

Ask HN: How would you pitch Excel? - d--b

Imagine that Visicalc had never been invented, and that as a result Lotus Notes, Excel or Numbers didn&#x27;t exist yet. Imagine that you came up with the idea, and that you foresaw a great future for it. How would you pitch it to a startup accelerator &#x2F; VC? I am most interested in the one-liner description &#x2F; elevator pitch. How would you convey the game-changing vision that eventually came from this tool with one or two sentences? And how do you cater for the fact that this is a pretty technical tool that is targeted to not-quite technical people?
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Someone
Depends on the nature of that alternative universe. If accountants are still
doing their work on paper, sell it to them first, just as happened to
VisiCalc. "A spreadsheet where you do not have to do the (re)calculations" (in
case you do not know: _spreadsheet_ existed as a word Before the electronic
spreadsheet was invented)

If, on the other hand, accountants are using specialized programming languages
that make it easy to manipulate tabular data with computed columns (say a more
free-form SQL, SAS or SPSS), you can try and sell it as a visual debugger for
those languages, or as something that allows more free-form computations.

To non-technical people, sell it as a way to organize their recipes. Totally
impractical, but it worked before :-)

~~~
d--b
Thanks, I see your point. It's very practical. But I think this would not
convince anyone that there is a 10 billion dollar business potential behind
it.

~~~
dropit_sphere
It probably didn't when electronic spreadsheets came out originally, either.

