When founders make a slide about competitors, they usually draw a nice grid. Their logo sits in the top-right corner. Three or four other startups sit in the other corners, looking slower, more expensive, or less “AI-powered.”
That slide is almost always missing the real competitor.
It’s not another startup. It’s a spreadsheet. Sometimes it’s a paper notebook. Sometimes it’s a WhatsApp group where someone types “ok noted 👍” fifty times a day.
And very often, that spreadsheet wins.
How a spreadsheet beats a startup
Picture a small business owner: a shop, a tutoring center, a few rental apartments. You show them your beautiful new software. They nod, they say it looks great, maybe they even sign up for the free trial.
Two weeks later, they’re back in Excel.
They didn’t choose a competitor. They chose what they already had. Here’s why that’s such a tough opponent.
1. It’s already there
The spreadsheet is already open on their laptop. It’s already full of their data. There’s no account to create, no onboarding video, no “connect your calendar” screen. Your product has to win a fight before it even starts: the fight to be opened at all.
2. It’s free — or feels free
Most people already have Excel or Google Sheets. Any monthly fee for your product is compared to zero. Even if your product saves them real time, “free” is a very loud word.
3. It bends to fit the business
This is the big one. A spreadsheet has no opinion about how your business should run. Need a new column for “paid by bank transfer”? Add it. Want to color late customers red? Done. Need a weird note on row 47 that only you understand? Nobody will stop you.
Software, on the other hand, has opinions. It has fields you didn’t ask for and lacks the one field you need. Every time the customer’s real life doesn’t fit your product’s idea of their life, they feel friction — and they drift back to the tool that never argues.
4. Everybody already knows how to use it
Your new hire, your mother who helps on weekends, your accountant: they can all read a spreadsheet. Nobody needs training. With new software, every person is a new learning curve, and in a small business, there’s no IT department to help.
5. The owner built it, so the owner trusts it
People trust what they made themselves. The spreadsheet might be messy, but the owner knows every formula, every shortcut, every quirk. Moving to your product means trusting a black box with the data their business runs on. That’s a big ask.
Signs you’re losing to a spreadsheet
You won’t see this competitor in your analytics, so you have to look for clues:
- Customers export everything. If the most-used button in your product is “Export to Excel,” the spreadsheet is still the real home of their work.
- There’s a “backup” notebook. If people keep a paper list or a side sheet “just in case,” they don’t fully trust your product yet.
- Trial users go quiet after a week. They didn’t find a better startup. They went back to what they had.
- Support questions sound like “How do I add a column for…?” They’re trying to make your product behave like a spreadsheet.
None of these are disasters. They’re information. They tell you exactly where the old way is still winning.
How to win anyway
You don’t beat a spreadsheet by being “more powerful.” Spreadsheets are already incredibly powerful. You beat it by doing things a spreadsheet can’t do on its own, while keeping what customers love about it.
1. Do the work the spreadsheet can’t do by itself
A spreadsheet is passive. It waits for you to type. It never gets up in the morning and tells you what matters today.
That’s your opening. Pull data in automatically instead of making people type it. Send a reminder when a customer hasn’t paid. Write a short summary every morning: who arrives, what needs cleaning, which messages need a reply. (That’s exactly the idea behind Santara, the product I’m building for short-term rental hosts.) The spreadsheet stores the work; your product should do some of it.
2. Make switching almost free
Let people import their existing sheet in one step. Keep their column names. Don’t make them re-enter anything. The less they have to give up, the more likely they are to move. Better still, let them keep using the spreadsheet alongside your product while they build trust.
3. Start on day one, not day thirty
If your product needs an hour of setup before it’s useful, the spreadsheet wins by default. Aim for one useful result in the first five minutes, even if it’s small. A first win buys you the patience for everything else.
4. Leave room for flexibility
You can’t match a spreadsheet’s freedom completely, but you can stop fighting it. Custom fields, notes on anything, simple tags, a way to export whenever they want. When customers feel they can still bend the tool, they stop missing Excel.
5. Price against the pain, not against zero
If you compete with “free” on price, you lose. Instead, make the cost of the old way visible: the hour every morning copying bookings, the late payments nobody noticed, the double-booked room. When the customer sees what the spreadsheet is really costing them, your price stops looking expensive.
Or: become the better spreadsheet
There’s one more option founders often overlook. Sometimes the smartest move isn’t to replace the spreadsheet at all. It’s to make a better one.
Many small businesses don’t want new software. They want the spreadsheet they already understand, just done properly: the formulas already written, the layout already clean, nothing to break. For those customers, a well-built template can beat a full platform, because it keeps everything they love about spreadsheets and removes the part they hate, which is building it from scratch.
This is not a lesser business. It’s simply meeting customers where they already are, instead of asking them to move. It’s the bet behind HiTaVa, the business I co-founded: ready-made Google Sheets and Excel templates for small businesses, with every formula already written.
The takeaway
Next time you draw your competitor slide, add one more logo in the corner: a green Excel icon, and maybe a little picture of a notebook.
Then ask yourself honestly:
Why would my customer close that spreadsheet and open my product instead — every single day?
If you can answer that in one sentence, you have a business. If you can’t, the spreadsheet is still winning, and the most useful thing you can do is go and find out why.
If you liked this, read the companion essay: People Don’t Pay for Features. They Pay to Do Less.
Next: Boring Businesses Make the Best Businesses, on why unglamorous problems like payroll and invoices are often the best place to build.
