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Did you figure out why customers would leave? I've been thinking about doing something in the "most people use a spreadsheet" space and hearing that people went back to it after a year of using a dedicated product is a little worrying.



I have a similar story - one of our products at $DAYJOB is a kind of CRM/ERP SaaS for a specific niche.

It pays its way, but at a huge cost of time spent on support and maintenance. When non-trivial feature requests come in, we can't feasibly drop everything else for long enough to implement it. We signal this by asking the customer to pay a lot (compared to our SaaS subscription price). Usually this dissuades them.

Every so often, we lose a customer -> support dies down -> we can add some real direction and features to the product -> we gain more customers -> we get swamped under support and maintenance. The cycle continues. I don't know what the solution is.

With spreadsheets, the customer can always fall back to cobbling together a new report or visualization by themselves.


It was hard to get all the company to use it. If you use it just for small subset than it is not that valuable.

Say you are tracking work done in vineyard, but nothing else. Then your calculation of price of produce is off, because you havent add the price of input. There are multiple roles in the company and they are usualy using they own systems for reporting.

Also quite a lot of production tracking have to be done on paper using special notepad with marked pages (another funny story) and people dont want to do this bookkeeping twice.




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