How to turn an important spreadsheet into a SaaS business, a thread

1/ First, there really are only three types of SaaS businesses: System of Record (CRM), System of Engagement (eg Outreach), and System of Decision (eg any BI tool). Most spreadsheets in not yet digitized industries still need a system of record. In others, system of engagement.

2/ There’s an astounding statistic around spreadsheets and this is the FIRST reason they’re ripe for disruption: Millions of Excel spreadsheets are used in medicine, science, economics, and finance. Yet up to 90 percent have serious -- even life threatening -- errors.

3/ So once you’ve identified a major spreadsheet in a major market, your basic SaaS app just needs to turn the record keeping into a workflow. That’s your first step to transformation and that alone can yield positive results and reduce risk for the customer.

4/ The second feature for this spreadsheet is collaboration. Likely multiple people run their work day based on this spreadsheet. So you’ll then want to make your SaaS app support by multiple users. This is basic yet powerful when you think about permissions and change tracking.

5/ This is the part when the fun begins. It’s likely that humans are looking at external systems and data sources and trying to manually sync the data on the spreadsheet. Build integrations with these systems and automate the sync.

6/ OK. Now you’ve got a SaaS app running workflows multiple people, syncing data with systems, and best of all, ensuring quality, reducing errors and risk. It’s also reducing grunt work. This is your big value prop when selling.

7/ Now it’s time to add an additional paid tier to your SaaS app. Since you’re at the center of it all, you can now start to monitor changes, you can calculate data, and you can draw insights. Provide a dashboard, provide insights, alert of risk. Charge extra for this.

8/ Now the fun begins. Now that you know not only where the data and workflow stands, you also know what decisions people make or what actions take when certain things happen. This is the opportunity for your automation layer where you can start replacing the humans.

9/ That’s it. That’s what it takes to take a plain old boring critical to the business spreadsheet and turn it into a big SaaS business. Here’s a visual of how this all comes together.

So how do you identify the right spreadsheet? How do you know it’s critical? How do you get started?

That’s for another thread.

In the mean time, join my insider SaaS Community where we go in depth into starting SaaS businesses: http://tkkader.com/community .