So I went down the internet rabbit hole with my previous post about unbundling Craigslist and applying that to local classifieds. And go deep enough, you start to get drawn into other threads, like this new one: unbundling Excel.
Just think about it for a few seconds. In all the different jobs and companies you worked at, what did you or your colleagues use Excel for? I can list some from my experience:
- Inventory listing and tracking
- Invoice templates
- Accounting and tracking finances
- Database
- Reports with statistics and charts/graphs
- Forms for everything
- Calendars
- Project management
- Designing logos or graphics (yes! I’d seen that before)
For every use case listed, you can probably find a SaaS product serving that specific use case, e.g. Airtable for databases.
Need to calculate? Excel. How about a task list? Excel. How about a lightweight CRM to manage customers? Financial model? Waterfall chart for project management? Simple dashboarding/charting tool? Data exchange format between a supplier and a buyer? Light ETL tool for moving data around an organization. The list goes on and on. ~ Tomasz Tunguz
And you can even unbundle it further by creating industry verticals for each use case, since each industry probably has slightly different needs and use cases. Imagine instead of invoice templates in general, you can develop one invoicing SaaS for freelancers, one for logistics, one for governments…the list goes on and on.
Indeed, I like what Ross Simmonds said here, that your competitor isn’t in your industry. Your competitor is Excel. Whaaaatt… ?
You might think your competition is another SaaS company. You think your biggest competition is the startup that just raised a new round of funding. But in reality… The biggest competition is Excel. Spreadsheets make up every industry. Spreadsheets have multiple use-cases. Spreadsheets can be tailored to a specific industry need. And spreadsheets have virtually no user onboarding thanks to decades of usage.
Excel’s universal design, popular ubiquity, and zero barrier to adoption/onboarding is actually every SaaS startup’s biggest competitor. But in crisis there’s also opportunity. It can also be every entrepreneur’s muse for her next startup idea. Mr Simmonds probably mapped out almost every use case of Excel we can know and showed the startups that exists in those verticals. It’s as mind-blowing an image as the Craigslist one. Mind-blowing because there’s so much promising potential within that image. Probably many billions of dollars of value captured within that.
Perhaps there’s one for your industry that’s not there. I think there’s a few I can chew on already…
And all this thinking about unbundling existing horizontal platforms brings me to my next logical question:
What other horizontal platform can we unbundle next? There’s Craigslist, and there’s Excel.
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