Every great product starts with a problem that needs solving. For Sheety App, that problem hit close to home—literally in my daily work managing a development team.
The Challenge: Tracking Team Contributions
A few years ago, while managing a team, I faced a common but frustrating challenge: how to effectively track and evaluate team member contributions. Like many teams using Agile methodologies, we needed to record evaluation points (similar to story points in Jira), but with an added layer of complexity.
Our evaluation system wasn't just about raw output—it factored in quality, requirement complexity, and various other metrics. We needed a flexible system that could handle complex calculations while remaining accessible to the team.
The Excel Experiment
The obvious first choice? Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheets seemed perfect—they're flexible, everyone knows how to use them, and formulas can handle complex calculations. So I built an elaborate system with interconnected formulas that crunched all our metrics into final contribution scores.
It worked... for a while.
When Complexity Becomes a Prison
As our team grew and records accumulated, the spreadsheet evolved into a beast of its own. Formula dependencies stretched across multiple sheets. Each new record meant updating nested calculations. And here's where the real problem emerged:
I became the bottleneck.
Excel offered zero permission control for our needs. The sheet was so complex and fragile that I couldn't trust anyone else to edit it—not because of distrust in my team, but because one wrong move could break the entire calculation chain. Team members wanted to help, wanted to contribute to tracking, but the risk of accidentally breaking something was too high.
When formulas needed to change (and they did, frequently), I had to carefully trace through the entire web of dependencies. What started as a time-saving tool had become a time sink.
The Search for Alternatives
Clearly, Excel wasn't the answer. I considered two obvious alternatives:
- Build custom software: This would give us exactly what we needed, but the time and effort required seemed overwhelming for what should be a straightforward tracking system.
- Buy specialized software: The market had options, but they were expensive and often overly complex. My needs weren't that complicated—why pay for enterprise features we'd never use?
There had to be a middle ground.
The "Aha" Moment
What if we could have the best of both worlds? The flexibility and familiarity of a spreadsheet, but with the permission controls and change tracking of specialized software?
That's when the idea crystallized: A spreadsheet-like tool with built-in permission management and robust change tracking.
This concept addressed all our pain points:
- ✓ Familiar spreadsheet interface—no steep learning curve
- ✓ Granular permission controls—team members could contribute safely
- ✓ Change tracking—every edit documented, every formula change visible
- ✓ Collaborative—multiple people could work without fear of breaking things
- ✓ Right-sized complexity—powerful enough for our needs, simple enough to manage
From Idea to Reality
That initial frustration sparked the development of Sheety App. We set out to build a tool that wouldn't force teams to choose between the simplicity of spreadsheets and the capabilities of specialized software.
Sheety App was designed for teams that need more than Excel can safely provide, but don't need (or want to pay for) the complexity of enterprise solutions. It's for managers who shouldn't be bottlenecks. It's for teams that want to collaborate without walking on eggshells.
Building Solutions from Real Problems
The best products are born from real frustrations. Sheety App exists because I lived through the pain of watching a simple tracking need spiral into a complex, fragile mess. If you've ever felt trapped by your own spreadsheet, paralyzed by formula dependencies, or wished your team could safely contribute to shared data—Sheety App was built for you.
Because sometimes the best solution isn't the most complex one. It's the one that understands your actual needs and makes them simple to achieve.