2020 was a terrific year for Rows. We hired 20 people and delivered 30 big features.

We have also onboarded >600 users, reaching a total >1000 people on our Private Beta. Many teams succeed with Rows spreadsheets.

Like everyone else, we had to cope with covid, which made things a bit harder and a lot stranger. But everyone on our team delivered; A special thanks for their dedication.

And many thanks to all of Rows users, friends, and families. We love your company.

2020 achievements

Team

We hired 20 great people in 2020: 10 Engineers, 3 Product Designers, 2 Product Managers, 1 Engineering Manager, 3 Business Managers and 1 Finance Manager.

Brand

We rebranded from dashdash to Rows and got ourselves a proper home at rows.com. You can read about the new brand and why & how we rebranded on this very blog.

Product

2020 was the year our product grew the most since we started building it in 2017.

From January to December, we delivered:

• Editor and Live Spreadsheet

  • Multi-tables! You can add up to 5 tables to the same page, for better organization and a slicker presentation. Multi-tables works in the Editor and in Live, shared spreadsheets!

  • New Form behavior for Tables: by default, Tables behave collaboratively (like on GSheets) and everyone sees everyone else’s actions. Now you can also select “Form Tables”, a first for spreadsheets everywhere; once selected, each user gets an independent copy of that Table. This is great for forms, and independent simulations.

  • Elastic grid. Our spreadsheet Tables expand and shrink as needed.

  • Filtering and Sorting.

  • Adding and Removing rows and columns.

  • Hyperlinks.

  • Accessing Integrations from a quick side panel in the Editor.

  • Feedback when loading data or executing long computations.

  • Live spreadsheets responsiveness: they display great on mobile devices!

  • Editing formulas across spreadsheets tables using our Point & Compose method (Mouse & Keyboard).

• Computation system

  • A whole system refactor, making our platform much faster and more stable.

  • Multiple performance improvements of our computing system, especially for large operations.

  • Parallel executions for Integration tasks, which improved calculation speed up to 10x for some scenarios.

• Dashboard & Account

  • Workspaces, including inviting other users to work with you!

  • New subscription plans. A generous free tier (up to 10 people, 1.000 free Integration tasks per month); and paid plans that make using data & APIs simpler and in many cases, cheaper too.

  • Product announcements alerts inside the platform.

  • Vanity URLs for your workspace (and soon your spreadsheets): you can now access your team at rows.com/{your-company}/.

• Functions and Integrations

  • Google Analytics

  • Rows Company Search: our very own Linkedin search for companies, and an industry-leading email and domain finder.

  • Linkedin Search

  • Instagram

  • Twitter

  • Facebook

  • Google Search Console

  • Google Sheets

  • Airtable

  • Salesforce

  • Facebook & Instagram Ads

  • Google Ads

  • Youtube

  • Xing Search

  • The SCHEDULE() function.

  • Merged INSERT(), UPDATE() and OVERWRITE() with their data counterparts (INSERT_DATA(), etc).

  • Made the {data} type of cells interchangeable with ranges. For example, you can now SUM(‘[1,2,3],[4,5,6]’).

  • A new integration platform that makes us faster (“The Integrator”).

• Homepage

  • Two complete redesigns, including much improved Integration & Template galleries.

  • Our own, custom, gorgeous Knowledge Base.

Users

During 2020 we extended our Private Beta from 400 to >1000 users. Many companies now use Rows to build more and better tools in many mission-critical processes.

Our 3 main use cases are:

• Sales

  • Automate lead generation: finding companies, enriching them with the contact of the right buyer persona and sending it to a CRM.

  • Popular templates: Automate Salesforce lead generation, Find Linkedin profiles and emails.

• Marketing

  • Consolidate marketing reports and analysis: SEO (Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed), Social (FB, IG, Twitter) and Performance Marketing (FB Ads, Google Ads).

  • Track competitors on social media: track number of Twitter followers, new Facebook/Instagram posts and mentions on the news.

  • Automate the monitoring of brand awareness: receive Slack/email alerts when a brand or hashtag is mentioned on Twitter or when the company is profiled on the news.

  • Popular templates: Track Twitter mentions with Slack, Automate tweeting articles, Create Google Analytics dashboards.

• Operations

  • Enrich locations with info about customers, orders, and deliveries: Cleaning up bad address data; Enriching addresses with postal codes; Tracking deliveries in real-time. All with Google Maps.

  • Build spreadsheet-apps that integrate existing internal tools: Syncing data from a proprietary back-office API or custom CRM; Communicating with suppliers; Managing restaurant orders; Doing Inventory Management; Tracking Jira ticket status.

  • Popular templates: Geocode addresses with Google Maps, Get formatted addresses

We will be adding more use cases as we grow, so watch out!

2021

2021 will be the year Rows opens to the public. We will release lots of features and work with our users (you) to continue building the spreadsheet you want and deserve:

• 100% compatible with classic functions and features from Excel & Sheets;

• Stuffed with Integrations that connect to Data & APIs (inc your own);

• Collaborative, with the slickest live sharing experience of any spreadsheet.

As for our subscription plans, our first goal is 100 paid companies (then 1.000!).

We are truly excited for what is coming next.

Have a great 2021 Everyone!

Humberto
for the Rows Team!