From blank canvas to vertical spreadsheets
Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder of Causal, on the future of the "better spreadsheet"
The winners in better spreadsheets usually stop selling a blank canvas and start owning a sharp job to be done. The pattern across this category is that broad spreadsheet products attract too many unrelated use cases at once, which makes messaging, onboarding, and sales hard to repeat. The companies that break out tend to keep the spreadsheet surface, but anchor it in one team, one workflow, and one buyer, then expand outward from there.
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Airtable worked because it found repeatable hook use cases inside companies, like marketing calendars and operations workflows, then spread across teams. Its strength was not generic spreadsheet replacement, but a database style tool that became useful for specific cross functional processes.
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Equals found that positioning as a next generation spreadsheet pulled in everyone from finance teams to school admins to pet resort managers. It only got more repeatable after narrowing to revenue reporting, CRM reporting, and lightweight BI for startups, then leading with dashboards that executives could immediately grasp.
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Causal followed the same arc. It started as a very general numbers tool, but real revenue came when it focused on FP&A at roughly 100 to 500 employee companies. Clay shows the strongest recent version of this playbook, taking the neo spreadsheet idea and turning it into a sales workflow product with enrichment, sequencing, and usage based pricing.
The category is heading toward vertical products that happen to feel like spreadsheets, not horizontal spreadsheets with extra features. The next wave will keep familiar grids, formulas, and dashboards, but bundle in native data, opinionated workflows, and AI guidance so each product feels built for finance, sales, or operations from day one.