Okay, let me start by saying that I know there are other products out there. There's Gigrove. There's WooCommerce for your WP site. There's Shopify. And on and on and on.

But SpreadSimple is simply...simple. (Yes, I also hate myself)

I was actually running into the issue recently for a client where I need(ed) to set up a directory of therapists. The client is on a WordPress site and while the obvious choice would be to use a plugin specifically designed for directories to give all of the razzle dazzle of a turbo-charged directory, it would cause too many headaches, because one thing I've learned about therapists is that they are some of the least technical folks you'll meet (I love you guys!). Giving them back-end access to update anything would most likely result in the entire site being deleted.

So what do I do?

*cue fanfare music*
Enter SpreadSimple!

What I DO know is that therapists know how to use Google Sheets and Excel, at least the basics.
So what did I do? I created a Google Sheet, inserted all of the necessary fields one would need to display their profile in our directory, connected it to SpreadSimple and the rest was history...okay, well, not quite...

I made some tweaks, updated some settings, connected my payment processor, set up webhooks and THEN I was done.

The end result? A very, very simple solution to a complex issue.

Now all I have to do is invite therapists who will be listed in the directory to the Google Sheet in question. They update their information, it's beamed in near real-time to SpreadSimple and voila, the site is updated.

Alex was super helpful via live chat, so support seems to be solid.

I'm an 'unlimted' junkie so I was really hoping that 5 codes would give us unlimited sites, but 100 seems...generous enough, such that if I'm managing 100 sites, I should be making $$$$$$$$ in which I can throw a few bucks to SpreadSimple for their monthly pricing. Keep the change ;)

I would like to see some new features, my current pain point which I don't think there's an easy workaround is incorporating zip codes. I would love for a zip code to be in a column and by some wizardry, the user input theirs and query the Google Sheet for the nearest therapists, even if it sorted and didn't filter by a radius, that would be more than enough.

I think this has a lot of potential use cases for small businesses and bootstrap operations, from food trucks to content creators launching a merch shop, and everywhere in between, and outside the box.

The flexibility you get here is very nice and there aren't many constraints on what you can do solely because the founder didn't "share the same vision."

Pick up 1 code, take it for a whirl, and see how you can make it work for you!