now. I’ll be posting more on that soon.
Gratitude
It almost goes without saying, but I am extremely thankful to all the people that have made this possible: Our advisors, investors, mentors and others we’ve met on the way and have been instrumental in getting this far.
Most of all though I’m thankful to the incredible team we’ve managed to put together. From engineering and design to growth and operations, there simply isn’t a weak link in this group.
We were lucky enough to be able to go out following the launch on Tuesday to celebrate. We even popped a champagne-bottle (and a volcano) in celebration:
