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Comment by darkhorse13 | Hacker News Reader

How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and companies trying to compete in this space.

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We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.

> We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.

Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All the best.

[0] database is the app?

We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database hosting early on in development, but it was super janky. Might look into this again in the future.

I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.

There is no way that my current organization would buy this, but it would free up a lot of developer hours if customer support or even operations analysts could do this instead of needing a dev every time they wanted to run a custom report.

I would be really interested in knowing why your organization will not buy this. I am the founder of a product in the same space, not launched, not in YC. But it is open core and on-premise and will integrate deeply with existing business logic with APIs or RPC. So I am really curious.

I can think of a few:

- Companies where editing the dB can have a large impact (eg banks) - Companies affected by privacy regulations (eg GDPR) - Companies where outages are expensive (eg Operations systems) - Companies where the database is valuable and export risk is high (eg customer data).

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