The Excel Marketing Problem

In the movie “Yesterday” a struggling musician has a very weird accident and he ends up in hospital. Through a supernatural twist of fate, he wakes up in an identical world with one weird difference: the Beatles never existed. And he’s the only one who remembers them. He goes on to recreate all their songs as a shortcut to his own fame and fortune, and learns a lot along the way.

It’s a good and charming film. I recommend you check it out.

“Thanks Chris, but what does this have to do with anything?”

I want you to imagine the same scenario, but instead of it being about a struggling musician and the Beatles it was instead a marketer and Excel.

Imagine if I clicked my fingers and Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, Google Sheets, Air Table, etc had never been built. The rest of the world is the same, except for that.

This is your golden ticket. You can build Excel and bring it to the world. What’s the value of Excel? $300B – $600B apparently.

It’s basically the equivalent of knowing the lottery numbers in advance, right? Can’t lose! Time to make some bank, woo-hoo!

Well, cool your jets there bud. Sure, you could build the product and do that. But I have a question for you: how would you bring it to market?

You scoff, “dude, I mean, it just markets itself, look at how many folks use it?”

Sure sure, but seriously, where would you start? Who would be your first users? How would you get people to pay attention?

Let’s start with an easier question: what can you use Excel for? And who can use it?

Answer: you can use it for anything, and the primary user is everyone!

That’s both wonderful but also a serious problem. You can’t bring a product to market with such a vague message.

I bring this up because so many of my marketing clients, and startups in particular, have what I call “the excel marketing problem” which is where there are so many powerful ways to use the product that it’s hard to decide on a narrow go to market message.

And any message will either feel to reductive, or the founders get stuck in “but it can also do X, Y, Z” which is great, but just muddies the message.

Solution to the excel marketing problem

The simple solution is to identify the use case with the best optimization of your product shining, a willingness to pay for that solution, ease of reaching that audience, and where the current solutions suck.

We’ve seen this a lot with the tail end of the previous startup status quo, and at the start of the AI paradigm shift.

From 2016-2021 one of the most reliable playbooks for building a new technology company was to take general software like, say, a CRM, payroll solution, backoffice management tool, ERP, accounting software, etc. and to make it specific to a vertical.

This is solving the excel marketing problem by saying “we’re excel for healthcare” basically. Cool, now you’ve constrained the problem, product, and market.

Since 2022 it’s been the shift to AI. And AI can do, well, anything. Can it really though? Not exactly, so let’s refine it a bit: when the good use cases for a tool far exceed the user’s imagination, then you’re probably stumbling into an excel marketing problem.

And right now, the constraint to getting the most out of AI is your imagination. That sounds wonderful until you consider: 1) this creates a paradox of choice on steroids tyranny for the entrepreneur and 2) the opportunity cost for choosing what to work on feels massively high.

Put another way, if you choose to work on something AI-related that doesn’t take off, you blame yourself because theoretically there was nothing stopping you from working on the right project. It’s entirely your fault. You can’t comfort yourself that you could have built X if the technology was available to build it.

Now that we’re back to blue sky opportunities with AI, we’re going to have good at solving the excel marketing problem again. So many things have become possible or feasible to build, that the marketing challenge will be: “how do I add constraints so I can bring this to market?”

So one realizations about the excel marketing problem is that a go to market campaign needs a minimum number of constraints to be effective. Marketing is about getting the right message to the right user at the right time and place.

The only way to beat the excel marketing problem is to create constraints. And if you’re wrong about your go to market hypothesis, then learn, iterate, and try a fresh approach.

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