How I Built a "Smart" Dashboard in Google Sheets to Automate My Startup's Expansion Strategy

Hey Indie Hackers,

Like many of you, I'm building a marketplace—a platform for travel experiences called ExperiaHub. And like many of you, I hit a classic scaling problem: I had too many options.

With nearly 200 countries in the world, where should I focus my time to find the best tour suppliers? Should I go for the country with the most tourists? The one with the coolest Instagram spots?

My initial strategy was pure guesswork. I had a messy spreadsheet and spent hours just staring at it, feeling overwhelmed. It was chaotic, inefficient, and definitely not data-driven. I knew I needed to build a system to tell me exactly where the highest potential return on my time was.

Here's the step-by-step story of how I turned that chaotic spreadsheet into an automated, strategic dashboard using only Google Sheets.

V1: The "Dumb" List
At first, I just had a list of countries and manually tracked how many suppliers I had in each. It was better than nothing, but it gave me zero strategic insight. It told me what I had, not where I should go next.

V2: The "Aha!" Moment - Finding the Right Metric
My first thought was to rank countries by the number of tourists they get each year. More tourists = more customers, right?

But that's a vanity metric. A country could have 50 million tourists, but if they are all budget backpackers who don't buy tours, it's a useless market for me.

The real breakthrough came when I switched my focus from Tourist Volume to Tourist Value—specifically, the "International Tourism Receipts." This number tells you how much money tourists are actually spending in a country.

I created my first real metric: the Opportunity Score. The formula was simple:

Opportunity Score = (Total Tourist Spend) / (Number of Suppliers I Have + 1)

This immediately flipped my priorities. Countries with high-spending tourists and few or zero suppliers in my system shot to the top of the list. I wasn't just looking for crowds anymore; I was looking for revenue.

V3: The Breakthrough - Making Tiers Smart with Percentiles
With the score, I tried to create priority tiers. I wrote a formula: "If the score is over 1 billion, call it 'Tier 1'."

It was a complete failure.

Because some countries (like the USA) have such massive tourism spending, their scores were astronomically high. The formula ended up labeling almost every country as "Tier 1 - Top Priority," which made the tiers useless.

After some frustration, I landed on a much smarter solution: percentiles.

Instead of using fixed numbers, I let the data define the tiers. I wrote a new formula that automatically identifies the top 15% of countries based on their scores and labels only them as Tier 1.

Here’s the Google Sheets formula that made it all work:

=IF(F2<=0, "No Data", IF(F2 >= PERCENTILE($F$2:$F$100, 0.85), "Tier 1 - Top Priority", IF(F2 >= PERCENTILE($F$2:$F$100, 0.50), "Tier 2 - High Potential", "Tier 3 - Monitor")))

This was the game-changer. My priority list was now dynamic and always relevant, no matter how the data changed.

V4: Making It Actionable
Finally, I added two features to make the dashboard truly operational:

Conditional Formatting: I set up a simple rule to color-code each row based on its tier—green for Tier 1, yellow for Tier 2, etc. Now I can see my priorities at a glance.

The "Action Dashboard": I created a new tab that uses a single QUERY formula to pull a clean to-do list. It automatically shows me only the Tier 1 countries that I haven't contacted yet, sorted by the highest opportunity.

=QUERY('Supplier Sourcing'!A:J, "SELECT A, H, I, J WHERE G = 'Tier 1 - Top Priority' AND H = 'Not Contacted' ORDER BY F DESC")

The Result
I've gone from hours of confused "analysis" each week to a focused, 10-minute planning session. I open the sheet, look at my "Action Dashboard," and I have my exact outreach list for the week.

My sourcing process is no longer based on feelings or guesswork. It's an automated system that consistently points me toward the highest-value opportunities.

Key Takeaways for Founders
Question Your Metrics: Don't just track what's easy. Find the metric that truly represents value for your business (for me, it was spend, not volume).

Automate Your Priorities: Don't just build a dashboard that shows you data; build one that tells you what to do next. The QUERY formula is your best friend here.

Use Percentiles, Not Fixed Numbers: If you're ranking a list of leads, markets, or channels, use percentiles to create dynamic tiers. It ensures your focus stays sharp.

You don't need expensive CRM software to build a smart system. Sometimes, a well-built spreadsheet is all you need to turn chaos into clarity.

Hope this helps someone else who's feeling stuck!