A startup I recently worked with was managing almost their entire business through Excel sheets. ...A startup I recently worked with was managing almost their entire business through Excel sheets. ...
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Alex Andrew
pro
• 4h
A startup I recently worked with was managing almost their entire business through Excel sheets.
Leads. Sales. Appointments. KPIs. Ad performance. Operations.
Everything.
One day they got hacked.
And just like that: months of business data disappeared.
But honestly? That wasn’t even the biggest problem.
The real issue was that they were already making decisions almost blind.
Their dashboards were just giant spreadsheets full of random metrics, duplicated data and badly represented graphs that gave no real visibility about what was actually happening inside the business.
So they were: • scaling wrong campaigns • misunderstanding performance • missing bottlenecks • making decisions based on incomplete or messy data
A lot of businesses think: “we have dashboards”
when in reality they just have colorful spreadsheets.
There’s a huge difference.
The best systems today are moving toward: → centralized cloud data → structured pipelines → secure environments → real visualization layers
Personally, I think the current best combo is: • BigQuery for scalable and secure data storage • Claude Code to structure and manage workflows • Custom React dashboards for clean visualization
Because data is not only about storing numbers.
It’s about being able to actually understand your business clearly enough to make good decisions.
Good visualization changes how companies operate.
Bad visualization quietly destroys them.
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