Starting from Scratch with the Spreadsheet Police 🚨
Or how to find the next startup idea worth pursuing
Back Into the Startup Game
After building Locatee for almost 8 years, I decided to build my next venture in parallel to coaching and supporting B2B startup founders. In this Substack, I would like to take you on my journey to find and build my next company and share my learnings with all of you along the way.
Let’s get started! Wait, but where to start? If there only would be a roadmap to build a startup that tells me what to focus on step-by-step.🤔
Enter the B2B SaaS Scaling Benchmark.
Together with my two startup buddies Andrea and Kevin, I created the B2B SaaS Scaling Benchmark where you can benchmark your company across 10 company dimensions such as need, market, or technology and different maturity stages ranging from getting started to exit. We received great interest and feedback on this roadmap from startup founders across the globe. To date, it has over 3m views and almost 3k downloads. More to come in this regard in a later post.
Back to building my next venture: In the B2B SaaS Scaling Benchmark, activity number ONE of building a startup is:
«The team has found a particular, critical, and recurring issue through market research they want to focus on.»
This is one of the first and most important roadblocks of your startup journey you want to check off. It sounds easy but I have seen it too often that founders focus on:
❌ non-critical issues
❌ non-recurring issues
Ways to Find Ideas Worth Pursuing
I talked to over 200 founders in the last 12 months, here are the most common ways they found their startup idea:
✅ Previous jobs: Many founders I met did come across their startup pain points during their regular job. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, internships are a great way to get exposed to potential issues that you can address with your startup.
✅ Own issues: Similarly, look for problems and inefficiencies within your days. Business opportunities can appear everywhere. Being your own first customer is a great way to get started.
✅ Deep dives: Conduct market research, talk to industry leaders, and do competitor analysis into a specific industry to identify common pain points and challenges potential customers face.
✅ Look what is already there and improve: Startup ideas do not always have to be disruptive and create a new market or category. Start with an existing market/approach and improve it from there.
Here are two examples that underline the mentioned approaches from my recent experiences:
👉 Locatee: My first “real” company was born out of the approach “Previous jobs”. My founder and I were working at banks and realized that there is a problem with how office spaces are managed and that real estate teams lack insights into how workspace is utilized. We set off to replace manually conducted occupancy studies with a digital workplace analytics solution.
👉 B2B SaaS Benchmark: The initially mentioned SaaS benchmark I created with two fellow startup friends started out of reflecting on our “Own Issues” when building our SaaS startups. We realized there is no clear roadmap on what you need to achieve along your startup scaling journey.
With my plan to start my next SaaS business, I started to think about which way I should go to identify the right startup idea.
I created a startup idea base with a funnel full of potential startup ideas. I am filling the funnel by reflecting on challenges we had a Locatee, by generating and brainstorming ideas with other founders, seeing “own issues”, or by doing deep dives into different industries.
A New Approach: The Spreadsheet Police 🚨
One additional approach I want to test was inspired by talking to founders at Norm (energy certificate for private homes), GetMika (Accounting-as-a-Service), Inventsys (Inventory and Maintenance at utility companies), and Timly (Inventory Management). It combines both approaches “Look what is already there and improve” and “Deep Dive” in a fun way.
I call it “Spreadsheet Police 🚨”.
Why Spreadsheet Police? The four companies I mentioned above have in common that they all replaced a manual process that was previously done in spreadsheets (either Excel, Google Sheets). Many companies out there are what I call “spreadsheet addicts”. When looking into it deeper, I was actually blown away by the severity and implications of this “disease”:
💡 Did you know that over a billion people around the world are using Microsoft's Productivity Suite, which includes our good friend Excel? That's a lot of cells and formulas!🤯
💡 Nearly 9 out of 10 spreadsheets are home to errors of some kind (according to the 'What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors' study). We have all been there!😅
💡 This one hurts - nearly 1 in 5 businesses have seen their bottom line take a hit because of spreadsheet mistakes (source: F1F9). Ouch!🤕
So the idea or current hypothesis is that via spreadsheets I can identify important, recurring, and urgent issues in companies that could be replaced with a SaaS solution. The “police” in the name is because it requires some investigation to find mission-critical spreadsheets. And it sounds fun. 🤓🚓
The beauty of this if it works - at least my current thinking - is that spreadsheets already solve an existing problem within the company and thus is the ideal starting point to bootstrap a SaaS company out of it. Or TK Kader puts it:
So here is my plan for project Spreadsheet Police 🚨
Step 1: Create a way to investigate the crime scene
I first thought that I could build a landing page where people can report spreadsheets that are due for retirement and need to be replaced with SaaS solutions. However, thinking about it more deeply made me realize that it will probably be hard to find people to report spreadsheets proactively. I am looking for people who are probably not thinking to replace the spreadsheet and might not feel comfortable sharing their insights via an online form only.
My current thinking is to create an interview guide to go onto the “crime scene”, join a couple of businesses in their day-to-day operations and try to understand what spreadsheet they are currently using.
Step 2: Investigate the crime scene
I plan to go on-site to a couple of companies, conduct interviews with different people, and - if possible - shadow some spreadsheets addicts to get more insights into how they are working and what parts of their work are still done manually. Something ripe to be replaced with a SaaS solution. I might start with a couple of real estate and construction companies first due to my background in Real Estate from my Locatee times and the fact that real estate is one of the least digitized industries.
Step 3: Judge the suspects
Once I have identified some suspects I will need narrow all suspects down to a shortlist to be replaced. I will need to assess them in terms of frequency (how often are they used), size of the problem (how big and important is the problem), urgency (why now), and some other criteria.
Step 3: Validate if other companies are subject to the same crime
As a SaaS company, you want to focus on a problem that is occurring not just at one company but across hundreds of companies. In this step, I plan to check if there are other companies with the same spreadsheet situation who are keen to take the leap and replace their spreadsheet with a SaaS solution.
Step 4: Launch and put those spreadsheets behind bars
Once, the idea is validated. I want to launch it! Feels still a long way to go. Exciting times are ahead! Let’s go and I am looking forward to having you follow along.
So what is next, here is my ask to you:
👉 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.