Hi, I'm Brian Nesbitt from Markido

Introductions
#1

Hey folks,

I am currently working with one business partner on a product for MS Excel at http://markido.com (site is pre-launch)

Before Markido I was a founder at Fuel Industries (www.fuelyouth.com). I was there for 10 years until we were over 100 employees and I decided to leave. I was a very hands-on CTO.

In my early twenties (late 90’s), I ran an online internet league site called crush’em for the popular EA games back when “TCP/IP” play could only be done by manually entering an IP address exchanged over ICQ :slight_smile: Sold that site way back then for a whopping $1,500.

Oh ya, I am also the author of https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon that is now bundled with Laravel :slight_smile:

Looking forward to learning more, thanks for the forum.

#2

Taking on Excel! Brave. Can you tell us a bit about what Markido does?

#3

You’re the Carbon guy! I loooooove Carbon. Amazing job, welcome to the board.

#4

I just want to repeat what @ian said. Carbon is awesome! Thank you for taking time to build it and release it. Probably the most useful composer package available.

#5

@danielstudds Markido is the company name and our first product is not named the same. Do you mean the company or the product? The product won’t be taking on Excel but actually works with it :slight_smile:

#6

@ian @ericbarnes Thanks :slight_smile:

#7

@briannesbitt interested in what the product is - I’ve had the misfortune of spending a lot of time in Excel, so I’m intrigued!

#8

@danielstudds Thanks for the interest! Excel is great because it is so easy to build things with it and iterate on them quickly. There are obvious limitations with that though as its just a workbook/sheet on your own computer. Getting multiple people to access your spreadsheet, is difficult… and no a multi-user online spreadsheet is not what I am looking for! Collecting data from many sources and massaging/transposing that data back into a format you need to report (pivot) on is soooooo time consuming and error prone. We have lived these issues for years and is the pain point we are solving.

P.S. traceemailstudio.com is looking like its heading in the right direction and nice articles too. We actually recently tried a few but ended up with aweber for now.

#9

Thanks @briannesbitt!

I’ve had the good fortune (haha) of working on mainly waterfall type projects and frickin’ huge organisations… the kind of place where you have to have (at least) 100 page docs each for reqs, high level design, tech specs, test plan, etc etc, normally backed with a bunch of worksheets, all of which need to be kept in sync. Is that the kind of thing that you’re looking at? Just the spreadsheet part? The opportunity is huge if you can get it working (and then work out how to sell it to enterprise…)

#10

The spreadsheet yes. Its really about building apps (even if you are a non developer, you just need to know how to use Excel) that integrate with a web browser (mobile), collect data and then get that data back into Excel in a useful format.

Yes, a corporate (installed locally on your servers) version is planned for sure.