Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

This is incredible. I uploaded a CSV with ~6000 rows containing campaign finance data for a particularly corrupt local politician and asked "what was the total contributed amount in [year]". Not only did it produce the correct answer (in around the same amount of time it took me to calculate it on my end) but it also seemed to understand that the spreadsheet was related to campaign finance in the "summary" portion of the response.

The most useful aspect was that I could ask "what was the total contributed amount between January and June of 2020" and get an accurate answer for that as well. Since the date column is provided as an "MM/DD/YYYY" string, I would normally have to do some boilerplate work to sanitize this.

For my particular use case, the charting aspect left a few things to be desired - once I grouped campaign donations by contributor, I could only see the first 10 rows in the AI response, with no option to expand the output. But overall I was truly blown away that something like this is even possible for a small team to build.

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. I fully agree that a combination of spreadsheets and SQL are the ideal tools for data analysis -- not a SaaS GUI.

> Niching down, if you work in operations at a <50 person startup or SMB and your company relies on a Postgres or MySQL database, Sourcetable is an affordable reporting tool with turnkey data infrastructure that doesn’t require code or engineers to set up.

With the rise of AI, companies like Tembo that help you set up all in one databases, and tools like this, I'm increasingly of the mind that many companies should start bringing things like analytics and observability in-house. I don't see the need to pay Mixpanel or Datadog thousands of dollars per month when a self-serve solution that relies on tried and true tech is more or less at your fingertips.

It’s amazing that Microsoft - given their focus on AI and decades of experience in spreadsheets - doesn’t offer this type of functionality. Corporate bureaucracy vs startup agility!

> Niching down, if you work in operations at a <50 person startup or SMB and your company relies on a Postgres or MySQL database, Sourcetable is an affordable reporting tool with turnkey data infrastructure that doesn’t require code or engineers to set up.

I'm already using Retool for these kinds of tasks- what does sourcetable do that I can't already do with Retool?

edit: also, did you build your own spreadsheet engine, or use an off-the-shelf one? (also will it be open source ;P)

I always wonder where these spreadsheet/database apps will land. Usually it falls flat for one of a few reasons I’ve observed:

- Fundamental gap in skillset, in that if you want to have ultimate flexibility to slice and dice the data and report on whatever you’re seeking, you’ve ultimately needed SQL skills in the past (which isn’t rocket science, but also isn’t something most accounting users can run with on their own).

- Fundamental desire of users to work with unstructured data. This goes back at least as far as Excel vs Lotus Improv in the early 90’s. Joel Spolsky talked about this, how they were terrified that Lotus Improv was going to kill Excel, because Improv was built to work with structured data, which users could then query and ask questions of to get any answer they want. But it turned out, as they observed people using both apps, there were zero users that used 100% normalized, structure data.

- Imperfect translation between spreadsheet and database. I’ve seen these work well 99.9% of the time, but at some point a column gets added or something that throws off formulas. And 0.1% error is basically catastrophic in accounting.

Maybe LLMs help overcome these challenges. Wish you luck.

You might want to check who is blacklisting you and request to unblock. AdGuard blocked sourcetable.com as "Scam".

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/np92pyo0eb0zphysc9wwz/screens...

This is amazing. I’ve been scouting for such a solution as we’ve outgrown excel. Giving it a spin

This looks great! Well done. My concern is that there's not a single mention of data privacy. Which is is a red flag for any one coming from an enterprise world. Get that sorted and I'd consider using your tool for actual work.

Awesome, have you got any mining specific worked examples or spatial examples? Thinking about lidar point clouds and running deltas for stock pile management. Looking at building a new mine and typically there at any mine site there are excel macros which might take an hour to run embeded in the operations. Often developed by older engineers, who will default to excel. Any suggestions on how best drive technical user adoption (asides from dropping it on the kids in the engineering deparments, can't wait that long) ?

Possibly off-topic:

If i want to enable a simple internal web application (say React) with ability for users to manage master data tables, their schemas, and PK-FK relationships using a simple lookup -- as close to a simple spreadsheet as possible (upload and download CSV or view/edit data in a spreadsheet view) ... what are some good components or libraries that I can utilize?

Brilliant work team, great to see this being launched.

Thats a spicy example dataset!

I like that it's able to infer information from the context of the cells, e.g. being able to run a query across continents when the data only contains the country.

Being able to ask it to interpret the results is helpful, it would be cool if it automatically told you if there was enough data to have statistical significance in the conclusions it was presenting.

Congrats on the launch! It's been great working with you from the Daft side

Cool.

How did you build so many integrations so fast?

Selfishly, would love to see Streak (CRM) integration as well.

An improved and more interactive version of Google Sheets' explore tab. Looks good!

You did it, you somehow made Excel even more error-prone.

Very cool. It would be great to have auto complete across cells.

What external checks are included to verify the chatbot output?

very nice app. just the front-end browser component alone is super-slick. but expecting users to bring their data to your platform is a barrier to adoption.

Are you open sourcing the product for non-commercial use?

Does this use function-calling on the backend?

Looks interesting, commenting so that I can remember.

Huge congrats on the Launch ! You guys crushed it with all the thought and hustle behind creating such a valuable tool. Wishing you nothing but success on the ride ahead!

do you use any agentic prompting techniques?

great product. congrats on the launch

Congrats on the launch! It’s wild to see AI stepping into spreadsheets like this. Pretty soon there won’t be a part of our workflow AI hasn’t touched.