The folly of trying to replace spreadsheets

Our very earliest marketing copy for our HR SaaS was “Replace your spreadsheet nightmare with a nice clean HR database…”

We thought it was a cute and quirky tagline, and that it would immediately relatable to our target audience of business and human resource managers. After all - who love working on large spreadsheets with thousands of rows, tabs and formulas?

Well, as it turns out - LOTS of people still do love working in spreadsheets! Who knew.

When we looked at how our early customers were using HR Partner, many of them came from large complex spreadsheets, for sure. However, one of our most requests features early on was: “Can we please export all this information into Excel so we can do more complex reporting?”.

You see, in our hubris, we had assumed that our customers would eschew their ‘old fashioned’ spreadsheets in preference for a slick, well designed app. But we were wrong.

The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they don’t enforce a strict formatting or control over the data being input. Things like ensuring mandatory information was entered, or the exact layout of that data, is by the very nature of spreadsheets, inherently difficult.

A database (like ours) on the other hand, is very good at regimenting the data being entered and ensuring that everything is collected in the right order, however it is very bad at outputting that same data in a flexible manner - something that spreadsheets are remarkably good at.

All our customers were looking for was for a system that would curate and ensure clean data was entered. Then they wanted to get at that data and slice and dice it up in all sorts of ways to meet their reporting requirements, with the complete confidence that the initial information was all clean and reliable.

So we had to reframe our marketing to make our app seem more of a complement to their existing spreadsheets, rather than seeking to replace them altogether. We expanded upon this by also releasing our open API that allows our customers to access their data in all sorts of other platforms like Zapier and Merge.dev to generate the reporting they need.

Does your SaaS actually save your customers from doing more work?

A recent conversation on Twitter with a colleague has reminded of this dilemma that we faced in our early days of launching my SaaS.

You see, In 25 years of consulting to small businesses, I had learned that business owners and managers were faced with the challenge of recording and maintaining a LOT of information about their staff. Things would often get forgotten or lost, being recorded on multiple spreadsheets, word documents and paper notes all over the place.

I thought that if we could build a system to aggregate all that data in the one place, then we would be solving a real issue. As a bonus, we would add reminders into our system so that important renewals and anniversaries would not be forgotten.

Well, that is exactly what we built with version 1 of HR Partner. It was essentially a huge database that would contain all ancillary data related to your employees, such as training they had done, their past education history, a history of their absences from work, contracts and documents relating to them, and much more.

As we didn’t get any eager customers. At all.

You see, we weren’t really solving any issue. Our customers would be recording just as much data as they would have been doing before in Excel, or a notepad, or on a whiteboard, except now we were just asking them to do it in a system that was unfamiliar to them. No wonder we didn’t have any takers.

We weren’t providing a huge amount of value to them for all this work (sometimes a little extra work) that they would have to do to store all that data in our app. Sure we had automated reminders, but this wasn’t compelling enough for them to make the switch and pay for our service.

It wasn’t until we added the ability for their employees to submit leave requests for approval by upper management. NOW we were on to something. The managers didn’t have to do as much work, as that was now delegated to their employees.

It was up to the employees to submit a leave request with their leave type they wanted, their start/end dates etc. and then all the manager had to do was to literally click one button and the process was completed. Any approved leave would be automatically added to the company calendar so that everyone had a ‘helicopter view’ of who would be away and when.

This was the turning point where we started to see traction in the market. Just by focusing on one niche area that actually cut down on work that the business stakeholders had to do. Also, we were repurposing all that collected data to give different perspectives on team movement and activity. Finally, our customers were seeing real value in our system.

Incidentally, we have since added many more features in our HR app, but the leave requests module is still our most popular and widely used feature - 7 years later!

I got booted from one of my own company’s Slack channels...

So, last week I got removed from one of my company’s Slack channels… and it was probably the best thing that could have happened for me, and my company.

You see, like most companies, we have ‘global’ chat channels that everyone participates in, plus each team has distinct channels usually for just those team members to discuss operational matters.

Some of our company Slack channels

Our Customer Success team has their own #customer-success channel where we would all discuss customer related issues such as onboarding new signups, and how to solve certain issues on the customer’s behalf.

As the original founder of the company, I naturally included myself in ALL our company Slack channels, because, well, I thought that is what founders had to do in order to help the team and keep a finger on the pulse of how the company was going.

But instead, that proved to be NOT a good thing. You see, I was pulled in so many different directions, and involved in so many side conversations that I couldn’t actually get my work done, which was to manage our growing development team, and set long term goals for our product.

Also, team members were getting too used to bringing problems to me directly via those channels, which meant I was the one solving a majority of them, or having to de-escalate situations depending on how important they were. This wasn’t helping our team to grow and trust themselves to make good decisions.

So my co-founder and I decided that it would be best for me to step out of the #customer-success channel. Not just mute the channel, but be removed entirely so that I am not even tempted to ‘check in’ on conversations happening there (as you can see from my screenshot here, that I can’t even see that channel any more).

It has been just over a week, and I can already see the difference. Sure there was a period of FOMO where I felt anxious that I was missing out, but based on feedback from other team members, conversations between my customer success team have increased in that channel, with a lot of questions going back and forth between each other, and ideas been thrown about with gusto and everyone is chipping in more to help each other out.

From my perspective, I have been able to focus back on pure product and leading my engineering team, and I have felt much more in control, and focused since doing so.

Don’t get me wrong - very difficult customer scenarios are still escalated to me (via other channels), but by the time that it is escalated, I know that the team has already explored all the alternatives, and it is only coming to me because it is either a bug or problem within the app itself that I need to be involved in.

A wise mentor once told me that the hardest thing for a founder to do is to make themselves obsolete in their own business, but I realise now that for a growing business, it is a necessary thing to do - and that is is major factor in building a business that can scale without you having to be involved in every minutiae, but rather be able to work on the bigger vision.

It is early days, but I think the experiment is working. Now to work on my goal of slowly get myself booted out of some of our other team channels this year. ;)

Reflections on 2020

I feel kind of conflicted writing this, because 2020 was a horror of a year for most people around the world. Instead, for me, and my family, it was somewhat of a start of new beginnings and some huge wins.

I feel that I have finally stepped out of a decade long black tunnel, and I can finally see the light ahead. You see, back in 2009, I lost my dad, and my wife lost her mum. For us, each losing the parent that we were closest to really took the wind out of our sails, and we both felt that we had lost purpose and a solid goal in life.

I lost interest in my old consulting business, and ended up selling it back in 2015 so that I could focus on launching a brand new startup that meant I could write software that I wanted to write. My wife felt ‘blocked’ in her art, and ended up taking on multiple part time jobs to ensure a steady income for the family while I rebuilt my career (what a crazy thing to do when you turn 50, huh?).

It basically meant a decade of ‘grind’ and living on our savings and on the good will and charity of others. I am forever grateful to family members and close friends who supported us unquestioningly during those difficult days.

But I will be honest and say that because it went on so long, there were days where I despaired that we would never see the light at the end of the tunnel, and that I was just throwing energy into something that wouldn’t last or pan out the way I expected.

People came and went into our lives during that time. Some left us in a better position, but some also left us in a far worse position. After a former co-founder lost interest in my startup and abruptly left in 2018, I ended up in hospital with a stress related heart condition, and I feared that this would mean I could not bounce back again.

But being in these depths was also what forged my inner strength, and bounce back I did. I found a new co-founder and together we built the business up to a far higher level than I ever thought possible. 2020 was the first full calendar year we worked together, and we managed to get to well over a thousand paying customers and we currently manage tens of thousands of employees on our HR SaaS platform.

In some ways, the COVID scare that shut down most of the world was a boon for us, as more people wanted an HR system to manage their suddenly remote or ‘work from home’ teams. For the first time in a long while, I felt that were in the right place at the right time. Well, more accurately, the right place at the wrong time.

I don’t like the idea that we are benefiting from something that is causing so much misery, but I re-frame that as being that we are providing a valuable service to people that want to survive the tough times we are in. In fact, rather than capitalising on this by raising our prices as many mentors have suggested, we instead slashed our prices by half to make it easier for struggling businesses to jump aboard.

My wife managed to go back to just the one part time job that she loves, and she has more time for her art and other creative passions. Our oldest son, who had moved down to Melbourne to pursue his music career also moved back home while the entertainment industry rebuilds itself, so it has been good to have the family back together again.

This week was a milestone, as it marked the first full year of me earning a steady salary from my startup. It was so good not to have to watch our pile of savings diminishing away, and to be able to pay bills using the income earned from something that just started out as an idea in my head all those years ago.

Life is good. 2020 was good, and 2021 will be better.