I didn't think I'd like Grist.

Previously, I purchased other 'spreadsheet' / 'database' style deals and I've mostly refunded them as they were tricky to use because of poor UI/UX or had strange limitations that didn't make a lot of sense, lacked data visualisation features and support was awful.

Grist has been great so far. I've set it up for some fairly basic uses to get the gist of it.

1. Tracking my revenue channels for my ecommerce businesses and the multiple brands that sit beneath it. This includes assessing profitability of products, how long they take to sell after marketplace listing and using that, and more data, to understand what's most worth my effort and the best next actions we can take. It's good for identifying 'hot' channels and 'hot' products.

2. A CRM style record for financial analysis that I'm hoping to automate. It stores data on industries, individual accounts, opportunity sources, identifying the most profitable customers and using that to improve targeting and to understand where our success really is.

There isn't masses of data in there yet but it's working really well and I feel quite confident in my understanding of it.

The next step is automating the data entry between my CRM, marketplaces and you know, every tool I have as this could be an amazing centrepiece where all data is pulled together and visualised.

Pros:
🌮 Unlimited documents. For me, that's more than enough with 100,000 rows in each, I like to be quite focused in the data I'm using rather than dogpiling it.
🌮 8 users is absolutely fine for me and my team.
🌮 It's very clear and easy to use and there are basic tutorials and guidance built into the platform.
🌮 Very stable. I've not encountered a glitch as yet.

Cons:
🤷🏼‍♂️ A giant lack of integrations. Zapier is there but that's going to cost a pretty penny. I'd like to see SyncSpider and Pabbly Connect. Maybe even niche automation tools would be good like 'Ants and Apps' from the marketplace? Anything that automates the data entry would be a huge improvement.

You can copy and paste data but that's not quite the same.

For the price, the team and the platform, Grist is a hella deal that I really have to recommend.