SheetDream

The aforementioned React.js update is coming along! It's not available yet for just anyone, but I'm allowing folks to pre-signup for it and they will get access to the feature once it is available before anyone else.

The central idea around it is that SheetDream will generate a complete Material UI style (ala GMail) interface around your sheets or tables. It will ask you a few questions about your data, analyze the relationships between your tables, and basically try to make sense of your app from the structure of your data in your sheets. From there, it makes an informed decision and creates a full administrative app using a Material UI style interface.

After the code gets generated you can edit/test it on CodeSandbox, tweak the configuration and/or code, and when you're ready you can deploy from there to Netlify (or download a ZIP containing all of the code).

I'll be creating a video around the process when the feature is fully baked. It's a truly rapid development process: you can feed SheetDream your sheets/tables and generate a fully functioning CRUD app in under 10 minutes.

The way I see it: SheetDream gets you to the 10 yard line of the opposing team, and lets you be the one to throw the touchdown. We make the base of the cake, you get to do the icing.

In other news, I'm working on an exciting new use case around using a combination of Airtable, SheetDream and WordPress for managing assets (images, videos, GIFs) used in helping the user onboarding process: images and screenshots used for documentation, tutorials, instructional articles.

I spent a little time before the holiday break adding in and tweaking an email series that gets sent to customers. Looking forward to using it to gather better user feedback and engaging more with users who sign up.

One request that a power customer has been asking about is the ability to produce single page apps from Airtable or Google Sheets.

This has been something I've wanted to look into since initially starting the project, and I'm actively exploring it now to see what it will look like. So far it seems feasible, though I will need to work out what the UI will look like for this sort of thing as it's more complex than what is needed for simple Handlebars.js/Bootstrap code generation.

I think the appeal of this sort of thing is to be able to get a Stacker/Softr-like app built against your Airtable or Google Sheets -- but to also have full ownership of the source code, so that you can pass things off to a developer to tweak and extend from there. Seems totally reasonable to me: those platforms have a significant amount of functionality but the devil is in the details, and often times you want to do something a little bit different.

Development and feature work has slowed a bit as I've been more focused on the marketing aspects of the product. Launching all the socials, tweaking the landing page, doing some content marketing by building a number of example use cases, etc.

I actually wound up using SheetDream to solve a problem I was having while working on content marketing material: the product UI was changing at such a rapid pace that screenshots were quickly becoming out of date. It was becoming difficult to keep track of which screenshots need to be updated on which page.

So I was able to leverage SheetDream, a special table in Airtable, and a little HTML/CSS to quickly build an internal tool to review all images used in our use cases and marketing materials and quickly mark the ones that need to be replaced.

This little tool has already saved me hours of time and it only took me like an hour to put together.

Super exciting time!

A handful of our existing beta customers have converted to paying customers. It's exciting to see that they've seen enough value with SheetDream to vote with their wallet.

It's so fun being involved with them and helping them grow their own MVPs.

At my previous employer I worked at, the last project I worked on fell to the old "early adopter flocking" scenario that every startup or product manager fears: you attract initial attention because of the cool factor, but it's just not enough to make them open up their wallets and cast their vote of approval.

Seeing SheetDream get past this and have a bit more stickiness with our initial beta customer base is huge.

Obviously nothing is ever totally complete in the software world.

But this is the first stretch of time where I can sense SheetDream's beta customers are very satisfied with the product: and the product as a whole just feels fairly well rounded (for an MVP at least).

Everything from documentation, marketing materials, code, processes.. it's feeling much more organized now!

I got my first several beta customers who are interested in the product: so now we enter the validation phase for SheetDream.

It's been a pretty wild ride getting here, from starting the product for my own needs in May, to eventually realizing this is something others wanted, and to eventually leaving my 9-5 to focus on this effort full time!