We built Equals backwards (but that's ok)

How our unconventional approach created an accidental advantage

When we started building Equals, our mission was as big as it gets in the business world: to build the next-generation spreadsheet. First, there was Excel, then Sheets, and now Equals. Simple. I remember showing David Sacks the product before we’d launched to anyone. “Holy shit, if you pull this off, it’s a $100 billion company” was his reaction. 

Here's where it gets interesting. For the past six months, we've been laser-focused on ARR reporting. From the outside it might appear that we’ve narrowed our vision. But we haven't. The vision for Equals is still as big as it was when we first started. How we get there is clearer than ever. We’ve just done things backwards – and that’s turned out to be our secret weapon.

The "standard" way vs. our way

The most influential class I took in college was one taught by Steve Blank, serial founder and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany (which launched the lean startup movement). He’s a legend in the startup world, and I was incredibly lucky to learn from him. This class showed me that I ultimately wanted to be a founder – it only took me 10 years to work up the courage!

In his class, Engineering Entrepreneurship, you have to start a company in 10 weeks. Steve hammered home the importance of starting small. Identify a problem and build the smallest MVP you can imagine that solves that problem. From there you’ll validate if the problems are real, if people are willing to pay for it, and you can continue to flesh it out. After all, you don’t want to spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money going down the wrong path. 

This is the common Silicon Valley advice. Y-combinator pitch a similar concept – they say “you should be embarrassed by the first version of what you ship.” And it’s good advice, generally speaking. But it can lead you down the wrong path. 

If from the get-go, Equals had been built with the sole purpose of solving ARR reporting for SaaS companies, we would have built something completely different. We definitely would not have said, “hey let’s build a spreadsheet”. We’d have been nuts to do that. 

So we would have done the same as everyone else who’s ever tried to solve ARR reporting. We’d have built connectors to various billing platforms, and a set of UI/charts on top of it with all of your metrics neatly calculated (i.e., not so neatly  😓). We’d have built basically the same set of reporting modules that exist in every SaaS app… and every single one of them sucks. You know the ones I’m talking about. 

Reporting tools all fail for the same reason. They’re too limited. They don’t let you touch and feel your data. They’re too rigid and pre-defined. They don’t let you manipulate your data and metrics to match your way of measuring your business. So the most used feature in all of these tools is “download to csv” 😂. And this is why out-of-the-box reporting tools don’t work and just aren’t that exciting as businesses. 

Creating an accidental advantage

So here then is how we built Equals “backwards.” 

We didn’t set out to solve ARR reporting. We set out to build a spreadsheet. But in order to build the business of the spreadsheet, it turns out we had to find and identify use cases for which we could sell it. 

It turns out a spreadsheet is an excellent tool for solving ARR reporting problems for SaaS companies. The primitive of the spreadsheet enables folks to do the customizations they need from a reporting perspective, that no other reporting tool on the market can handle. 

So our “backwards” approach has turned out to be a massive advantage for ARR reporting. It actually works and is nearly impossible to replicate. 

Yet we’d never have stumbled on that advantage had we gone down the path of building an MVP. We’d never have built the spreadsheet, which was and still is overkill, to just solve ARR reporting. 😀  

Building Equals forwards 

I recently learned the story of how ServiceNow got started. It’s pretty similar to where we’ve been with Equals. The founder, Fred Luddy, wanted to build an all-purpose tool to handle internal workflows at companies. He spent years driving up and down Silicon Valley, facing rejections until he found the killer use case: internal ticketing. But they’d already built the primitives and foundations of the product that could solve a much broader set of problems. From this, they’ve built a behemoth of a business, internal ticketing being just one module of now perhaps 40-50. What made them a $180 billion company wasn't that first use case, it was the horizontal technology that enabled all the use cases that followed. 

I see Equals playing out similarly. We’re not just an ARR reporting company. That’s where this starts. We’ll next (and already are) move to CRM reporting. Perhaps into the product engagement world. Maybe support ops. And that’s just for SaaS companies. 

From there, the spreadsheet as the primitive is still the best tool on the planet for reporting on any business. E-commerce companies. Professional services. Every Shopify business on the planet. Financial services. You name it. It then becomes a game of executing each module well, while the underlying technology remains the same. 

We might have started backwards, but that's put us in an insanely exciting position. We've got the foundation, and like our friends at ServiceNow, that’s how you can pursue a $100B opportunity.