How much of your "AI-native" stack is still just an Excel spreadsheet?
I'll go first. We're an AI company and we pitch ourselves as AI-native, but I still run a chunk of the business out of plain Excel spreadsheets I'd never put in a deck.
Fundraising tracker? Spreadsheet. Early pricing models? Spreadsheet. Half the "analytics" I do before something becomes a real dashboard? A messy .xlsx I delete later.
There's this gap between how teams describe their stack and what they actually open at 11pm to get the answer. The pitch is agents and pipelines and a modern data warehouse. The reality is someone exporting a CSV and pasting it into a tab named "final_v3_REAL".
And I don't even think that's a failure. The spreadsheet is fast, flexible, and nobody needs onboarding. It's usually the quickest path from "I have a question" to "I have an answer," which is the whole point.
It's a big enough pattern that we just launched Basedash for Excel around it, so you can drop the .xlsx in and get dashboards out instead of pretending the file doesn't exist. Building it made me a lot more honest about my own habits.
So be honest with me: what's the least glamorous, most spreadsheet-shaped part of your "modern" stack that's secretly doing the heavy lifting?
Replies
We've incorporated spreadsheets natively into our app through Salestrics Workspace, which solves a lot of the issues mentioned.
However, I'd say my least-glamorous spreadsheet-shaped portion of my scope is my product plan, which has around 4k rows of tasks dating back to when Salestrics was a completely different project.
Me I didn't even use it secretly I used it fully when creating my database afterall it will be source of all information in my software solving the issue of poor connectivity in village hospital and difficult code maintenance due to hard coded information.
my pricing model is a google sheet named "pricing v7 ACTUAL.xlsx" that founders update at 11pm before investor meetings. notion has the "official" version. nobody opens that one.
confession: customer onboarding is a csv pulled from postgres pasted into airtable manually every monday. been promising to automate it "next quarter" for 3 quarters running.
the funniest one: our north star metric dashboard runs in retool but the underlying SQL is just a saved query pinned in our team slack from 18 months ago. nobody has touched it since.
the spreadsheet isn't the failure mode. the failure mode is pretending you don't have one.
I've been leaning more on my AI-native platform, but sometimes it just comes down to Google Sheets.
Fast, efficient and familiar.