$6.6 million in venture capital. That's nothing compared to Microsoft's budget for Office development, I guess, but a small team can work wonders.

Will be interesting to see if anything comes from it.

Personally, Apple Numbers is a better model than Excel and all spreadsheets are equal powerhouses for data - once you let Easy Data Transform do the heavy lifting.

This had me scratching my head for a bit. Here's an article for some context.

https://wraptext.equals.app/equals-seed/

Starting price of $250 per month (includes 10 seats, but there appears to be no option for individual users)

https://equals.app/pricing/

Another online spreadsheet startup that's caught my eye recently is Causal: https://www.causal.app/

It seems to share a lot of similarities with Equals and is available in a free pricing tier for personal use.

Well, here is the danger of posting on the Internet while taking calls.

I remember shortly after hitting "post" I saw a second browser open to outlinersoftware.com. I must have started in one window, rewrote in another, and posted the wrong version.

Thank you, Jaslar, for filling in the blanks.

Hah, I've done that. It wouldn't have been the first time everybody else knew what the post was about, and I didn't. Thanks for the update!

There is no way that Equals is going to replace Excel for 99.99% of Excel users. 0.01% of Excel users be might still be a market worth pursuing though.

Andy Brice wrote:

There is no way that Equals is going to replace Excel for 99.99% of
Excel users. 0.01% of Excel users be might still be a market worth
pursuing though.

Microsoft Office excel has from 750 million to 1.2 billion active monthly users. Google Suite, which includes Google Sheets is used by approximately 2 billion users every month, although they don't break down Sheets usage. (But last year, Google’s educational program alone accounted for 70 million users of G Suite.) It probably wouldn't be out of line to say that Sheets has about a quarter of the usage of Excel.

So if a bulletproof free app like Sheets (or LibreOffice Calc, or Zoho Office Sheet) won't dissuade Excel users (through features like specialized macros, or by dint of corporate torpidity) it's unlikely that a small pay competitor with unknown future financing and stability will be able to pull away and substantial customer base.

Is it really a market worth pursuing? If you can get funded sure, but that funding tends to dry up quickly then the pressure is on to sell to someone or shut down. If you're going against behemoths like Microsoft, Google and Zoho's free and pay alternatives (remember, Using Microsoft Excel and other core Office programs is free via the web) you'd better have a plan upfront to pay for development *and* grab paying customers. I don't see this being a particularly viable business to be in, though I could see it being a typical VC funding play to get something ready for market and flipping it to some sucke... I mean business that thinks they can integrate the product into their own pay-suite.

Ridiculous. Nothing is going to replace Excel. Or Word, for that matter. It's what people use. Of course there always is a fringe that will rock the sheets with Equal, or its equally trendy predecessors/successors, but the key word is fringe.

Good luck to Equal, though. Innovation is ever welcome. If history is any guide, however, useful features of Equal likely will find their way into future versions of Excel, either directly or via add-in.

I don’t see this being a particularly viable business to be in

It certainly isn't a business that I would like to be in!

The main competitor to all 3 of my products (PerfectTablePlan, Hyper Plan and Easy Data Transform) is probably Excel. But I am only trying to replace Excel for specific tasks (table planning, task planning, data transformation). I'm definitely not trying to replace Excel completely.

See also:
https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies

Andy Brice

It makes complete sense to develop software that does *one* thing better than the market leader. But developing software to replace the market leader, as the creators of Equal have attempted to do, and then charging $250 for a license, smacks of lunacy.

Andy Brice wrote:

I don’t see this being a particularly viable business to be in

It certainly isn't a business that I would like to be in!

The main competitor to all 3 of my products (PerfectTablePlan, Hyper
Plan and Easy Data Transform) is probably Excel. But I am only trying to
replace Excel for specific tasks (table planning, task planning, data
transformation). I'm definitely not trying to replace Excel completely.

See also:
https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies

Andy Brice