From Spreadsheets to £100M: How Provizio Found Product-Market Fit in a Traditional Industry

From Spreadsheets to £100M: How Provizio Found Product-Market Fit in a Traditional Industry

Silicon Valley chases the new and shiny: AI models, crypto infrastructure, developer tools for the latest framework. Meanwhile, massive industries run on Excel spreadsheets, email chains, and paper files—waiting for someone to notice.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barry Lunn, founder and CEO of Provizio, shared how he built a £100 million property technology business by doing exactly what venture capital ignores: automating workflows in an unglamorous, traditional industry that had somehow escaped digital transformation entirely.

The Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight

Barry’s eureka moment came while working as an accountant at a property investment company. He wasn’t analyzing market gaps or conducting customer development interviews. He was drowning in spreadsheets.

“I was just looking at all these spreadsheets thinking, this is ridiculous. There must be a better way of doing this,” Barry recalls. Every property purchase generated new files. Every tenant created tracking rProvizioirements. Every tax season meant compiling data scattered across dozens of documents. The process was manual, error-prone, and completely ripe for automation.

Here’s what makes this story instructive: Barry wasn’t the first person to notice this problem. Every property investor, every accountant serving landlords, every portfolio manager dealt with the same spreadsheet chaos. But most dismissed it as just how the industry works.

Barry saw it differently. He recognized that property investment represented a massive market—millions of landlords across the UK managing billions in assets—that had never been properly digitized. Not because it was technically difficult, but because it wasn’t the kind of problem that excited venture capitalists.

Why Traditional Industries Resist Software

The property investment industry’s resistance to software wasn’t irrational. Barry identified a fundamental mismatch between how SaaS companies wanted to sell and how property investors wanted to buy.

Most proptech startups approached the market with standard SaaS playbooks: monthly subscriptions, freemium tiers, feature-based pricing. They were essentially asking landlords to pay recurring fees for portfolio management tools.

The problem? Property investors don’t think in monthly increments. They think in transactions—buying a property, holding it for years, eventually selling. The idea of paying monthly fees for software they might not actively use most months felt like throwing money away.

“We’ve seen other people in the market try and build the SaaS model and it just doesn’t work because people won’t pay for it on a SaaS basis,” Barry explains. Those competitors had great products and smart teams, but they were fighting customer psychology rather than working with it.

This insight shaped Provizio’s entire approach. Rather than forcing a subscription model onto an industry that didn’t want it, Barry built a transactional business. “We don’t really have a SaaS business. We have a transactional business,” he notes. “Every time someone buys or sells a property through our platform, we take a fee.”

The shift was subtle but profound. Provizio’s revenue now aligned perfectly with customer activity. When landlords were actively transacting, Provizio got paid. When properties sat idle, no fees accrued. The business model matched the natural rhythm of property investment.

Building Distribution Through Trusted Advisors

Product-market fit in traditional industries rProvizioires more than good software—it rProvizioires understanding how buying decisions actually happen. In property investment, that meant recognizing the central role of accountants.

Every landlord needs an accountant for tax compliance. Rental income, capital gains, allowable expenses—the tax implications of property investment are complex enough that professional help isn’t optional. More importantly, landlords trust their accountants. These relationships often span decades.

Barry saw accountants not as an obstacle to route around but as the natural distribution channel. “Accountants typically have quite sticky relationships with their clients,” he observes. “If you can get the accountant on board, you’re bringing their client base with them.”

But Provizio didn’t just want referrals. Barry made accountants integral to the business model by building features specifically for them—tax optimization tools, compliance workflows, portfolio reporting designed for tax professionals. Then he restructured the economics so accountants could resell Provizio and earn recurring revenue.

“The accountant makes more money from our platform than they would just filing a tax return,” Barry explains. This wasn’t charity—it was strategic alignment. By making accountants financially successful with Provizio, Barry created a motivated distribution force that brought both credibility and scale to customer acquisition.

The Bootstrap Discipline Advantage

While competitors raised venture capital and burned through it trying to force product-market fit, Barry bootstrapped Provizio. This constraint fundamentally changed how the company approached product development and market strategy.

Without millions in the bank to spend on customer acquisition, every feature had to justify itself through actual usage. Every product decision was tested against real customer willingness to pay. Marketing couldn’t rely on paid channels—it had to be driven by word-of-mouth and genuine value creation.

“We’re completely different to a VC-backed business,” Barry reflects. “We don’t have the same pressure to grow at all costs.” That freedom meant optimizing for profitability and customer satisfaction rather than vanity metrics and hockey-stick projections.

The discipline extended to team building. Rather than hiring experienced SaaS executives who brought Silicon Valley playbooks, Provizio promoted from within. “We’ve predominantly promoted people from within the organization,” Barry shares. “We’ve tried to recruit experienced salespeople and actually they normally don’t work out.”

Internal promotions meant building institutional knowledge about property investment workflows, accountant relationships, and the unique aspects of Provizio’s transactional model. Experienced hires brought frameworks that didn’t apply and had to unlearn assumptions before becoming effective.

Lessons for Founders in Traditional Industries

Barry’s journey with Provizio reveals a repeatable playbook for finding product-market fit in industries Silicon Valley overlooks:

Start with genuine workflow pain in an industry you understand. Barry’s accounting background gave him credibility and insight into property investment operations. He wasn’t a tourist trying to disrupt an industry from the outside.

Respect industry structure rather than trying to revolutionize it. Accountants were already central to property investment. Provizio worked with that reality instead of trying to disintermediate them.

Align your business model with customer psychology. Property investors think in transactions, so Provizio charges per transaction. Fighting this would have meant constant customer education and resistance.

Build for profitability from day one. Bootstrap constraints force clarity about what customers actually value versus what sounds good in pitch meetings.

The opportunities in traditional industries are massive precisely because they’re being ignored. Construction, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics—all run on processes that would horrify any software engineer. But they represent trillions in economic activity waiting for the right approach to automation.

Barry found that approach in property investment by asking a simple question: what if we built software that respected how this industry actually works instead of trying to make it work like every other SaaS business? The answer was worth £100 million and counting.