Mayple boosts efficiency on Equals

“We burned a lot of time trying to work with other data BI platforms and we've abandoned all of them. Equals helps us move the business forward faster, in a familiar way. It definitely increased the velocity of building a billing platform by at least 50 percent. What I love about Equals is that it's obvious. It's a great product because it needed to exist.” – Max Smouha, CTO

Discovering the opportunity

Mayple is a startup that officially launched their product this January. They specialize in express international business shipping: they can ship products irrespective of order size anywhere in the world for a fraction of the price of their competitors and in a matter of weeks instead of months. Since launching, they’ve experienced exponential growth, which has been made more manageable in part due to their tech stack.

Max, co-founder and CTO at Mayple, knew that prior to launching their product they needed an easy way of accessing and visualizing their data. Anticipating the growing pains that come with scaling a business, Max also wanted a product that would make extracting data and sharing insights with less technical team members easy. After evaluating several different BI tools, they came across Equals. “There’s something ironic about being so technology focused: sometimes you overlook solutions that are simpler. Equals is essentially Excel + the cloud, except cloud Excel exists and it is very frustrating compared to Equals. As soon as I started working with Equals spreadsheets, I was really excited because we immediately had access to all of our data and our non-technical users found it intuitive.”

Implementing changes

Mayple monitors overall company performance in Equals: from dashboards to forecasts, they’ve been able to simplify tracking orders and implementing data transformations by relying on the spreadsheet interface. “We have a bunch of different queries that we run in order to determine order volume, revenue projections, moving averages for order velocity, and just about everything that helps us keep an eye on the business. Even when it comes to a quick ad hoc question, Equals is my first stop. I’m in Equals daily with a one-off question about the business: maybe I’m calculating a moving average on how many orders are placed for a specific customer or I’m creating an inventory projection. I actually prefer Equals over something like SQL workbench. We do all of that prototyping inside of Equals because it's faster and feels familiar.”

Favorite feature: “Being able to build SQL directly inside of your sheets is pretty amazing. But overall, it's such a familiar workflow. The marriage of data with charting is a big one for me. I find it to be a lot easier than any other piece of software that I've worked in. It's not overly complex in the way that it becomes confusing or it makes you feel like the product is out of reach. Equals lets everyone, regardless of experience, work with data in a powerful way.”

Unlocking growth

Aside from key company metrics, Mayple has also found success when using Equals for different critical business projects. “These days just about everyone you know has a horror story about when they automated billing or changed the billing process at their company. Equals played a crucial role in streamlining our workflow by allowing our team to collaborate effectively and reconcile our data. Automating our billing would have easily taken six to eight months, but using Equals everyone on the team was able to get access to the information they needed which allowed us to be efficient and gave me peace of mind that our projections were right. The process took just one to two months for us to fully complete. We’ve experienced a significant boost in business velocity by adopting Equals.”

As the team at Mayple expands to keep up with their burst of success, they continue to rely on Equals as a place to share and extract data. “The next wave of successful tech will be centered around simplicity. Equals isn't your typical Snowflake or Looker, but the results speak for themselves. I'm not looking to complicate my life, I'm looking to simplify it and I'm looking to make things faster and make things more performant. Equals has been really great for all of that. Every time I come back to the platform, I'm pleasantly surprised by how productive I can be inside of it.”