I know a number of you invest in smart sheets. I actually use it on a daily basis, so thought I would describe it to you.
It is a specialized spreadsheet with fields of whose task it is, deadlines, supporting resources, descriptions, vendors, state of the task. i.e. not started, in progress, done, backlogged, and few more, verbal status.
There are also drop down boxes to make it easier to enter vendors, people, etc.
It is also easy to do queries from the main sheet, and if you update a query, the main sheet is automatically updated.
Of course it is in the cloud, so many users can use it.
I am not that impressed. M.S. Project can do a lot more. Excel can do anything now. You can do fourier transforms on excel. With VBA there is basically no limit to what you can do with excel.
I am sure with M.S drive, it has the same cloud capabilities.
I cannot say I get it either. I tried Smartsheets but it did not fit my business needs that well. I mainly need scheduling and notes. Trello served my need much better. Smartsheets was less “granular” I guess.
One difference may be that I have 10s of clients at a time. Each can be considered an individual project, but having similar scheduling issues such as “trial date” will share the same to dos, with the same scheduling of the to dos, thus excellent for automation. It just was unduly complex w less granular scheduling and notes and links.
Eg, in calendar view the information was much less useful than what Trello provided me, or what my actual legal software does (as I discovered has its own automation features called “precedents”. That is what I settled on using although Trello is always tempting.
This said, SMAR has excellent numbers. But to be truly a killer investment the market requires dominating a large category. I don’t see how they are doing that. Doing a great business but unlike Excel or Alteryx or Okta or Zoom or ZS (currently more 55 if not 60%+ market share in SWG market - albeit that is presently less than a billion dollar market but growing each year).
How many companies actually modify excel in the manner you describe though? I believe the whole point of smartsheets is you don’t have to be a programmer to set it up for your business.
I passed on smartsheets, So have no interest in defending it. It seems Atlassian is a bigger threat to me. All the examples I could see for a use case with SMAR could also be done in Atlassian. I passed for that reason.
I’m a user, too and have to jump in here. I made a system for management of group work flow complete with auto updated dashboard. It never fails to impress when sharing with other groups.
I did it with no training. I showed others how to make their own in minutes. I’m smarter than the average bear, but no tech savant. This stuff is somewhere between Excel, MS project and SharePoint. Very flexible and accessible to users. Anybody that could do a pivot table would be an absolute rock star with SmartSheets at their disposal.
The functions you describe are a small fraction of the capability.
Their templates are prepackaged systems for application and are a great way to realize more benefits for groups that maybe can’t do a pivot table.
Smartsheets enables automation. Approvals. Dashboards. Embedding into other things. Custom solutions, template solutions. Timelines, Gantt, agile cards, portfolio, mobile, on and on.
Project tracking sheet is a very narrow view of the uses.
I did it with no training. I showed others how to make their own in minutes. I’m smarter than the average bear, but no tech savant. This stuff is somewhere between Excel, MS project and SharePoint. Very flexible and accessible to users. Anybody that could do a pivot table would be an absolute rock star with SmartSheets at their disposal.
I agree that the user friendliness of it is a big plus. I use it more for project tracking, and for data bases.
I guess my point is that I do not see it as a game changer like the iphone, excel, or windows was.
I figured my uses would be overkill. But the other issue I have is pricing. For such a sophisticated tool they do not charge much for it.
One of those things though that anecdotal it may be, we are best understanding the business drivers and watching the money each Q. That tells the tale far better.
TEAM is a competitor and yet it seems only w some overlap but not directly use by use.
I would like to see pricing power (like Alteryx demonstrates - although some can argue that will be its downfall someday and others retort Alteryx has pricing power for a reason because it is so valuable and unique a tool w no one else able to pressure Alteryx pricing because the alternatives suck - relatively speaking).
That is one reason so many of us own Alteryx. On the other hand Elastic’s primary drivers are enormous number of users and low cost disruptive pricing let gb basically. Different companies and different drivers powering their business.
I’d like to see SMAR have some pricing power, which would prove it is differentiated enough to have the power. I don’t see SMAR as a price disruptor like Elastic or Amazon.
Again though the numbers speak louder than our speculations.
The premium Smartsheet features are “in the five figures”.
These include the Control Center, Dynamic View, Uploader, and the now 7 accelerators.
Average annual contract value has been growing at about 50% consistently for every quarter. The number of larger customers with ACV greater than 50K and 100K is growing faster than almost every company we follow.
So I’m not sure I agree with the “no pricing power” argument.
I have not followed it in great detail, but my understanding with this “accelerator” products is that they were a very small portion of revenue for the company. In the $20 million range or something.
The number of customers with large spend are 400 or so.
I will check the last earnings call. I know the cost per seat was like $25 a month or something.
I’m a new Smartsheets user. My company chose it for its user friendliness and low cost. We’re using it to combine information that used to be kept in numerous Excel sheets all into one place. Overall impression: it’s better than what we had before.