Show HN: While everyone builds AI apps, my spreadsheet reached 2,300 users

198•LarsenCC•2h ago

Everyone’s chasing AI hype. I built a Google Sheet and it quietly took off.

In 2020, I made it to track my own finances for income, expenses, savings, yearly summaries etc. I shared it once on Reddit, forgot about it for a year… When I checked back, it had over 130k views and I was honestly stoked!

No launch. No funding. No AI. Just a spreadsheet people actually stick with and find useful.

I finally gave it a proper home: write-it-down.com Now, more than 2,300 people use it.

It’s intentionally boring and that’s why it works.

People don’t always need AI. They just need something that actually solves their problem. This isn’t a billion-dollar startup of course, but it taught me more about building products than almost anything else.

Build something useful. Solve a real problem. Even if it’s just a simple spreadsheet.

So, what’s the most “boring” thing you’ve built that found unexpected traction?

Comments

LarsenCC•2h ago

Hey everyone,

Lately I’ve been exploring smaller, simpler projects like this one. I usually build backend systems (currently at Browser Use, funny enough).

This spreadsheet started as a personal finance tracker during COVID and somehow turned into something people actually wanted to use.

The biggest lesson for me: People don’t care how “advanced” something is, they just want it to work and make their life easier.

Curious to hear what you all think.

zeroCalories•1h ago

Making a product flexible often makes it complex to use, complex to develop, and mediocre at everything. Makes it easy for a small product that hyper focuses on one use case to swoop in and snatch users away.

LarsenCC•1h ago

Yes! Good lesson there.

backendWizard•2h ago

Nice G

LarsenCC•2h ago

Thanks! haha

product-hunt•1h ago

True hype created by AI is huge. Everywhere I look it's always just AI. Man we need more apps like this that just do one thing and that's it.

LarsenCC•1h ago

Ikr! I love AI, but there are too many "useless" apps that use AI just for the hype of it.

lionkor•1h ago

I feel like the AI hype is big, but there are lots of us who just build normal things and who's jobs cannot allow or make use of LLMs properly.

Popular culture has always been easy to influence. We had blockchain hype, OOP hype, AI hype, Microservices hype, we had so many and they were ALL mostly a fad that resulted in yet-another-tool in the toolbelt of engineers -- nothing more, nothing less.

Good on you for using the right tools to build a new thing!

LarsenCC•1h ago

Agree! I got stuck using hype/trendy solutions to solve problems for far too long... This was proof that sometimes all it takes is a super simple solution.

dude250711•1h ago

True! At the end of the day, it's a multiplier - just like many other dev hype fads e.g. Python/JavaScript poorly-typed fad of 2010s - devs who do not know what they are doing are just producing worse tech debt at a higher rate.

Same with microservices or misusing HTML to make UIs instead of documents etc.

echelon•1h ago

LLMs are a good search replacement, but they're not task automation.

Codegen AI is great for tab-complete. It does save typing, and it is pretty smart, but you still have to have an engineer in the seat that is paying attention and knows what they're doing.

Video AI on the other hand is already disrupting Hollywood. The costs are 10,000x cheaper, the delivery time is 100,000x faster, and it's accessible with 1,000x less personnel. These are insane numbers. Multiple orders of magnitude - full step function change - across multiple dimensions at once.

You still need to have an editor and VFX person to make video AI work, and you still need to incorporate photon-on-glass footage, but it's remarkable how usable these tools are.

A small studio with five people can use AI tools to do serious work that would ordinarily take 100 people or more and require huge budgets.

This isn't just hypothesizing - I work in this industry. This is not only myself, but this is dozens of the studios I talk to and work with.

Just to cite one example, there's a studio I know that used to bid $300k on projects. You've seen their work - they do Netflix show intro sequences, pharmaceutical ads, etc. They're now bidding just $50k and winning projects left and right.

I think the biggest area of AI investment and disruption is going to be video AI.

code_for_monkey•37m ago

i believe you but wow this feels so bleak

LarsenCC•24m ago

I think browser automation using LLMs is still huge tho (I'm biased haha)

fedeb95•1h ago

Congratulations on making the life of ~2k people a bit better.

LarsenCC•1h ago

Appreciate it! It's not much, but its honest work.

product-hunt•14m ago

That's why every app should be. to make peoples life easier

slig•1h ago

Congratulations on the milestone!

The three small videos with the big cursor are excellent. What did you use to edit them like that?

LarsenCC•1h ago

Thanks! Screen studio I believe.

nilkn•1h ago

I think consumer personal finance is hard to disrupt with AI for two reasons: (1) mistakes, hallucinations, etc., aren't acceptable; (2) there really aren't any major secret insights to derive from the data -- just spend within your means, avoid debt or use it sparingly and wisely, target high-interest loans first if you have them, maintain a sufficient emergency fund, max out tax-advantaged accounts, invest in low-fee index funds as much as you can after all of the former. There just isn't much more to it.

If you're already doing all those things, the best way you can help your personal finances is to make good decisions and work hard and with integrity in other areas of your life: grow your career and income, position yourself smartly to lower your odds of layoffs / termination / etc., take care of your health to avoid health-related income disruptions and costs (this includes mental health!), and make smart relationship choices (i.e., don't end up in divorce).

Personal finance is pretty much a solved problem. Breakthrough results generally come from personal and moral discipline sustained consistently over a long period of time. Simple tools like this can help a lot -- I like it.

1oooqooq•1h ago

it's the thing that would be easier to automate and use AI. your rationalization would apply to everything. heck the front page have a medical diagnosis slop.

the point is, seen critically, it's obvious that it's not even a replacement for a calculator. yet the hype pushes on with infinite exceptions "oh, its not the best for this that i know about, but everything else I'm not an expert I will clai AI is perfect"

l5870uoo9y•1h ago

I must admit that I disagree and believe that AI will only be used more as it improves. There is already a big difference between GPT-4 and GPT-5 in terms of hallucinations. If AI can do your tax accounting in 20 seconds with a 95% probability of accuracy (perhaps better than most accountants—after all, who can really understand tax legislation?) and with some clear checksums, who wouldn't use it instead of doing it themselves? In addition, AI is really excellent at inferring meaning from data (and see relations).

beardedwizard•1h ago

In the current AI = LLM world, why have a language model do taxes? Why not just have AI help you adapt your non AI tax planning platform to local tax laws by reading and comprehending them at scale, a language task, instead?

pavel_lishin•1h ago

> perhaps

That perhaps is doing a lot of lifting.

catigula•1h ago

Not really. After using GPT-5 extensively I'd easily trust it to do my taxes. I find the output to be very reliable, also my taxes are trivial.

edoceo•1h ago

I'm currently doing that. One problem is that it's interpretation of the tax law and instructions are not consistent. My taxes are not trivial.

sgarland•1h ago

Better idea: the U.S. could adopt the income tax practices of most other countries, where the revenue service tells you what you owe, instead of making you guess. No need for A.I. or Intuit.

komali2•49m ago

That doesn't arbitrarily increase GDP through revenue-through-friction, though.

devoutsalsa•48m ago

They will tell you how much you owe, but only if you file incorrectly :P

For Americans, if you didn't know, you can check your IRS transcripts at https://www.irs.gov/ to see exactly how much the IRS thinks you've earned.

Imustaskforhelp•46m ago

Fwiw iirc Intuit has to offer a free version of their tool with the same capabilties but it is so hidden from everybody behind so much stuff that its hard for people to reach there.

Honestly, yes there shouldn't really even be a discussion about this. US should definitely do it. I think US and India are the only two major countries still stuck on something like this and I am not sure if there are really any advantages of it.

DebtDeflation•1h ago

For the 95% of people who get all their income from W2/1099 compensation, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts and who either take the standard deduction or whose only itemised deductions are dependents, mortgage interest, and SALT, there's really no need for filing tax returns at all. But the tax accounting and tax software industries lobby to prevent it.

nilkn•1h ago

For most folks, filing your taxes is already mostly automated and requires a time investment of maybe 45 to 60 minutes per year. Would it be nice to reduce that down to 20 seconds? Sure, but it's not going to materially change anything in the financial life of most people. I'm all for it if it could be done reliably at scale. Outlier cases where taxation is complicated enough that it's possible to engineer substantial and meaningful financial outcomes often count more as business finance than personal finance. I'm sure artificial intelligence will indeed be more disruptive to business and corporate finance. For true personal finance, though, I suspect it may be more predatory than helpful by selling people into bad decisions that sound smart (which banks, etc., already try to do with so-called financial advisors).

Keep in mind a 5% failure rate would likely be >10 million incorrect tax filings per year solely due to AI errors, not inclusive of additional incorrect filings due to human error as well.

HPsquared•52m ago

I'd really like an AI tool with absolute security I can trust to trawl through my emails and reconcile invoices against my bank records.

loliver666•50m ago

I'd never trust it

criddell•17m ago

Do you have to trust it? Have the AI built a list of all the invoices it can find in your email then a separate application reconciles that against your statements. The AI might miss something or invent something, but the mismatch list you get back should be short.

It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe it would be better than having to do it all manually.

grepfru_it•36m ago

So I’m doing something like this for a legal case I am dealing with for giggles. AI is absolutely giving me bogus answers that I have to fact check. Not sure I would trust it to reconcile items.

aubanel•47m ago

> hard to disrupt with AI for two reasons: (1) mistakes, hallucinations, etc., aren't acceptable

I think AI hallucination rate is already below my own hallucination rate, especially in a boring/unknown domain

banku_brougham•38m ago

And yet only one is unacceptable for humans reviewing their own expenditures.

LarsenCC•10m ago

I also dont trust an LLM with my finances. At least not for now

mikepurvis•33m ago

You can forgive your own mistakes, but you'll have zero tolerance for a bot making mistakes with your money / on your behalf.

LarsenCC•26m ago

I prefer to also just write it down myself (at least for now)

keeptrying•38m ago

Untrue - there isn't a personal finance solution that doesn't have mistakes. Not one. I've literally tried them all. Its mostly because the syncing with accounts is very very brittle and a lot of things like stock plans etc aren't supported well so your daily view will always be somewhat off.

There are insights to derive from the data - like how much do you really spend. But again its really hard to get there because the numbers are always off and most people don't actually want to know.

You are severely underestimating the average person's agency with their money.

bux93•32m ago

There are some databases with spending habits, so you can compare your spending to folks with similar households, and some prudent guidelines. But it's not rocket science and a bit silly. You don't really need to remind sneakerheads they spend more than average on shoes, or pennypinchers that they spend (too?) little.

For most people just keeping tabs of spending helps them reign it in. Setting up auto savings and pension contributions also helps. The next step is using cash to pay for discretionary spending - not more automation.

sisibd•10m ago

> and with integrity

Good advice except for this. In today’s society you’ll lose 10/10 times to somebody who’s working hard and doesn’t have any integrity. See Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc.

Qision•1h ago

> Built on Google Sheets you own your data

What?

marciobarroso•1h ago

hahaha, You know nothing John Snow

LarsenCC•1h ago

haha

LarsenCC•1h ago

Haha, I mean... You don't have to share your data with a random AI startup. Its in your google drive.

Ofc you can always put it on a sheet of paper :P Thats the OG method.

hoistbypetard•1h ago

You're just sharing it with an established AI megacorp :)

(I thought they used free google drive accounts to train Gemini, but I can't find where I saw that now. Does anyone have a reference?)

product-hunt•12m ago

fixed

BostonFern•1h ago

The testimonials on the landing page, where are they sourced from?

LarsenCC•1h ago

People actually getting back to me via different sources (linkedin, whatsapp etc)

didntknowyou•1h ago

it's AI generated

LarsenCC•18m ago

Whatever you say I guess.

gyomu•1h ago

Did you purposefully write every paragraph of your intro post as an AI writing trope?

LarsenCC•1h ago

Probably! I guess that’s what happens when you spend too much time around LLMs lol.

In any case, didn't feel like it when writing haha.

gyomu•33m ago

Cheers for answering, was genuinely curious whether it was AI-written, you were doing it tongue in cheek, or that’s just how writing the post came naturally to you.

LarsenCC•14m ago

I do tend to write short sentences... haha. But I am def. influenced by all the LLM writing I think.

jnovek•1h ago

Sorry, what are you talking about? Why is his post an “AI writing trope”?

aswegs8•1h ago

No frills. No bells. Just pure AI.

Do you know why it sounds like that?

Neither do I.

It's a feeling.

FooBarWidget•1h ago

I mean, so what?

Seriously. Is there any problem with "AI-sounding" writing? It's grammatically correct. It's readable. The only issue I can possibly think of is that you perceive AI negatively, and that you project this negativity onto everything that tangentially touches AI.

latexr•47m ago

> It's grammatically correct. It's readable.

It’s overly verbose. It’s repetitive. It’s boring. It doesn’t flow right.

If people don’t want to read what you wrote about your product, they won’t use (let alone pay for) your product. Pointing out bad copy is perfectly valid and helpful criticism.

FooBarWidget•19m ago

If verbosity, repetitiveness, boring and flow are the problem, then just call those out. No need to blame it on AI. Humans don't write perfectly.

LarsenCC•15m ago

Will take this feedback! Thanks.

latexr•12m ago

To be clear, I wasn’t directly criticising your post, just answering the question of the “problem with "AI-sounding" writing”.

nemomarx•1h ago

AI is heavily trained on polished corporate marketing / memo speak. I think if you've had to write copy long enough you'll sound like that naturally.

(See LinkedIn posts from before 2020 - they're only missing the emoji basically.)

happytoexplain•59m ago

Note that this is also just how many engineering-minded people prefer to write when describing a system or tool when the goal is to sell or the audience isn't technical.

Compare with what I think a lot of us are highly used to reading, which is copy written by salespeople, or by management-minded people with sales in mind.

IMO, the way the copy is written is not like minimally-guided AI, aside from the clarity (which is the good part of AI writing). AI has a different character/tone. It tends to sound a little more like a salesperson, or a 50's PSA video.

LarsenCC•1h ago

Its doing pretty well for an AI writing trope I guess.

I just wanted to share something I have built for myself and other people seem to like it!

gyomu•29m ago

No X. No Y. No Z. Just W.

While the world was doing Y, I was doing Z.

Everyone’s doing X. I’m quietly [ChatGPT loves that word] doing Y.

People don’t X. They Y. It’s not about Z. It’s about W, and it taught me everything/means everything to me/utterly transformed me/etc.

Do X. Do Y. Even if it’s just Z.

code_for_monkey•36m ago

I feel the AI would've used more words? Maybe? I feel like spotting AI writing is more of a gut feeling for me these days, more so than something I can describe.

kruffalon•1h ago

Small typo in the first paragraph:

"Strart" should probably be "Start" unless it's ragebait to gain engagement.

LarsenCC•1h ago

Nice catch! Its not ragebait haha.

4ndr3vv•1h ago

Getting 2k users is no small task, congrats.

Did most start using it when it was a free spreadsheet linked to a reddit post or have the 2300 users all bought the $4.99 product?

Has there been a change in take-up since you monetised it?

LarsenCC•1h ago

Most free, but a lot still buy! Surprisingly only ~50% less paid signups compared to free signups.

artursapek•1h ago

Actually, having AI to do this kind of schlep work of analyzing my spending is something I’m really looking forward to.

LarsenCC•52m ago

Yeah, I guess I just enjoy writing it down myself since I really get a good feeling where I spend my money.

If I let it be automatic, I quickly lose grip.

product-hunt•15m ago

Maybe we are making something like this soon

the__alchemist•1h ago

Wow. How did you do this? This is a saturated field, especially since the downfall of Mint. (Context: I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app. I use it myself, but have 0 users)

LarsenCC•1h ago

I have no clue. I built it for myself in 2020, then made it better each year. Once posted on Reddit... the rest is history.

pantulis•41m ago

I've had a similar one for like two decades, and it originated from another thing that I found around and tweaked to my liking. This spreadsheet sits nicely between the minimal effort and the uber solution of typing everything in some plain text accounting solution.

LarsenCC•17m ago

Cool!

sras-me•37m ago

> I made one of these too, but a minimal/fast HTML/CSS/JS web app

Same story here. But not sure if yours had a backend. Mine did not have one and stored everything on the browser datastore, but could export it to some free json hosting service after encrypting and compression so that it can be synced to other devices and used from them as well.

Was not aware of anything that did the same, thought it would be useful (mostly because it would be totally free to use, could be accessed from multiple devices and respected user privacy) and shared here couple of days back.

Zero interest! Ha ha. At least I didn't spend a lot of resources on it and made it for my own use. It have been working well for me for many years.

danieltanfh95•1h ago

This is honestly not better than the LLM-powered double booking system where i just record in plain text, and have the LLM convert it into journal entries. the entire thing is in plain text and backed by git+remote. Recording finances is the hardest part about tracking finances because you tend to forget/get lazy/need to track across multiple family members etc.

This is solved via LLMs that can transcribe, categorise, convert messy records into structured book keeping.

I remain unconvinced that anything more rigid is more useful.

LarsenCC•1h ago

Everyone has their own way of solving their problem. Still a lot of people like spreadsheets more I guess.

aswegs8•1h ago

make it 2301

LarsenCC•1h ago

Hehe, its a few more now actually.

didntknowyou•1h ago

c'mon I'm all for the hustle but put a bit more effore to be creative. all your website reviews are AI generated 5 star slop

LarsenCC•1h ago

I actually paid a friend to build it who is just getting into software :D He wanted a starter project and needed some money to attend a conference.

But will give him feedback!

fhennig•1h ago

> Build something useful. Solve a real problem. Even if it’s just a simple spreadsheet.

I think saying _just_ a simple spreadsheet makes it sound like a bad thing. Actually, the simplicity is probably one of the key selling points! I wish more things were just spreadsheets.

LarsenCC•17m ago

I love spreadsheets haha

product-hunt•7m ago

I think we should bring back this trend of making simple things

lain98•57m ago

It's possible to do the same with google sheets using GOOGLEFINANCE function and I have been using it to track and manage finances since years.

LarsenCC•53m ago

I was thinking about making a sheet for this, yes. I might actual revise and upgrade this version to include it!

fersarr•53m ago

Very cool. What did you see to do the screen recordings?

LarsenCC•18m ago

Screen studio

sneilan1•49m ago

This is awesome! I’m already integrated into TillerHQ. Apart from price, do you have any differentiators that make it take less time for auto categorizing? Tiller doesn’t have any built in AI tools for auto categorization so I had to roll my own.

Also I’m extremely skeptical of your pricing. $5 one time seems too good to be true.

hersko•18m ago

Why is it too good to be true? It's just a premade spreadsheet.

doctorhandshake•42m ago

Having bounced around several snoop-ware GUI-heavy vendor-lock-in personal finance products, I've this year been using and loving a similar product called Tiller, which absolutely convinced me that a spreadsheet is The Way for this.

grepfru_it•27m ago

Microsoft money 2007 was the last great finance program to exist.

Monarch comes close

If there were a standardized way to pull your own data from banks, we wouldn’t need to use snoopware, vendor locked apps.

LarsenCC•23m ago

I only know spreadsheet atm haha

product-hunt•11m ago

Yea I know Tiller but I think this one is much better because it saves you a lot more money

latexr•41m ago

I suggest you get rid of the obvious AI illustrations. They’re stylistically incongruent with each other and the rest of the page, perfect examples of slop which make me think the rest of the service was also LLM-generated.

“Opinions” is a weird way to put it, the typical word there is “testimonials”.

“Get Started” also doesn’t feel right to me, makes me think of a subscription service that will require lots of set up, which seems to be the opposite of what you’re going for.

shibaprasadb•40m ago

> Build something useful. Solve a real problem.

This is the essence of how we should think about building products (or, at the very least, doing some projects). I see so many of my juniors are building "useless" stuff just to participate in the AI hype. Whereas simple and elegant solutions are often neglected.

LarsenCC•37m ago

> simple and elegant solutions Exactly!

brandall10•37m ago

Could you please share the original post that you made that has 130k views?

Obviously if a product/idea is good enough it can go 'viral' on its own with little prodding, but I'm curious about the discussion behind that post and how it may have taken on a life of its own.

LarsenCC•13m ago

Yeah np! https://www.reddit.com/r/sheets/comments/178kf81/tracking_fi...

XCSme•36m ago

Congrats!

Why does the page always scroll to the top when focused/changing tabs back to it? :(

LarsenCC•22m ago

Unsure, will check!

jaffa2•35m ago

I will never us it if I have to pay. Its not clear what this gets me over any other spreadsheet .

LarsenCC•22m ago

Some people find value in it, but if you don't thats fine!

rimmontrieu•17m ago

I have the same exact spreadsheet to track my spending. I think it's simple, effective and it just works that's why many people feel the same and use your spreadsheet instead of a mega feature-rich financial SaaS, which vibe coders think they can churn out in no time.

LarsenCC•12m ago

I like how many people just use a spreadsheet!

ch_fr•6m ago

Hello, please be aware that your publication history is visible on hackernews:

> Show HN: I built an AI that gives expert-backed blood test insights in seconds (bloodinsightai.com) [1]

You're free to make whatever kind of project you want, but it becomes a bit ironic when every other paragraph in this post is "unlike everyone, I did not chase the AI hype" (the whole post reads like AI prose btw).

Please also note that, while the "Loved by 2360 people" uses images hosted on d145moygdin44j.cloudfront.net, the "testimonials" section has profile pictures that link to the randomuser.me API. This could lead people to believe that the reviews are fake.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43380749

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