2023 W42 - That Sale

Humberto

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

I am publishing this post very late. My co-founder Torben and I were traveling and I couldn't finish it on time. Better late than never.

So, last week we closed a special sale. It's a custom contract with a company that needs a bit of power beyond what our plans offer out of the box.

This is what happened:

They reached out to us, to see if we could help them.
Their specific need is a spreadsheet simulation at scale. Think of a business model that needs to be called via API thousands of times.
They already had a supplier for their need, but thought we might solve it better. "Better" in this context means faster go-to-live, which reduces the cost to both parties (Setup, Migration, User Success).
Torben did a bunch of checks and tests with them. He also produced a live video demo of a form calling the API, and the results getting sent to a log. This video was good and I think a good assistant in making our case. Detail: A Rows spreadsheet with a Form calls another Rows spreadsheet, via the API, and then the data gets parsed, the model is triggered, and the whole simulation including inputs and outputs gets stored in a spreadsheet table.
Eventually we got to something that solves their use case. We signed a contract with their business parameters (higher usage of API, support etc).
Then we got back to work!

As a product-led company, I don't think we should take on "all" potential custom contracts. The reasons why this particular contract makes sense are:

Classic spreadsheet terrain; business models require many variables, frequently they're non-tabular, and then there's flexibility, inspectability, and upgrades, which typically are better served by spreadsheets; and
Needs a very connected spreadsheet that offers APIs, services, forms and embeds out of the box. This is for building, testing and deploying a solution. This is what we're all about! Our mission is to Build tools that offer Computation to everyone, or simply "to give everyone engineering super-powers"; and
The special needs of this user fit well into our natural rollout, and so they incentivize us to be even better and faster at what we do; and
The client team was fast and knew what they wanted. This wasn't a months long process, it took days from start to sign.

This effort will reinforce our competitiveness!

See you next week!

- Humberto