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Comment by krm01 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve built http://upstart.me entirely on Google Sheets. Haven’t had any issues and works really well. This allows me to collect data from newsletter through a Google Form - which gets stored in a Sheet - that I can then curate, copy & paste to an other sheet that is used as the DB for the Live website.

Im also working on an internal CRM tool for http://fairpixels.pro with a sleek frontend that can be used as a browser homepage (showing key business stats) all while the same Sheet is used to manage customers.

I highly recommend looking into this because it allows for a simple to manage backend for those that live in Sheets.

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We were recently considering quick prototyping using Google Forms but ran into two key limitations:

(1) Getting a _validated_ email address of the submitter. It does support an email field, but makes it a free-form text input with no way of enforcing ownership of that email.

(2) Pre-populating some of the fields when we send the user to a form via a link. Without this, the user ends up filling the fields even though they have already submitted that information in another form.

Are there any powerful (forms + spreadsheet) products out there that solve these (and are cheaper than, say, AirTable) ?

(2)

Calcapp may be what you're looking for. You can validate text fields using regular expressions and there's an example of how to validate an e-mail address here: https://www.calcapp.net/learn/beyond-numbers.html#validating.... Fields can be pre-populated with either values you know ahead-of-time or through Excel-like formulas.

(I'm a co-founder of Calcapp.)

> enforcing ownership of that email.

I believe the GP was talking more about "click here to confirm your account" type validation, not "does it have an @ in it".

You can generate URLs that pre-fill Google Forms, they're just ugly and have the all the pre-fill in the URL as query parameters

Yes. We can make one in 30 minutes with https://qbix.com/platform . But what is the goal of this? I want to understand since it sounds like you need real PROFILES for reusable personal data.

If you're using React, I wrote this short tutorial on how to use Google Sheets in React apps: https://appendto.com/2018/08/the-simple-stack-a-primer-on-us...

I like Upstart, can you give me an idea of the price range to sponsor a data science newsletter? e.g. cost per impression.

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