“Equals is a spreadsheet startup aiming to challenge and replace Excel with its next-generation spreadsheet,” according to Crunchbase.com
Excel competitor Equals, shipped Dashboards, a tool for building automated and aesthetic business dashboards inside Equals spreadsheets. Equals was co-founded by Bobby Pinero and Ben McRemond, both ex-Intercom leaders. Equals launched last June and was so popular that it became a finalist in the Golden Kitty Awards for Data and Analytics earlier this year. (Joining the ranks of Chat GTP, Canva, Notion, and other significant applications.)
“Equals started with the premise that the spreadsheet is the best way to do analysis,” explains Pinero. And he’s got a point. With most BI tools, users click ‘download CSV whenever they want to dig deeper into the data. Dashboards removes the need for that extra step, enabling users to work with live business data in a familiar format: the spreadsheet.
Dashboards connects to SQL (structured query language) databases and tools like Hubspot and Stripe to automatically update charts and tables. This ensures that reports stay accurate and up-to-date, aiming to improve teams’ capacity to make data-driven decisions and time decisions.
Equals has practical applications for both early-stage founders and growth operators, business intelligence tools (BI) often have a steep learning curve, limiting their ability to provide actionable growth insights, Equals’ Dashboards lets users get started in an age-old tool – the spreadsheet – and immediately dig deeper into their data, without the need for any “SQL gymnastics.”
Equals functionality can easily and automatically update data in real time, the user just has to set the program to “auto-expand’. The crowning jewel of Equals, however is its flexibility. Dashboards can be built out using spreadsheet formulas already known to the user, and can be formatted like you would format your typical spreadsheet.
Excel has over 750 million users worldwide, so to say that Microsoft currently corners the market in business intelligence programs would be an understatement, and 68% of people working in offices say that they use Excel at least once per hour. Despite this, 48% of workers who are required to use excel say that they have never received any formal training. So, Equals being a more efficient and easier to learn version of Excel means that entrepreneurs and small business owners would benefit, as they wouldn’t have to dedicate the time to learning or teaching their employees a more complicated software. Equals is looking to disrupt the business intelligence market, one spreadsheet at a time.
