At what team size did spreadsheets stop working for you?
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I've been noticing an interesting pattern while talking with founders.
For very small teams, spreadsheets, chat, and memory seem to work surprisingly well.
Then something changes.
Not because people become less organized.
Because coordination becomes more expensive.
Suddenly you're answering questions like:
Who's actually working today?
Is everyone following the same process?
Where did this information come from?
Why are three different tools showing different numbers?
I'm curious where that tipping point was for everyone else.
Was it 10 people?
25?
50?
Or was it never about team size at all?
What was the first operational process that completely broke as your company grew?
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For me it was never about headcount, it was about how many businesses I was running at once. One business alone, spreadsheets held up fine even as the team grew. The moment I was running a software company, a care home, and a cafe at the same time, barely a handful of people total across all three, the same spreadsheets started lying to me. Not because the numbers were wrong, because I could not look at all three often enough to catch when they were. The first process that broke for me was follow up, not sales follow up specifically, just checking whether anyone had actually responded to anything. That gap is exactly why I ended up building FounderFlow, and why I am onboarding the first thirty founders myself instead of opening a public signup, the problem looks different for every business even when the spreadsheets look the same.
@stacywycof83995 That's a really interesting perspective. It shows that complexity doesn't always come from team size, but from juggling multiple businesses and constantly switching context.
I also like your point about spreadsheets "lying" because you don't have time to review them, not because the data is inaccurate. We've noticed something similar with Trackly. The biggest challenge usually isn't collecting data, it's making sure the right people have the visibility they need at the right time to act on it.
Looking forward to seeing what you learn from onboarding those first 30 founders. Those early conversations often shape the product more than anything else.
@shahroz_siddique right, visibility is the sharper way to put it. Collecting the data was never my problem either, across three businesses I had plenty of data, I just could not tell which piece of it needed me on a given morning. Trackly sounds like it is solving the same root gap from the team side instead of the multi-business side. I am one week into onboarding those thirty founders now, and what has surprised me most is how differently the same gap shows up for two businesses that look nearly identical on paper.