The End of the Spreadsheet Saga: Centralizing Feedback with AI
Aug 20, 2025
I still remember the early days at our startup, fresh out of our seed round, totally convinced we had product-market fit figured out. We were getting a ton of feedback, and like most lean teams, we figured a simple Google Sheet would do the trick. "We'll just dump everything in here," I told my co-founder, "and we can sort through it once a week." Famous last words. By the way, if you're a startup founder who just raised a seed round, you might find our journey to product-market fit insightful. I shared everything I wish I knew in this post about reaching product-market fit. Just a thought. Sometimes, the solutions we think are simple end up being the most complicated. Like that spreadsheet. It quickly became a digital junk drawer. Sales had their own, support had another, and product had three different Notion docs. Trying to find that one golden nugget of insight – the recurring theme, the critical bug, the brilliant idea someone mentioned in passing – felt like looking for a needle in a haystack, blindfolded. We were spending more time trying to organize what users were telling us than actually listening to it.
The Feedback Frenzy: When Spreadsheets Just Don't Cut It
Remember the early days of your product? The excitement was real. Then came the feedback – a mix of ideas, questions, and bug reports. Like many teams, you probably started simple: a Google Sheet here, a Notion doc there, just to keep track. For a moment, it felt manageable. But as things grew, those simple spreadsheets became a tangled mess. Feedback wasn't just in one place; it was spread across Slack, Intercom, sales calls, support tickets, and a dozen other disconnected spots. Finding that one crucial insight felt impossible. Soon, you're spending more time organizing feedback than actually using it to improve your product. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. This is a common challenge for many growing product teams. And it's why old-school spreadsheets just can't keep up with truly understanding what your users are telling you.
The True Cost of Scattered Feedback
It's more than just the daily grind of manual data entry. The real impact of fragmented feedback goes deeper:
Missed Opportunities: Great feature ideas can get lost in the noise because they aren't properly categorized or simply disappear.
Always Reacting: Without a clear overview, you're constantly responding to the most urgent issues instead of proactively planning for user needs.
Teams Out of Sync: Your sales team might hear valuable insights, and support sees recurring patterns, but if those insights don't connect, your teams are working in silos.