Spreadsheets (2+2)ever = Tiller personal finance startup finds growth formula in Microsoft Excel

Eight years ago, Seattle-area entrepreneur Peter Polson decided to pursue what he perceived as a gap in the personal finance software market, inspired by his growing family’s increasingly complex needs for tracking its finances, and disappointed by the available options at the time.

Given the tech trends, he initially assumed that would mean a mobile app.

But the data, fittingly, offered a different solution. In their initial user research, Polson and team kept identifying a passionate cohort of spreadsheet fanatics. At first, they saw this group as a lost cause. They’d never get them to switch to a mobile app. Then they realized: these were their people.

The result was Tiller Money, a subscription service that populates customizable spreadsheets with automated data feeds from banks and other financial institutions — tracking spending, income, investments, and budgets with help from templates and a community of users who share solutions and workflows.

After prioritizing development for Google Sheets initially, Tiller has been ramping up on Microsoft Excel since last year, based on the popularity of what was then its limited Excel solution.

The payoff came with the announcement in May that Microsoft would recommend Tiller to its Microsoft 365 subscribers, offering a 60-day free trial to Tiller, twice the normal length. Tiller…