Ask HN: Normal to get to 40K users with just spreadsheets? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Normal to get to 40K users with just spreadsheets?

15 pointsqqq001843887117 comments

(Throwaway because you'd probably know which company it is if you saw my regular account.)

Joining a Series A company as their principle engineer (<10 people) and their product is used by 40K users. Their entire stack is in spreadsheets. Origin story is that it started as a prototype, and grew from there. It's all maintained really well, and the "glue" is in a normal programming language, but I can't help but ponder... how common is this?

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Spreadsheets, common. "maintained really well", not so common, so that's great!

Congratulations, you joined a very resourceful company that was able to concentrate ruthlessly on their product-market fit by leveraging the tech that they knew.

Now you can take all the spreadsheets and the glue code, and then cover the entire system with behavioural end-to-end tests.

Then you get to pick one part at a time and develop a replacement with a more standard stack, keeping the old and new part running in parallel, looking for differences in behaviour in order to discover functionality hidden in the spreadsheets and add to your test suite.

Then when it's all done you have a great story to tell about how you took a startup that had a great product-market fit but an unorthodox stack and migrate it to something that let the company hire from a more accessible pool of devs.

This 1 million percent!

There is a real danger someone will come in, shout a lot and say the answer is to now re-write it all or buy in a system, maybe even outsource it to save money.

Don't fall for it - have good tests and incrementally improve what doesn't work - don't listen to dreams of how easy life will be "if only you had a good system" - what you have works, and has scaled to 40k users - past that who knows but you can always copy/mirror everything you have and support 80k users etc.

I think it is a good example that it is the fact that customers WANT IT that is important.

A lot of people here are technical and of course are concerned with technology, but it doesn't matter how right you do with the tech if the customer's don't want it... and to some extent it doesn't matter how WRONG you get the tech if your customers are happy / want it.

I work at a place where spreadsheets aren't "powering" things but they're certainly how some folks think about things and ... that's not so bad really as spreadsheets are pretty amazing.

It is undeniably impressive to get so far with something that was largely perfected in 1999. Cheers to more people realizing that!

With modern tech, running everything in spreadsheets is more plausible as you can 'scale out' buy buying more compute power. Depending on the product it might be the right thing to do.

If you are storing data and logic both in the spreadsheet this could be tricky in terms of upgrading logic which would need to be done carefully across all the sheets.

But if you have a master spreadsheet with formulas, load it in memory, fill it with data and ask it for an answer, then well you are just running a function using a different technology and there isn't a problem (other than it would be more efficient in say Python probably ... but if you are charging enough compute is cheap).

I've seen it in a product that made several millon dollars a year. I was horrified. You'd be shocked at how far you can get with a product that simply solves the problem no matter the tech stack.

At some level, were you amazed though? I feel like people in places like /r/learnprogramming should be linked stories like this whenever they post "should I learn python or java".

What would someone learn from this which would help them make the decision about which language would be better for helping them understand how to write software?

Maybe it would broaden their perspective of the possibilities? If you can solve million dollar problems even with spreadsheets, then maybe the choice between these two commonly-used problem solving tools is not that big of a deal? Just pick one or the other and focus on honing your problem-solving skills!

I used to work for organizations that used BI software like Qlikview and SSRS. I got an ostensibly non-technical job where the only software I was provided with was MS Office, and I am just amazed at how much of the stuff I used to do with Perl, Oracle, Qlikview, etc. can be done with Access/Excel/VBA.

Most Fortune 500 companies are built on spreadsheets, so I’d say it’s pretty common ...

But honestly it also shows how unimportant tech stacks can be vs. the almighty product/market fit.

The thing that I always find frustrating about using spreadsheets (well, Excel) is that it's difficult to prevent unwanted invisible characters and automatic type/format changes from wreaking havoc. I generally resort to exporting to text and using regular expressions to clean spreadsheets that I'm given.

You can do a remarkable amount with MS Access and VBA though.

So are they hiring you to transition them to a real database?

Yeah. They've gotten this far being lean; but there's something things that are hard and cumbersome to do with sheets.

No kidding!

How do they do authentication?

Firebase. They had a couple contractors do some good things up-front (auth, domain, some DB work) so that they can do the rest in sheets, which takes a certain type of technical wisdom. Wisdom to know where to draw the boundaries of the business-logic sandbox is quite admirable.

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