I've been working in startups for the past 10 years and I know at least 2 successful companies I worked for started out as spreadsheets and a lot of manual labor.
Do you know of any other companies that started out as spreadsheets?
Here are some others I can link of:
• ZeroCater (reference: https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/06/how-i-started-zerocater/)
• Credo (reference: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297611)
Maybe not exactly what you meant, but my startup (sturppy.com) started because I didn't want to plan an idea that I had on a spreadsheet for the nth time.
Classic one : https://nomadlist.com/
YNAB! They have a very informative and creative content which makes them stand out compared to classic budget app.
Our startup (someka.net) started and still continues as a spreadsheet because we “sell” spreadsheets :)
You mean everything is managed by a spreadsheet, but that's not actually shown to users? I guess a lot are, thinking e.g. about a lot of the recommendation sites out there.
For other things that don't scale, we know Indie Hackers started as a podcast, Angel List as a blog for example.
Another good example of a spreadsheet-based startup is sheet2site.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.