2023 W43 - 1 year of Building in Public

Humberto

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

It's been a Year since I started Building in Public.

On that first post, I started by going over the biggest mistakes we've made at Rows. The top 2 mistakes still feel very actual, so I'll review them.

Mistake 1: Not investing enough in UX since the beginning. I'd say we have progressed a lot, and Rows is a far more polished product at v2 than it ever was, unrecognizable even. We now have great Data Tables, Pivots, complete Charts and Embeds. Our grid has never been as smooth. And, ofc, we launched our AI Analyst✨, which provides every one of our users with the best UX to analyze data: human language. On top of that, we polished many spreadsheet elements, introducing consistent actions and options menus. Oh, and we also killed our homepage, making Rows even more accessible and convenient. The result is that our flow is good for our users, and we see that in their success. (Alas, there's still lots to improve. Spreadsheets are f-ing hard. Just wait for v3!).
Mistake 2: Misunderstanding what it takes to succeed in the context of Integrations and Data. On that post, I talked about our journey to make data super simple. I would say this is where we have made the biggest strides in a year. Connecting an Integration and loading data has never been easier :). Rows lets you load your Notion, BigQuery, HubSpot or API data in no time, and we support you every step of the way!

It is all coming together.

And our speed isn't coming down.

This past week was also a flurry of hard and good things.

We travelled to London for a Board meeting with our investors. We produced alignment to where we are and the next steps.
For the first time, we got Rows.com to run inside another product. Not just an Embed of Charts and Tables, but the whole thing. This was super cool to try, and it builds on top of our experience with the loginless Instant Rows⚡️, and Embeds. It's just a first version, but soon we will see Rows in other places 😱.
We had upgrades. On the previous week we found 1 bug and 1 setup issue that were preventing some subscription upgrades to happen.. And we did a lot of user calls.
We continued launching improvements, such a better handling of hyperlinks, and more actions for the Notion Integration.

The result is that Rows is better than it ever was and we're growing. The market is still terrible, and there's 2 wars going on that make everyone nervous (and sad)(and mad).

2023 has been a very weird year.

I hope next year we can celebrate the 2nd birthday of building in public! Writing every week is quite the investment, but I am loving it. Send feedback on what you'd like us to talk about.

See you next week!

- Humberto