The SaaS opportunity of unbundling Excel

I saw similar articles on SaaS opportunities of unbunding Reddit, Craigslist, etc.

It kinda reminds me of this image:

As something gets big/people use it for all sorts of cases, there's an opportunity to "unbundle" it for people for whom the product has become more complicated.

Wonder if the next products with an unblinding opportunity will be the likes of Airtable&Notion...

The crazy thing is as more companies start to taking on products are meant to unbundle Excel, it doesn't seem like Excel is getting any weaker. Instead of trying to unbundle Excel, better to be inspired by it and look at what its done well and try to apply it to your product. Competition with them long term is just too difficult. Excel just never dies.

I spend a lot of time with startups. We tell them all that Excel is your worst competitor. Everyone already has it (no new cost), they kind of know how to use it (no onboarding) and it’s very reliable (in general startup software is not). It’s a startup killer. — [gregpoirier] (@gregpoirier) June 8, 2018 (Source: https://foundationinc.co/lab/the-saas-opportunity-of-unbundling-excel/)

dam.

Great article.
I often see Excel / Google Sheets in companies as a starting point to a process - it's just so easy to set up anything and adapt as the process evolves.

But at some point, when the process becomes more and more complicated - spreadsheet limitations occur. That's when companies start looking for a dedicated tool (or at least should).
And that's also a perfect moment for product builders to hit such companies. If only you could find out which companies are at this stage - you could probably get some high converting leads :)

A common case is when a company doesn't change the tool in a right moment and it "gets stuck" in Excel. Then, it's unwilling to make a change, because it "costs" to much to move to another software.
Maybe it's one of the reasons it's still so commonly used - there's probably a lot of "stuck" processes out there ;)

However, I agree that Excel is here to stay - in many cases it's just sufficient, especially with simple tasks.
And because of "no onboarding" - why investing in other tools in such cases?
And the truth is, there still is a lot unused potential to automate those simple tasks by using some basic Excel functions, which many users just don't use.

Very interesting article. I think Excel is here to stay for a very long time. In fact, it was primarily the spreadsheet applications and word processing which helped sell the early computers to business users. Excel being highly customizable is it's biggest selling point. I do think that there are plenty of opportunities if your product adds value to Excel and works alongside it.

I unintentionally unbundled my company's app and made a bigger suite out of it, because some people like a lot of features and some like simplicity (there's no way to get it perfect).

Some like "wordpad." Some like "notepad."

But this post just made me conscious of unbundling. So I appreciate it.

I'll be unbundling the suite of apps even further. Why not? The company's got the code already.

Yeah excel is used in so many places. Just visit a random company and ask about all the things they do with excel. It's great for a lot of things but I think the biggest opportunity to compete is better structure, offering integrations with other services and automating tasks.

What do you think?

100% agree. My idea for CommKit actually came from noticing our founder manually calculating commission owed to Account Execs, along with the conversion rates. Despite the manual nature, there seems to be a commitment to Excel from the founder.

Tools that pull information from public data houses might turn customers' heads, e.g. spot rate on any given day for USD/GBP/EUR etc. Also, growth of a company might result in saas tool adoption?

It’s tried many many many times and excel just never dies. Also because it’s so good. To the extend that I am going so say if someone is trying to come up with something better than excel, most likely they are using it wrong.

Great article, thanks for posting. Couldn't agree more with the conclusion.

It's true, too many people are worrying about their SaaS competitors when really the app they need to worry about is Excel. It's an industry joke that most people are just moving cells in Excel spreadsheets all day but theres truth to that. Whether your in Finance, Sales, or Product, you're probably using Google sheets or Excel -- even over ticket tracking tools.