Fivetran (YC W13) launches spreadsheet for data analysis

Why do I need to give Fivetran access to my google accounts to try out their product? Eg, why can't I just enter my email account and click on the confirmation email for identity confirmation like every other service?

From the google page:

  Fivetran is requesting permission to:
    View basic information about your account
    View your email address

I don't know what 'View basic information about your account' means, but No Thanks.

My first thought was, "How is this different from all the other online power spreadsheets?" But then, buried in the footer of the homepage, I saw two very interesting links:

Unit Testing - "Finally, automated unit testing for Spreadsheets." [1]

Revision Control - "Revision Control For Spreadsheets. Track changes the way developers do." [2]

[1] https://www.fivetran.com/labs/spreadsheet-unit-testing

[2] https://www.fivetran.com/labs/spreadsheet-revision-control

How do you think you'll be able to compete with other BI tools? For example Tableau, has good table controls + lots of nice visualisations as add on? If you aren't competing in BI market, who do you think your target is, and why would they ditch Excel with PowerPivot and PowerView?

Listing your pricing tiers in terms of memory makes me nervous. I have no idea how number of rows/cells maps to memory requirements. It's completely opaque to me.

The Fivetran team has built an awesome product - I've been using the beta to play with some internal analytics data, and it hits a fantastic sweet spot between Excel, SQL, and R - it's a great way to explore a large data set.

Spreadsheet and sql data nut here. Signing up through Google is not the way to earn my trust to test this out. A simple login and password feels a lot more secure, and I would only test with that option. At least it is not Facebook.

The product looks and feels great, but I watched my co-founder (and CTO) get extremely frustrated at the new user walkthrough. He was trying to get it to stop walking him through the steps and did not succeed (he wanted to play with it on his own, not have his hand held), resulting in him closing the site.

While I understand the value of these walk-through for people who do not spend a lot of time in web applications (though you might argue that this is so similar to excel that pretty much everyone is familiar with the interface), you should strike a balance by allowing someone to easily kill the walk-through.

Congrats on launching. I am always excited to try new tools like this. The idea of having an intuitive way to save a series of steps in a spreadsheet interface without having to use macros or use R is definitely appealing.

I opened the March Madness example linked to on TC. I don't really understand how to trace what it is that has changed from one step to the next. Is there a simple way to do that? Is there another example you would recommend to understand how the steps work?

I am part of a (presumably small) minority of users who absolutely loathe dark screens with white text.

Usability issues aside, there are no examples about sales or operating expenses. Sales Analytics (think: product, division, type, time) are where companies are having a ton of trouble. I would spend more time on this rather than March Madness to acquire paying users.

Wingz, reborn yet again.