In 2020, I made it to track my own finances for income, expenses, savings, yearly summaries etc. I shared it once on Reddit, forgot about it for a year… When I checked back, it had over 130k views and I was honestly stoked!
No launch. No funding. No AI. Just a spreadsheet people actually stick with and find useful.
I finally gave it a proper home: write-it-down.com Now, more than 2,300 people use it.
It’s intentionally boring and that’s why it works.
People don’t always need AI. They just need something that actually solves their problem. This isn’t a billion-dollar startup of course, but it taught me more about building products than almost anything else.
Build something useful. Solve a real problem. Even if it’s just a simple spreadsheet.
So, what’s the most “boring” thing you’ve built that found unexpected traction?
Lately I’ve been exploring smaller, simpler projects like this one. I usually build backend systems (currently at Browser Use, funny enough).
This spreadsheet started as a personal finance tracker during COVID and somehow turned into something people actually wanted to use.
The biggest lesson for me: People don’t care how “advanced” something is, they just want it to work and make their life easier.
Curious to hear what you all think.
In any case, didn't feel like it when writing haha.
Do you know why it sounds like that?
Neither do I.
It's a feeling.
I just wanted to share something I have built for myself and other people seem to like it!
While the world was doing Y, I was doing Z.
Everyone’s doing X. I’m quietly [ChatGPT loves that word] doing Y.
People don’t X. They Y. It’s not about Z. It’s about W, and it taught me everything/means everything to me/utterly transformed me/etc.
Do X. Do Y. Even if it’s just Z.
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I agree that putting your personal data into a free Google account indeed isn't a risk of sharing it with third parties. It is a guarantee.
If you use Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube etc, you already share a lot with Google; this spreadsheet is unlikely to make any different. If have managed to de-Google your life, good for you. Don't use this product either.
Other finance apps (I used to use mint.com before they shut down) require direct connections with your bank and investment accounts, generally via Plaid or Yodlee, and sometimes directly. This product avoids all that.
Now I personally don't think it's useful to me, since there are just too many expenses to keep track of, and doing it manually is too much work for me to even attempt. But privacy to Google would be pretty low on my list of concerns when using a spreadsheet.
Obviously if a product/idea is good enough it can go 'viral' on its own with little prodding, but I'm curious about the discussion behind that post and how it may have taken on a life of its own.
Did most start using it when it was a free spreadsheet linked to a reddit post or have the 2300 users all bought the $4.99 product?
Has there been a change in take-up since you monetised it?
Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.
Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.
Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.
Popular culture has always been easy to influence. We had blockchain hype, OOP hype, AI hype, Microservices hype, we had so many and they were ALL mostly a fad that resulted in yet-another-tool in the toolbelt of engineers -- nothing more, nothing less.
Good on you for using the right tools to build a new thing!
Codegen AI is great for tab-complete. It does save typing, and it is pretty smart, but you still have to have an engineer in the seat that is paying attention and knows what they're doing.
Video AI on the other hand is already disrupting Hollywood. The costs are 10,000x cheaper, the delivery time is 100,000x faster, and it's accessible with 1,000x less personnel. These are insane numbers. Multiple orders of magnitude - full step function change - across multiple dimensions at once.
You still need to have an editor and VFX person to make video AI work, and you still need to incorporate photon-on-glass footage, but it's remarkable how usable these tools are.
A small studio with five people can use AI tools to do serious work that would ordinarily take 100 people or more and require huge budgets.
This isn't just hypothesizing - I work in this industry. This is not only myself, but this is dozens of the studios I talk to and work with.
Just to cite one example, there's a studio I know that used to bid $300k on projects. You've seen their work - they do Netflix show intro sequences, pharmaceutical ads, etc. They're now bidding just $50k and winning projects left and right.
I think the biggest area of AI investment and disruption is going to be video AI.
Baffling.
Same with microservices or misusing HTML to make UIs instead of documents etc.