Table of Contents

Introduction

This article is about how our team built Turbosheets, a collaborative Spreadsheet editor that outperforms Google Sheets by achieving nearly 5x faster calculation speeds. We are gradually rolling out the product to users who signed up for early access, so do consider signing up on our website if you would find this product useful.

The idea for Turbosheets arose when our team was building Spendwyse, a tool that aimed to make it easier for Finance teams to access their SAAS billing data within Google sheets/Excel. During our customer feedback interviews, we noticed that our customers spent far more time complaining about Google Sheets rather than talking about our product itself.

This got us thinking - would it be possible to build a new spreadsheet editor for “pro” users that fixed some of the major issues people had with Excel and Google Sheets?

Pain Points

To start, we began by listing down the problems our customers mentioned most often:

Google Sheets

• Google Sheets slowed down significantly with datasets larger than 20,000 rows. Complex calculations contributed to this as well.
• Lacked Keyboard Shortcuts, which was especially felt by ex-Excel users
• Version History was decent, but could be improved - People seemed to want a more robust Version Control system that allowed for precise rollbacks, audit trail, etc.

Excel

• Shareability was still severely lacking compared to Google Sheets. Excel online was ubiquitously disliked, and the people we spoke to ended up downloading and sending Excel files to collaborate with teammates instead.
• Nearly non-existent Version Control and Audit Trail.

Success Criteria

Based on this, we concluded that the ideal spreadsheet for this customer segment had the following characteristics:

1. Files could be accessed and edited via web browser, so people could click on a link, and immediately get started with editing the spreadsheet.
2. It had to support a much larger number of cells than Google Sheets, and ideally offer Excel-like speeds while working on it.
3. It had to have a more comprehensive and powerful version control system.