Spreadsheet Police 🚨 Update: Creating a Way to Investigate the 'Crime Scene.'
A deep dive into how to find potential startup ideas based on a company's existing spreadsheets
In the previous post, we explored how I aim to leverage spreadsheets as a means to unearth potential SaaS startup ideas. In this post, we delve deeper into the first step of this approach: Creating a way to investigate the 'crime scene.'. I will elaborate on how and who to interview.
Laying the Groundwork for Investigation
To conduct a structured investigation, I've prepared a comprehensive interview guide, designed to take approximately 30 minutes.
The guide is organized into the following sections:
Gathering General Information: This section seeks to capture details about the interviewee's role, responsibilities, and daily tasks.
Identifying Different Spreadsheets: Here, we probe into how the interviewee, or their company, relies on spreadsheets. The aim is to understand how they work today and how integral spreadsheets are to their workflow. My current assumption is that the less digitize the industry, the more we will find manual processes and spreadsheets. More on the selection of the industry later on.
Exploring the Most Mission-critical and Important Spreadsheet: There might be different spreadsheets used by the interviewee. Obviously, not all of them are candidates for potential SaaS software solutions. The really interesting ones are frequently used and are critical to the business. Therefore, we delve deeper into a particular spreadsheet to uncovering if the importance and criticality of the data it holds, how it collates data from various sources, whether multiple people interact with it, and whether the interviewee uses it to get insights, take action, and decisions.
Miscellaneous Questions: This part includes a variety of questions, e.g. to give room to the interviewee to share his or her feedback and other ideas.
If you want to check out the full interview guide, you can find it here.
Identifying Who to Interview
As the famous saying goes, we don't want to "boil the ocean." Therefore, it's crucial to be selective about the industries, companies, and personas we focus on during the interviews. In addition, you should also consider the personal criteria that your next venture needs to pass.
What industries and roles to focus on
Deciding on the right market or industry is one of the most critical decisions you can make when starting a company. Why? Because the industry is usually not something you can easily change later and the dynamic in the chosen industry will highly influence your future buyer and thus your startup. By assessing the industry with certain criteria, we should be able to identify interesting industries.
👉 Huge/large industry size: Building in a large market will increase the likelihood of opportunities and allow to niche down, e.g. real estate and construction industries are huge markets globally and offer a lot of niches
👉 Changes Affecting the Industry: The market is going through large transitions. Change always breeds opportunities. Such global megatrends can be climate change, AI, digitization, demographic changes, and many others.
👉 Industry Growth: The industry should not just survive but thrive today and in the future. The more work that needs to get done, the more opportunities. E.g. focussing on print media, an industry that is struggling due to the internet, will inherently make it harder to build a startup.
👉 Local Head or Tailwinds: The players affected by regulatory changes, subsidies, labor shortages, or other many trends.
👉 How People Work Today: Basically the level of digitization that the industry is in. The more manual process, spreadsheets, PDF print-outs, siloed data, etc. the better.
In terms of roles, I will try two different approaches. I am planning to talk to decision-makers (e.g. C-level roles, owners) as well as employees to get deeper insights into their day-to-day operations.
What is personally important to you
On top of the industry, you should set yourself some criteria that are personally important to you. Here are my examples:
👉 Passion: A problem that I am deeply passionate about and I am drawn into, e.g. I am here to make it easier for people to X, I’m here to put an end to Y. It needs to pass your excitement filter. Otherwise, it will be very hard to make it a reality. Hence, this is a must criterion.
👉 Bootstrappable: I would like to bootstrap my next company, ideally without external capital. Therefore, I am looking for areas where demand already exists and does not need to be created. This results in lower risks, less time for educating the market, and thus less capital needed.
👉 Experience: Something where I am experienced in or have access to via my network. This should allow one to pursue an opportunity faster and give an unfair advantage.
👉 Dogfooding: Something where I can dog food the solution and experience the problems first hand. This makes it easier to understand customer problems. In my case, this is an optional criterion.
Armed with the criteria and a list of the industries such as NOGA-Codes or NAICS, we can identify the industry, companies, and interviewees to approach.
Let’s look at an example
Now we can identify the industry to focus on based on the criteria and the list of all industries. For my first outreach, I decided to look specifically into the Construction and Real Estate industry because of experience and passion. Let’s look at a specific sub-nice:
Field Service and Installation Companies in the Solar and HVAC Industry ☀️
How this matches with the explained criteria:
👉 Huge/large industry size: Global solar industry is estimated $234.86 billion in 2022 according to Fortune.
👉 Changes Affecting the Industry: Due to the climate crisis, we have to rebuild our entire infrastructure. Installers in the solar industry are carrying out part of this shift and benefit from it.
👉 Industry Growth: The solar industry globally will grow to from $234.86 billion in 2022 to $373.84 billion by 2029 according to Fortune.
👉 Local Head or Tailwinds: Because of the amount of work that is needed, installers are growing, they need to hire people which leads to a labor shortage and therefore a strong urgency to act.
👉 How People Work Today: This is what we will explore with our interview but the current assumption is that the field service and installers still work rather manually and have not reached an advanced level of digitisation.
What’s Next?
So that's the plan! Armed with my interview guide ready and the industry to focus on, I'm all set to start hunting spreadsheet crimes and uncover potential SaaS startup ideas.
As I continue this exciting journey, I'll be sharing the findings and insights right here on this substack. And, if you have any thoughts or experiences to share, don't hesitate to reach out!
Until next time, let's keep fighting spreadsheet crimes, one company at a time! 🚀
👉 Subscribe to my Substack if you want to learn more about my process and learnings
🚨 Do you have a crime scene to investigate? Do you have a spreadsheet to report?Reach out to the Spreadsheet Police aka me via Linkedin
🎙️ I am curious to hear your thoughts about this post. What do you like about it and what should I focus on in my next posts? I am very curious to hear your thoughts.