I Built a Product Nobody Wanted
In this video, Andrew Kamphey shares the story of launching SheetOps, a product designed to streamline operations in Google Sheets, which ultimately flopped due to poor marketing and a lack of user feedback. He reflects on the lessons learned and emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs and effective product naming.
I built a product that I thought would absolutely be awesome, and it totally flopped. I built a product, a template called SheetOps . It should have been called SheetOops. Oh my God. I am Andrew Kamphey, and I run Better Sheets here. I make tools and templates for Google Sheet users, and I'm constantly making templates and tools inside of a sheet that you buy and you use.
And what it does is it tracks your operations. It tracks the things you want to do in Google Tasks, and then it actually tracks your delegation of things other people are doing for you in Google Calendar and in the sheet. It's supposed to be used for freelancers, for contractors, for employees, and yourself, keeping yourself up to date of what you thought you would be doing, giving yourself deadlines, timelines, that kind of thing. It's really cool. I'm very proud of it. I think it's a really awesome way to tie in Google Tasks and into Google Calendar.
The biggest failure though is that I got no replies. I got no feedback. Nobody used it, wanted to use it, and then gave me the feedback of here's w- h- the friction, which I really like. When I launch something, I like to know that people are using it, what their friction is, and then edit it.
That's where you make your revenue. You sell to a customer. You wanna know where are you leaving money on the table with these relationships, and you wanna keep abreast of them.
Every time you use a Google Sheet, you use it differently. Every time you build a spreadsheet , you build your operations, you build your business, everybody does it differently.
In fact, if you have a better name for this, I'm still looking for a better name for SheetOps . I might rename it to SheetOops because, oh, that's even funnier.
Please, if you have a good name for SheetOps , comment it below. And if you've launched a product and it flopped historically bad, let me know in the comments why, why you think it did.