The decisions for which I am most grateful my co-founders and I have made, from day one, were to 1) have a monetization model that's not reliant on usage and 2) not set goals against usage.

Granted, we're a bit of a peculiar case because of the market we serve (giving parents a screen-free alternative to smartphones and social media for their kids). But personally, my experience here has given me hope that other monetization models _can_ pave the way for non-addictive social products to flourish.

The coolest thing IMO watching kids use an old-school home phone is how quickly they pick up new social skills/etiquette, especially compared to something more distraction-prone like Facetime. Also: the first time they try to plan their own playdate is infallibly hilarious.

[1] https://tincan.kids/

We ended up turning it into a network others can join[1] after other families started to ask about it. Having over a hundred local families join within a few weeks has given me hope that the next generation isn’t just condemned to live in a social-media-saturated hell, or that smartphones will inevitably be a part of kids’ lives earlier and earlier.

[1] https://tincan.kids/ – Disclosure: it’s not free, but we’ve tried to make it low-cost.

But for Google sheets, I've yet to find something as flexible and maintainable as map/lambda -- especially when I'm doing things that are pretty... egregiously hacky, but better suited to gsheets than excel (I still prefer Google's realtime collaboration to Microsoft's).

Those functions + a little bit of custom app script have helped me (not very technical) get pretty far in building maintainable data pipelines, reporting, etc. in gsheets.

[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12508718 [2] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12568985