Selected work · 02

The formula editor they forgot to build — end to end.

Formula Foundry needed a complete product launch: a Google Sheets add-on, an Excel add-in, a customer portal, and a marketing site connected to a headless CMS — plus the brand to hold it all together. We led design and engineering across every surface.

Formula Foundry — marketing-site homepage with the multi-line editor mockup

Role

Brand, design, engineering

Services

Brand & logo · Add-on UX · Web app · Marketing site · Headless CMS · SEO

Duration

Ongoing since 2025

View the site

Background

High-scale spreadsheet work needed a real workspace, not another chatbox.

Spreadsheets do far more economic work than they get credit for. Financial models, dashboards, sales forecasts, ETL pipelines disguised as Sheets — they keep entire businesses running. And yet the formula bar where the actual logic lives hasn't meaningfully changed in twenty years: a single line, no syntax highlighting, no variable management, no way to share or maintain anything beyond the smallest formulas.

The Formula Foundry founders had been on both sides of that problem — building financial models in Excel and watching analyst teams hit the same walls in Google Sheets. The bet: data and finance teams would pay for a real workspace, the way developers pay for a real IDE. Generic AI bolted onto Sheets wasn't the answer. The answer was a workspace built specifically for high-scale spreadsheet architecture — multi-line editing, global variables, snippet libraries, AI assistance that understood spreadsheet idioms, and a path between Sheets and Excel that didn't require a rewrite.

Challenge

Build a category-defining product, not just a marketing site.

The brief on day one was the whole product, not the website. Two add-ons (one for Google Sheets, one for Microsoft Excel) sharing the same mental model. A customer portal at app.formulafoundry.io for billing, seat management, snippet sharing. A marketing site that could position the product against Gemini in Sheets, Copilot in Excel, FormulaBot, GPTExcel, and friends without sounding defensive. A brand that worked at every scale — favicon to add-on splash to LinkedIn header. Three pricing tiers with seat-based billing and EU-VAT handling. All shippable to the same launch date.

The hard part wasn't any one piece — it was making them feel like one product. A feature designed for the Sheets add-on had to map cleanly to Excel. The marketing site had to read like a developer tool, not a SaaS template. The portal had to feel like the same product as the editor — same vocabulary, same visual language. And the whole thing had to be coherent enough that data and finance teams would trust it on day one, before the testimonials and the case studies existed.

Approach

Brand-first, not theme-first.
Wordmark, palette, voice, and product language designed together. The @@variable syntax that runs through the product became part of the brand — visible on the marketing site, in the docs, on the launch shirt. Recognisable before you've read a word.
One product across two spreadsheets.
Sheets add-on and Excel add-in share the same multi-line editor, the same global variables, the same AI assistant, the same snippet library. Two implementations, one mental model — so a Sheets habit transfers to Excel and back. The 'translate this formula' button became one of the most-used features in the first month.
Marketing as part of the product.
Next.js front-end on a headless WordPress backend (running our own Structura plugin for the editorial layer), live changelog at /changelog, real testimonials from data analysts and finance leads, comparison routes against Gemini in Sheets, Copilot in Excel, FormulaBot, GPTExcel, GPT for Work, and Formula Studio. Not a brochure — a product surface visitors can navigate.
SEO that compounds.
Comparison routes shipped on day one, sharded sitemap, JSON-LD on every product page, marketing-analysis pass after launch with the score lifted by hand. The site is built to be found and to keep being found — and the headless CMS means the editorial team can publish without a developer in the loop.

Highlights

Top 30 on Product Hunt — launch day
Formula Foundry ranked in the top 30 products on its launch day on Product Hunt, alongside seasoned SaaS launches, on the strength of the demo, the brand, and the day-one comparison story.
Two platforms, one mental model
Google Sheets add-on and Microsoft Excel add-in shipped together, sharing the same editor, variables, AI assistant, and snippet library — so a habit on one platform transfers to the other.
Six comparison routes on day one
vs. Gemini in Sheets, vs. Copilot in Excel, vs. FormulaBot, vs. GPTExcel, vs. GPT for Work, vs. Formula Studio — each a dedicated SEO surface with honest side-by-side coverage.
Three pricing tiers + Stripe Tax
Starter ($7.50/seat), Pro ($12.50/seat), Business (custom). Per-seat billing, domain-based invites, EU-VAT handled by Stripe Tax, 14-day active-day trial that doesn't burn while you're not using it.
Live public changelog
The /changelog route ships every release. v2.5 added bulk variable rename, v2.4 added formula chaining. Customers see velocity; we stay accountable.
Branded for scale
Wordmark, glyph, colour system, and voice designed once, applied everywhere — from the favicon to the add-on splash to the marketing hero to the launch t-shirt.

The variable syntax is brilliant. Changing tax rate from 0.08 to 0.10 instantly updated 500+ formulas. Makes spreadsheets maintainable and formulas self-documenting. Perfect for financial modeling.

Namrit Sheth

Data Analyst — Editor's Pick on the Formula Foundry homepage

Screens