benmcredmond

Equals | https://equals.com | ONSITE (New York City) | Full-time | Software Engineers and Product Managers

We're building a new spreadsheet, connected to your Stripe, Salesforce and Hubspot data, and your SQL warehouse. We're used by companies like Notion, Intercom, Descript, Attio, and more.

I sincerely believe we have some of the most interesting technical work you'll find at a company of our size (17 people). Building a spreadsheet in the browser is hard!

For our PM role, you'll be our first PM and own a very very broad surface area.

Backed by A16Z and Craft. Team is ex-Intercom, Amazon, Meta, etc.

PM Role: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/equals/c936a100-5cf5-4f7b-8e65-ef94... Eng Role: not posted yet but email ben@equals.com if interested

Sorry, just seeing this. Yes, we can definitely help. Lots of customers with a background like that. Send me a mail ben@equals.com and we can set something up.

If this is something you're struggling with... It's one of the core use-cases we're solving for at Equals (https://equals.com).

We sync your Stripe data to a data warehouse and give you an MRR by customer by day table. You can use this table in our data connected spreadsheet to report on your business.

Hi! Author here. The principles are roughly ordered from start -> end of a project, with the exception of the last. Principle 6 is specifically about how something is built, the preceding ones are about what to build. I can see how it could be a bit unclear.

Total number of activations went down.

We aren't trying to hide anything, just tried to share a single number.

Hi HN, I’m one of the founders here at Equals.

We've been building Equals – a next gen spreadsheet with data connections – for a few years now. Making Equals fast is a constant stream of work and we've had to solve some pretty interesting problems, we thought it'd be fun to start sharing some of our learnings here.

Our most recent bottleneck was our formats system. The hard thing about formats in a spreadsheet is you can apply them to hundreds of thousands or millions of cells at once. Formats aren't just a presentation concern, they are also the spreadsheet's type system and thus affect the speed of all calculations. The linked post here is by Mike on our team describing the computer science behind how we finally made formats fast.

We shared one of our previous launches on Hacker News [1] and so thought this might be of interest too. Would love to hear any thoughts or feedback.

Ben

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805132

Hi HN, I’m Ben, one of the founders of Equals. Equals is a new spreadsheet with native connections to databases, data warehouses, and other data sources.

Today, we’re launching a new data source: CSVs. With this release, you can turn any CSV into a mini database, queryable with SQL or our query builder. This lets you use Equals with large internal or public datasets that we don’t have connections to. Once set up you can share your CSV “mini database” with anyone on your team, and upload new versions of the CSV over time.

Under the hood this feature is powered by DuckDB (https://duckdb.org/). We were impressed with performance and with how easy it was to build.

I shared our launch of dashboards (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805132) a couple of weeks ago. The feedback was super helpful.

We’re still early and would love any feedback from the community.

Ben

Few things I'll mention.

First, we have a generous free tier. The free tier includes all but two features, 3 editors, and unlimited viewers.

Beyond that, the main difference is that Equals is a full-featured spreadsheet. You have full Excel/Sheets compatible formulas, pivot tables, formatting, etc. Along with connections to all SQL databases and SaaS tools like Salesforce and Hubspot.

Today's launch adds the ability to build auto-updating dashboards on top of our spreadsheet – but, for example, should you want to do a deep dive on an anomaly on a dashboard, you can do that right in the same tool. Something that gets tricky after a certain point of complexity in tools like data studio.

We just redesigned this, so really glad to hear it resonates.

Thanks so much for the kind words and glad it resonates!

Joins are coming very very soon. Stay tuned.

If that's working, great!

Few differences I'd call out:

- If you have summary tables with formulas we'll auto-extend those tables as we see new periods in your data. e.g. If you have "revenue by month" calculated using SUMIFs on top of charge data and we see a new month, we'll copy your formulas down/across.

- Any charts based off those tables will also update. Sheets doesn't do either of these things.

- Finally, people who've switched from Sheets have found our query UX to have much tighter iteration loops by being more deeply integrated into the product.

Yep we easily connect to MSSQL and always from a static IP, so you should be able to whitelist. Our team will be happy to help if you run into any trouble.

Unfortunately we don't support signing in with MS365 accounts. But we do allow you to turn on "auto-join from my domain" so anyone with a verified email at your domain can automatically join your Equals account.

Send me an email ben@equals.app with what you need and I'll see what we can do.

Appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately we're unlikely to offer a white label solution, we're pretty focused on building for end users. You could check out our import scripts which let people build custom integrations with python/js: https://equals.app/integrations/import-scripts/.

Ah got it - yeah our free plan is very generous. Only limitations are 3 editors, scheduled queries, and saved queries. It can do everything else. Keep an eye out for updated GA in next few weeks.

Damn sorry about the broken link will fix that.

GA datasource is most primitive today, only supports unique pageviews. An expanded one is being built currently, will be out in a few weeks.

Could you share a bit more on #3?

Thanks!

Today we have a cap of 200k rows per sheet – this is a level where we feel performance is acceptable. We actually just doubled the limit from 100k and we have a plan to get to 1M rows by EOY. Definitely some meaty performance work here but it's tractable.

For SQL querying, you set up a connection to your SQL database in Equals and then we pass queries to your database. Query results are copied into the spreadsheet where you can use full spreadsheet formulas, pivots, etc. against it.

Filters within the sheet is something on our roadmap - don't have it just yet. But! You can use our visual Query Builder to let less technical users change the underlying data that your charts + tables are pulling from.

In terms of exporting the data, you can export to a CSV but typically you don't need to do this step to debug something. The biggest difference from Tableau is we are actually a full featured spreadsheet. You can do any investigation you want to do within Equals itself. When we want to go deeper on some dashboard we tend to make a copy of the document in Equals and dig in from there.

You could use an import script (https://equals.app/integrations/import-scripts/) to pull data from a custom API and enrich at the same time. Import scripts let you run any arbitrary code and have the result added to a spreadsheet.

Sorry to hear that. We don't have self-hosting yet and no timeline unfortunately.

We do have a few enterprise customers who were satisfied with our security after digging in. We're SOC 2 Type II, etc.

Hi HN, I’m Ben, one of the founders of Equals.

My co-founder and I started Equals to build the data tool we always wished we had as part of the early Intercom team. We found no matter which new BI tool we adopted, we’d ultimately end up back in a spreadsheet. Yet, we’d then come back to the BI tool for easy access to live data.

So - Equals is a spreadsheet with live data. Equals has native connections to databases, data warehouses, and other data sources. You can write SQL directly in the spreadsheet to pull in data from your database, or you can write Python/Javascript to pull data from any API. We launched the core Equals product about a year ago.

Today we’re launching Dashboards. With Dashboards you can hook in multiple data sources at once and build charts and tables that auto-expand. As your data updates, so does your spreadsheet and dashboard. We believe this is the simplest and most flexible tool for founders to stay on top of their business.

We’re still super early and so would love to hear your feedback on the product.

Ben