Spendflo’s Origin Story: How a LinkedIn Message About a Lost Contract Launched a $15.4M Company
The best startup ideas don’t come from whiteboards—they come from problems that frustrated you for years.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared how a single LinkedIn message transformed years of procurement frustration into a company creating an entirely new category.
The Quarterly Ritual Nobody Owned
Long before Spendflo existed, Siddharth lived the problem. At his previous startup, which scaled from Series A to IPO at breakneck speed, he had a recurring confrontation that played out every single quarter.
“She used to walk up to me every quarter with an Excel sheet and said, this keeps going up, this number keeps going up. Go figure out what it is and go cut it by half,” Siddharth recalls about his CFO. “And SaaS spin was one of the top two top three spans.”
The solution? Create another Excel sheet. “And then I used to create an excel sheet. Nobody use it. Nobody followed any processes, nobody have any idea where the contracts are. It just kept repeating itself,” he shares.
Quarter after quarter, the same cycle. SaaS spend climbing. CFO frustrated. Excel sheets multiplying. Nothing changing. The problem wasn’t that nobody cared. It was that nobody owned it. “Nobody’s job was to actually manage this entire process or manage the vendors,” Siddharth explains. It just fell on whoever happened to sign the contracts.
The Message That Changed Everything
December 2020. Nine months into COVID. Siddharth had moved on from his previous company. Then his phone buzzed with a LinkedIn notification.
“My ex CFO hit me up and said, sid, you signed this contract a while ago on LinkedIn. She hit me up on LinkedIn and said, where the hell is this? Can you help me with this?” Siddharth recalls. “And by that time, id left the company. Its only been a year. Shes hitting me up a year later about a contract that I signed two years ago.”
Read that again. An ex-CFO was hunting down a former employee on LinkedIn about a contract from two years ago. That’s not a process problem. That’s a market screaming for a solution.
“And then I realized, oh, wow, she really needs help,” Siddharth says.
Why Founder-Problem Fit Matters More Than TAM
Most founders start with market analysis. They calculate TAM, identify white space, and convince themselves the opportunity is large enough. Siddharth started with lived pain. He didn’t need to validate whether CFOs struggled with SaaS procurement. He’d lived through years of quarterly confrontations.
This is founder-problem fit. It’s the deep, visceral understanding that comes from living inside the problem for years. You know the workarounds. You know what solutions people tried and why they failed. You know the real pain, not the pain that shows up in surveys.
From Help to Company in Two Months
That offer to help turned into proof of concepts. Those POCs turned into paying customers faster than most founders can incorporate. “We signed our first customer in like in the first two months of the business. Very lucky, I remember,” Siddharth shares.
Lucky? Or inevitable when you’re solving a problem you deeply understand for people who are desperate for a solution? “And I got married in February 2021, and I was negotiating our first contract on my first night,” he remembers.
The Problem Behind the Problem
Most founders would have built a better Excel sheet or a SaaS management tool that shows spend. Siddharth understood the deeper problem: companies with 200 to 2,000 employees have massive SaaS spend but lack enterprise infrastructure.
“For those types of companies, a lot of their spend is SAS spend,” Siddharth notes. “They don’t necessarily have procurement software and they don’t really have spend management as well.”
“What we figured out is wed actually have to marry SaaS management, spend management and procurement management into one single place,” Siddharth shares. This wasn’t positioning. It was recognizing that his ex-CFO’s LinkedIn message represented a gap nobody else was addressing.
The Category That Emerged From Real Pain
The category name—SaaS spend management—didn’t come from a branding exercise. It emerged from customer conversations. “And that’s when SAS spend management as a category even came up,” Siddharth recalls. “And it became a category only in 2022, I would say or 2021. 2022 ish.”
Why Market Analysis Would Have Failed
If Siddharth had started with market analysis, he might have concluded the opportunity was too crowded. SaaS management tools existed. Procurement platforms existed. An analyst would have said: pick one lane.
But living the problem revealed what analysis couldn’t: none of those solutions actually solved the problem. His ex-CFO didn’t need better visibility. She needed someone to own the entire process and guarantee savings. She needed outcomes, not software.
That’s why Spendflo acts as a virtual procurement team. “We provide a guaranteed savings on it as well,” Siddharth explains. “That way we’re always budget neutral and we’re actually delivering the outcome rather than just giving you the software and asking you to figure it out.”
Market analysis doesn’t reveal that insight. Living the problem for years does.
The Lesson for Founders
The best B2B companies emerge from founders intimately familiar with the problem they’re solving. Not from customer interviews. Not from market research. From years of lived frustration and deep understanding of why existing solutions don’t work.
If you’re doing work that frustrates you, pay attention. If you’re creating the same Excel sheets quarter after quarter, notice the pattern. Your future company might be hiding in your current frustrations.
The question isn’t whether the market is big enough. It’s whether you understand the problem deeply enough to build something people desperately need. Siddharth’s ex-CFO wasn’t looking for market validation. She was looking for help with a contract she couldn’t find. That desperation, multiplied across thousands of mid-market companies, became a $15.4 million company.
The best startup ideas don’t come from whiteboards. They come from problems that frustrated you for years, waiting for one moment—maybe a LinkedIn message—to finally demand a solution.
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