The Northspyre Guide to Product-Led Growth in Traditional Industries: Converting Excel Power Users to SaaS Champions
Excel might be the most successful software product ever created. Yet in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, William Sankey shared how Northspyre managed to convince one of its most devoted user bases – real estate developers – to embrace a new way of working.
Understanding the Enemy
The challenge wasn’t that Excel was bad software. The problem was what it forced people to do. As William observed from his time in real estate development: “these people are the very best at what they do, some of the very best in the industry, but they spend a lot of their time doing a lot of tedious administrative work.”
The cost of this inefficiency became clear while working on Madison Square Garden’s billion-dollar renovation. Teams would “spend two months digging through 16,000 points of information and data that had come in to try to understand what was happening on the project and make a decision about how to move forward.”
The Hidden Opportunity
Moving between different development firms revealed that this wasn’t just one company’s problem. William discovered that “all these companies looked completely different on the outside, but on the inside, in terms of how products were delivered, everybody was leveraging convoluted, error prone spreadsheets. Everybody was spending 30% to 50% of their time doing low value administrative work.”
Building the Alternative
Instead of immediately building a product, William spent three years learning to code while working as a developer. This dual perspective proved crucial – he could build something that truly understood how real estate professionals worked.
The breakthrough came when partnering with co-founder Mark Newport, who William describes as “a brilliant engineer.” Together, they built something that didn’t just replace spreadsheets but eliminated “even the need to do things like data entry.”
Landing the First Champion
The Museum of Modern Art became their proving ground. Rather than selling against Excel, they offered a solution to a pressing resource problem. Their champion at MoMA told them: “I was just getting ready to hire a couple of people because this project is pretty massive… but you know what? I’ll give this a shot and if it doesn’t work, I’ll hire those people.”
Scaling Through Industry DNA
As Northspyre grew, they maintained their advantage by hiring people who understood their users’ world: “we have quite a few people on our staff that have actual hands-on experience running and delivering projects. They really get it. They haven’t just done a few user interviews.”
Beyond Workflow Automation
The real key to winning over Excel power users wasn’t just automating their work – it was giving them capabilities they couldn’t get in spreadsheets. William explains their latest evolution: “we unveiled a new product, where we combed across $125 billion of project data. And now we’re not only helping to execute on projects, but we’re giving you market data into what things might cost in different markets.”
Lessons for Founders
Northspyre’s success in converting Excel power users offers several insights for founders targeting traditional industries:
- Deep domain expertise matters more than technical sophistication
- Don’t sell against the incumbent tool – solve the problems it creates
- Hire people who understand the industry, not just the technology
- Build capabilities that go beyond what the old tools could do
For founders looking to disrupt established workflows, Northspyre shows that success comes not from building better software, but from truly understanding how people work and what they’re trying to achieve.