Equals | https://equals.com | ONSITE (New York City) | Full-time | Software Engineers and Product Managers

We're building a new spreadsheet, connected to your Stripe, Salesforce and Hubspot data, and your SQL warehouse. We're used by companies like Notion, Intercom, Descript, Attio, and more.

I sincerely believe we have some of the most interesting technical work you'll find at a company of our size (17 people). Building a spreadsheet in the browser is hard!

For our PM role, you'll be our first PM and own a very very broad surface area.

Backed by A16Z and Craft. Team is ex-Intercom, Amazon, Meta, etc.

PM Role: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/equals/c936a100-5cf5-4f7b-8e65-ef94... Eng Role: not posted yet but email ben@equals.com if interested

If this is something you're struggling with... It's one of the core use-cases we're solving for at Equals (https://equals.com).

We sync your Stripe data to a data warehouse and give you an MRR by customer by day table. You can use this table in our data connected spreadsheet to report on your business.

Would equals be simple enough for a staff member with limited accounting and tech background who has been putting simple revenue, churn, product trend reports together by hand using our stripe data? If so, how can we reach out to schedule a meeting to discuss?

Sorry, just seeing this. Yes, we can definitely help. Lots of customers with a background like that. Send me a mail ben@equals.com and we can set something up.

Hi! Author here. The principles are roughly ordered from start -> end of a project, with the exception of the last. Principle 6 is specifically about how something is built, the preceding ones are about what to build. I can see how it could be a bit unclear.

Thanks! There's probably another article on the trade-offs between 6 and the other items.

Item 6 jumped out to me because many people would interpret it as waterfall process which doesn't appear to be what you are trying to encourage.

I liked how you put things in your article.

Aside: my personal definition of good engineering is making the right compromises.

Total number of activations went down.

We aren't trying to hide anything, just tried to share a single number.

Hi HN, I’m one of the founders here at Equals.

We've been building Equals – a next gen spreadsheet with data connections – for a few years now. Making Equals fast is a constant stream of work and we've had to solve some pretty interesting problems, we thought it'd be fun to start sharing some of our learnings here.

Our most recent bottleneck was our formats system. The hard thing about formats in a spreadsheet is you can apply them to hundreds of thousands or millions of cells at once. Formats aren't just a presentation concern, they are also the spreadsheet's type system and thus affect the speed of all calculations. The linked post here is by Mike on our team describing the computer science behind how we finally made formats fast.

We shared one of our previous launches on Hacker News [1] and so thought this might be of interest too. Would love to hear any thoughts or feedback.

Ben

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805132

Hi HN, I’m Ben, one of the founders of Equals. Equals is a new spreadsheet with native connections to databases, data warehouses, and other data sources.

Today, we’re launching a new data source: CSVs. With this release, you can turn any CSV into a mini database, queryable with SQL or our query builder. This lets you use Equals with large internal or public datasets that we don’t have connections to. Once set up you can share your CSV “mini database” with anyone on your team, and upload new versions of the CSV over time.

Under the hood this feature is powered by DuckDB (https://duckdb.org/). We were impressed with performance and with how easy it was to build.

I shared our launch of dashboards (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805132) a couple of weeks ago. The feedback was super helpful.

We’re still early and would love any feedback from the community.

Ben

Few things I'll mention.

First, we have a generous free tier. The free tier includes all but two features, 3 editors, and unlimited viewers.

Beyond that, the main difference is that Equals is a full-featured spreadsheet. You have full Excel/Sheets compatible formulas, pivot tables, formatting, etc. Along with connections to all SQL databases and SaaS tools like Salesforce and Hubspot.

Today's launch adds the ability to build auto-updating dashboards on top of our spreadsheet – but, for example, should you want to do a deep dive on an anomaly on a dashboard, you can do that right in the same tool. Something that gets tricky after a certain point of complexity in tools like data studio.

If that's working, great!

Few differences I'd call out:

- If you have summary tables with formulas we'll auto-extend those tables as we see new periods in your data. e.g. If you have "revenue by month" calculated using SUMIFs on top of charge data and we see a new month, we'll copy your formulas down/across.

- Any charts based off those tables will also update. Sheets doesn't do either of these things.

- Finally, people who've switched from Sheets have found our query UX to have much tighter iteration loops by being more deeply integrated into the product.

I'm pretty sure I can get the updates to work (right now it's based on synchronous UI) just because Sheets has auto recalc and event trigger features. However I'd say it is different than your product since my strategy is very low level.

I'm using a JavaScript interface to JDBC. It's left to the developer to find this scripting system (GAS), stitch the pieces together, figure out where the Google vs JDBC docs connect, etc. Getting auto-complete and syncing in my IDE was a lot of work and research. Google has their own sync tool which is basically a git work-a-like that you have to use in tandem with git.

It's powerful but there's nothing friendly about it.

What is does have is -- all the users already know Google Sheets. So they have this big system they already know that they can use with the data my code populates. That includes all the export features Google Sheets has. Buy in from management is easy, since it's a platform everyone knows and we're already paying for it.

You have to weigh your tradeoffs.

Yep we easily connect to MSSQL and always from a static IP, so you should be able to whitelist. Our team will be happy to help if you run into any trouble.

Unfortunately we don't support signing in with MS365 accounts. But we do allow you to turn on "auto-join from my domain" so anyone with a verified email at your domain can automatically join your Equals account.

Appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately we're unlikely to offer a white label solution, we're pretty focused on building for end users. You could check out our import scripts which let people build custom integrations with python/js: https://equals.app/integrations/import-scripts/.