Ramp Sheets goes viral: three engineers built an AI spreadsheet tool that got thousands of daily users in its first week

guests are both named Alex. We have uh some folks from RAMP, the creators of RAMP Labs, Ramp Sheets. We're bringing in

Ramp Sheets,

both Alex's. Uh please kick us off with introductions on both of you, how you came to work at RAMP, work on this particular project. I'd love to hear the origin story. Uh it's a fascinating product and uh we're going to go into it.

Hey, uh I'm Alex Shvchenko.

Uh I've been at RAM for now two years, started out and still am on the applied AI team. success. [laughter]

Uh, and throughout these two years, I've been working on a bunch of like experimental things uh, as part of Applied AI and

lately just been trying to

wrap them up into Ramp Lab so that we can publish these things publicly.

That's great. And Alex, sorry.

Yeah, I'm Alex Stoffer, um, one of the leads of RAM Labs along alongside the other Alex. And

yeah, this is the place for AI bets at RAMP. Um, we're really experimenting going to the cutting edge of AI. Um, trying to ship product that is actually outside of the current like ramp mandate.

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

Do you guys have nicknames yet? [laughter]

I feel like people get confused. Alex, because you can't even just be like, oh yeah, Alex at Ramp Labs. You have to go further.

Yeah. Just the last names, I guess. Jenko and Oh. So, so talk to us about the product. uh it feels extremely aggressive to go after uh Microsoft to go after Google uh not products that have massive user bases and yet you're launching ramp sheets uh talk to us about the thought the positioning are you going to try and replace the investment banking workhorse that is Microsoft Excel is this more for CFOs who are already on ramp how are you thinking about the product itself

well originally this started out as an experiment as everything within ramp labs is um we've been trying out different variations of this actually just to try to help our own internal finance team. Um this has gone as I said through many iterations. This

initially was like process mining to document some of their workflows from video uh so that they can like communicate better between each other and to software engineers. And then we tried to take that piece and create like Zapier and um like retool workflows based on them to try to automate and

um we tried to to to get them to use it and and

they were like no this is too blackbox. We can't really use this. We need visibility into it. And so we like took a step back and tried to look through the looms of like all the information that they were giving to us. and we jump through like random locations and 99% of the time when you like open their loom it's like in a spreadsheet.

So we decided we should like really meet them where they work and have a spreadsheet interface for this. And this doesn't necessarily need to be replacing um anything. This can be an add-on to their existing workflows, right? This can be uh a quick way to create like a proformer or something that they can then export to a CSV or an Excel file and then load it up in sheets or Excel and continue their work there. Um

so that's that's broadly the

so why build why build like a web version of a spreadsheet at all? Why not a plugin that lives inside of Excel? That's what uh Bloomberg and Capital IQ and most of the other I you know uh kind of complimentary systems have typically plugged in through connectors. Uh you decided to build the actual uh full spreadsheet in the cloud uh in the web. Um why that decision versus just plugin? Well, um, internally we do have some more complex workflows that rely on like sheets and stuff that people can use. For this, as I said, like ramp labs is like the experimental branch and this was an experiment that like got very very large. Um, and that's like the way to allow people to interface with it as quick as possible. Um, we we didn't need like access to your Google account. We don't need access to your Excel account. you can just go and try it out and and it's there and it's available on ramp.com/sheets to anyone, not only RAM customers right now.

Oh, cool.

Um, that's probably like one of the biggest reasons.

How?

Yeah. So,

for some context, like uh a lot of people think that there was a big team behind this or that ramp is like investing a lot of resources here. And the truth is that like three guys kind of built this in a cave um pretty fast. So,

yes. Yeah. and uh we wanted to release it. We believe in shipping quickly and getting feedback from customers. Uh we thought we built a pretty cool tool and just wanted to see how people would play around with it. Um so we released it last week and then uh the response was overwhelming. Uh there 2 million impressions. Um thousands of users joined immediately. They're making thousands of sheets every day. um places that you wouldn't imagine have have been using it. Um like there it's it's popping off at Wharton with students and professors. Uh there are many banks that are already using it. Um VCs, finance, people in the space industry. Um I got off call with a a user who's based in London this morning who's a VC. So it's it's like it's astounded us honestly. what uh where where are people getting the most value or what kind of like work uh work are they actually doing uh once they kind of play around with it and get a sense for how it works like how are they applying it?

Yeah, there are a lot of interesting use cases. Um some are personal uh there there are a couple of uh stories here where it's helping them plan their wedding. You know, these things can get incredibly uh complex and you need a way to organize it. Um, another use case, uh, an employee here is, uh, he's moving to New Jersey and wanted to find like the best place to live and and and want a model for that. But outside of personal cases, there is a real demand here. Um, especially with uh, founders, VCs, small businesses, especially owners of small businesses, they don't actually have like a large finance team, right? And it's incredibly valuable to spin up a model really quickly instead of going and paying a consultant thousands of dollars uh to just make a template for them.

Yeah, it makes sense. Very cool. Where are you guys where where where are you planning to take it from here?

Yeah, there's a bunch of features that we're still working on. We actually shipped sharable links today. Um nice. and then exploring what best templates. So like very very intricate templates that you can take and and create basically kind of these like proformas right away or like budgeting uh right away. Um and then as well as like integrating with ramp itself so that you can like actually export your spending data and like analyze it within uh ramp sheets. So those are like the the three biggest things right now.

Very cool.

That's amazing. The chat is saying con ramp construct an LBO for this regional HVAC company that backs into a 25% IRR. Make no mistakes, please maybe one day. I mean that actually probably is within what is basically oneshottable by the model in RAM sheets today. Uh but thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us. Congrats on all the progress and uh excited to watch where it goes. Excited to uh see more people demoing it and taking it for a spin.

Incredible launch.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for cheers. have a good day. Uh we are going back to the timeline for a minute uh while we bring in our next guest.

Uh we were we were covering uh

OpenAI uh shopping research. Oh yes. Didn't really get to and Doug joined but really think uh I I'm I'm bullish on this product. I think like being able to effectively run a deep research report and then see all the information that you need on a bunch of different products and then eventually just hit

buy right from the in the app is going to be like a crazy flywheel. That's like actually what people do today. They start Google searching, they find out what products are available, they find out pricing, features, etc. Then they make a buying decision. And if you can pull that all into a single sort of like experience, it's going to be very very valuable. And this is effectively the deep research as a product is a product that has better product market fit uh than almost anything else in consumer AI. And so I'm uh very bullish.

Well, if you're selling a product on chatbt, got to go to numeral.com. Let numero worry about sales tax and VAT compliance compliance handled so you can focus on growth. Um no, I agree. It'll be very interesting to see how fast uh like how fast OpenAI makes their first dollar from advertising or commissionbased sales, how quickly they make their first million, their first billion from it. Like the numbers are so big they need to get to uh tens of billions of dollars on those business lines fairly quickly. They're certainly the most uh optimistic growth areas for the business. uh and uh something that I think everyone it's very consensus that uh if they get uh agentic commerce working they can the pool of capital is just very like the the the audience is already there they just have to run ads this is like proven whereas uh breaking into hardware that's something that uh Microsoft didn't pull off with the phone and Amazon tried to fire a phone and f Facebook tried a phone for a while like