Startup Project Tracker: Free, Built From Your Sheet

At six people, your startup's roadmap has three homes: the founders' heads, a Slack channel called #priorities, and whichever whiteboard survived the last office reshuffle. Sprints happen without ceremony — Monday you decide, Friday you check — and that looseness is a feature. What breaks is recall. An investor asks what shipped this month, and you're grepping your own memory at 11pm.

So somebody opens a spreadsheet, and honestly, it works. One row per initiative, an owner, a status. It's fast, it's free, and nobody needs onboarding. The gaps are small but constant: the sheet can't tell "Now" from "someday," it shows no momentum, and you'd never screen-share it to a board member with the pricing-experiment notes sitting in column H.

The usual next move is buying a tool — Asana, Monday, or ClickUp at roughly $10 a head per month, or Jira if the engineers stage a coup. But a six-person company doesn't need workflow software. It needs the sheet it already has to grow a board and two clean views, and AI can do that before your next standup.

Step 1: Start With the Company Sheet

One tab, one row per item the company is actually doing — product, growth, and ops together, because at this size splitting them is how things get lost:

Status runs Backlog → Now → Building → Review → Shipped. "Now" is the honest column: if more than five rows are in it, the sheet is already telling you something.

Step 2: Grab a Free Account

Head to lovespreadsheets.com and sign up — no card required. Building and running the tracker costs nothing; you only pay later if you want individual teammate logins or the app living on your own domain.

Step 3: Describe How Your Startup Actually Works

Open the Project Tracker template, connect the sheet, and write down the rules you've been enforcing verbally:

• "Status goes Backlog → Now → Building → Review → Shipped, and Now means this week — not this quarter."
• "Everyone sees everything. Six people, zero silos."
• "Effort is S/M/L, Impact is Low/Med/High. Big-effort, low-impact rows should stick out so we can kill them."

Then ask for the three views a startup wishes the sheet had:

• A Now / Next / Later board — Now and Building up front, Backlog collapsed into Later, so standup takes thirty seconds
• A weekly shipped digest — every Friday, an email or Slack post listing what hit Shipped, ready to paste into the investor update
• An investor-clean roadmap view — a read-only link showing Item, Area, and Status only; effort scores and internal notes stay home

Hit AI Optimize if your description feels mushy — it sharpens the prompt — answer whatever the AI asks back to clarify, and let it build. Fifteen to twenty minutes, roughly the length of one standup you'll no longer need.

Step 4: The Whole Company on One URL

Out comes a web app: your items on a board, filterable by area and owner, editable by anyone on the team. Drag a card to Shipped in the app and the row updates; type a new row into the sheet and a card appears on the board. The sheet is still the database underneath — the app is just the good-looking half of it.

Send the private board link to the team and the view-only roadmap to your investors, and stop reconstructing the narrative from memory.

Why Startups Keep the Sheet

No process tax. Tools designed for 500-person companies make six people fill in fields nobody reads. A sheet-backed tracker has exactly the columns you invented and none you didn't.

The investor update writes itself. "What shipped" becomes a filter, not an archaeology dig — the Friday digest is the update's first draft.

Runway stays runway. Per-seat software is a subscription to your own headcount: at $10 a seat, hiring quietly raises a bill you signed up for at half the size. This costs the same as you grow.

Common Questions from Startups

We change direction every few weeks — will the tracker keep up? Yes. Rename statuses or add an Area in the sheet and describe what changed; a pivot costs you a sentence, not a re-implementation.

Our engineers want Jira. Do we fight them? No. Let engineering run tickets wherever they like — this sheet tracks company-level items, and an engineer flipping one Status cell a week keeps the roadmap honest.

Is the free tier actually enough? For building and running it, yes. Paid matters once you want per-person logins or the tracker at tracker.yourstartup.com.

Build Yours

Take the sheet where the company's work already lives — or spend ten minutes making one — and point lovespreadsheets.com at it. Before tomorrow's standup, the roadmap will be out of the founders' heads and onto a URL the whole team can see.