We tried a bunch of other solutions, but the needless complexity and apparent inflexibility was just not worth the time investment to understand and bend to our needs.
We're handling several dozen business contacts this way. Eventually we broke out potential investors into their own spreadsheet. We'll break out potential hires into another. Hopefully customers will overflow the pipeline soon, so then we can re-evaluate solutions then.
In the mean time, I think this is a key lesson for a lot of startups: the path of least resistance is very, very attractive. The world is run on spreadsheets, for a very good reason. In general, they simply get the job done without much fanfare. They might not be ideal, but then again no tool is.
Spreadsheets let me stash some data, slice and dice it, and provide a moderately painless migration route to more specialized tools when necessary.
As far as I'm concerned, every single productivity software product today needs to first solve the problem of "How will we be two orders of magnitude better than Excel/Gmail/Word/PowerPoint/Notepad/Horizontal-Productivity-Tool. Not one order of magnitude: two. That's how much it takes to overcome the activation energy to use something other than the defaults.
Also, realize that if you are a programmer, then you are not normal. Normal people use MS Office for pretty much everything. I've got enough empirical evidence of that to consider it pretty much fact at this point.
We're handling several dozen business contacts this way. Eventually we broke out potential investors into their own spreadsheet. We'll break out potential hires into another. Hopefully customers will overflow the pipeline soon, so then we can re-evaluate solutions then.
In the mean time, I think this is a key lesson for a lot of startups: the path of least resistance is very, very attractive. The world is run on spreadsheets, for a very good reason. In general, they simply get the job done without much fanfare. They might not be ideal, but then again no tool is.
Spreadsheets let me stash some data, slice and dice it, and provide a moderately painless migration route to more specialized tools when necessary.
As far as I'm concerned, every single productivity software product today needs to first solve the problem of "How will we be two orders of magnitude better than Excel/Gmail/Word/PowerPoint/Notepad/Horizontal-Productivity-Tool. Not one order of magnitude: two. That's how much it takes to overcome the activation energy to use something other than the defaults.
Also, realize that if you are a programmer, then you are not normal. Normal people use MS Office for pretty much everything. I've got enough empirical evidence of that to consider it pretty much fact at this point.