If you had told me 10 years ago Excel spreadsheets would change my life, I would’ve told you that you’re crazy. Over the last 5 years, I’ve had the opportunity to teach Excel to hundreds of MBA students, consulted for Fortune 500 companies, and host one of the top Excel courses on Skillshare. I never thought my Excel knowledge would take me anywhere.  But I’m always open to new opportunities that challenge my way of thinking when it comes to analyzing data and modeling scenarios.

Life After Excel

It’s a bit extreme since I still use Excel and Google Sheets quite frequently. I was an early user of Coda, and recently joined their growth team. The product was founded with this observation (pulled from their homepage):

I recently published a blog post on Coda’s company blog with the full story behind my journey with Excel spreadsheets, and how Coda challenges my beliefs about spreadsheets and data analysis.

If you would like to sign up for Coda, sign up with this link so that you can get instant access (there is currently a waitlist).

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A New Kind Of Spreadsheet

I was a beta user for Coda.io which came out of stealth in late 2017. Coda is basically a shareable doc that combines of Google Sheets, Excel, PowerPoint, and Trello into one. I will be doing a review and tutorials about the tool itself in the future, but for now I want to focus on how the experience of Coda has led me to re-consider the productivity tools I use on a daily basis. Why is this important? Food activists say you “vote with your dollar” when you consume food from certain restaurants or food providers. For the computer or office administrator, the tools we choose to use impact the decisions your IT manager or CTO must make which may impact the bottom line.

You are most likely a heavy user of Excel because your company or office uses it to make critical business decisions. You might also use Excel because it came with Microsoft Office. From my experience using Excel and seeing how other businesses use Excel, one theme has become clear: most people do not need to use Excel.

1985 version of Excel for the Mac

To clarify, most people do not use 80-90% of Microsoft Excel’s features. Most office workers and administrators are using Excel to maintain a list of data, filter and format said list, and maybe do some graphing here and there. If you extract this use case to thousands of users in a company where the CTO has purchased Microsoft licenses to satisfy workers’ needs, this leads to wasted IT spend. For the 10-15% of Excel users who are performing a highly specialized function (e.g. financial analyst, investment banker), the cost justifies the use case. However, even in this case, I would argue that the “formula gurus” out there are actually building small applications where the code and logic just happens to live in the cells of the spreadsheet.

Business Applications Will Be Browser Applications

If you are following along with the argument so far, you believe that highly specialized software (which, I believe, includes Excel) should be used primarily by a worker in a highly specialized function. This leaves a large majority of us who don’t need Excel which led to the rise of a lightweight spreadsheet application like Google Sheets. When Google Sheets first came out, it was clunky, slow, and lacked (understandbly so) the features available in Excel. However, the ability to communicate and collaborate on a spreadsheet was completely novel which led to Google Sheets’ rise in the workplace.

Can more “highly specialized” software move to an online environment? There is a great episode on the a16z podcast called “The $200 PC in the Enterprise” that addresses this shift. Consider the plumber or Verizon repair person who comes to your house to fix something. He or she normally carries a tablet or phone to schedule the job, confirm the work needed to be done, and a host of other activities. The applications that this worker uses are extremely lightweight and could live in a browser or a native app on the phone or tablet. Having said that, the features of the web or browser application are tuned down so that the worker can get their job done efficiently.

If we switch over to the medical office worker who is still tied to a PC or machine in their office to review an X-ray or submit medical records, these applications are custom-built software that come with costly licenses similar to Excel or Oracle applications. There may be a need for the radiologist to use the specialized X-ray software, but for the other administrative workers in the office, the full feature set is not necessary. We are talking about solving the 80/20 rule here for our employees, which means delivering the 20% of features that can solve 80% of what workers need to do day-to-day, and this is where the browser application can solve a real problem in terms of speed, cost, and security.

An Elastic Framework For Excel and Spreadsheet Software

What does it mean to be elastic in terms of software or web applications? To borrow a definition from the world of cloud computing:

Elasticity is the ability to grow or shrink infrastructure resources dynamically as needed to adapt to workload changes in an autonomic manner, maximizing the use of resources.

From a cloud computing perspective, virtual machines can be easily scaled up and down based on the needs of your web application. What if the same concept could be applied to the features in your software or web application? If the goal is to maximize resources and minimize cost especially for highly specialized applications, conceptually this is where today’s productivity tools could evolve to. Every time your Excel spreadsheet needs to run a specific function, it would call the Microsoft API to create a PivotTable or run a Goal Seek. In the world of video transcoding, visual effects studios are already doing this by outsourcing their rendering workflows to the public cloud.

The above graph shows the benefits of having an elastic infrastructure to grow and shrink your virtual machines given your workload. In today’s workplace, Excel is over-provisioned to workers so that would be the blue line in the graph. The orange line would be the ideal feature set for a spreadsheet application that mimics actual demand from your workers. At the end of the day, Excel is a blank canvas and you are calling various functions in the Microsoft library to carry out your calculations. These functions give Excel it’s robust flexibility as an analytical tool. Extending this elastic framework even further, you could push these functions into the cloud and call them only when you absolutely need them. Perhaps the better analogy is serverless computing, where no servers or OSs are needed and all the cloud is doing for you is running the Excel function and returning the results back to your machine in your office.

We want to edit our tools as we have previously edited our documents. – Alan Kay, Opening The Hood Of A Word Processor

Going back to Alan Kay’s paper from 1984, he hints at a future where we are not constricted by the presets of our tools and applications. While Excel gives us the flexibility of analyzing data, it may be constricting the modern-day worker from work patterns that involve analysis, collaboration, and communication. Before we go into the the current and future state, it’s worth looking at a brief history of the mainframe.

The Only Tool Around For Mainframes

IBM still shipping out mainframes

As referenced in the a16z podcast, one of the main reasons Excel has persisted through the decades is because it was the only tool available to process and analyze data from mainframe computers. Back then, the demands of the business user were simple: give me a tool to process the data being dumped from my company’s central database without needing to code or run advanced MySQL queries. Microsoft responded swiftly by providing the libraries and graphing features to get your core data analysis work done, and business users loved it.

Fast forward two decades. Business users still prefer doing ad hoc analysis in Excel, but new data visualization and analytics applications can now handle the workflow between your database and the nice fancy graph that goes in your PowerPoint presentation. To keep up with the demands of business users, vendors like Tableau and Looker provide that additional layer of analysis that Excel from a graphing perspective cannot provide. However, Excel still remains the go-to tool for processing data dumps and CSVs from your engineering team.

Where Productivity Tools Are Headed

From a hardware perspective, it is hard to imagine a world where phones and tablets are not the preferred “machine” for the worker who is traveling to and from client sites. In the office, PCs and desktops computers will eventually fade as netbooks, Chromebooks, and even simple USB devices like the Chromebit can take care of most computing requirements. Shifting more applications to the browser and web means less hardware costs,  but the bigger question is which applications will replace your software like Excel, SAP, and Oracle?

There will always be the specialized users who need Excel for modeling or Photoshop for photo editing. However, that group of users will not grow as fast as the group of modern-day workers who value communication and collaboration on tools like Slack, G Suite, and Trello. By default, these tools live in the browser, require little maintenance, and solve common work patterns very well. I believe the business requirement to communicate the Excel model outweighs the requirement to build the Excel model as teams within the enterprise become more tightly integrated.

Thanks For Sticking Around

I normally don’t write long posts like this, but having experimented with a few new tools and technologies recently has showed me the typical patterns we see in the workplace are not necessarily “productive.” New patterns are emerging, and most of you may already be using these productivity tools without even knowing it. In my next post, I’ll highlight my initial experience with Coda, the doc tool mentioned at the top of this post.

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Time & Flexibility Are Inversely Correlated

During the month-end close, analysts in accounting and FP&A are scrambling to submit their budget versus actuals and forecasts. The month-end close might even be divided into several days pre and post-end of the month. It’s like a ticking time bomb where even after the month “closes,” there are still days (i.e. month-end+1, month-end+3) where you still have to turn in your analyses. On top of this monthly cycle, you have quarterly “closes,” half-year plans, and of course annual plans. This happen every single month.

I’m not dogging on the job function for planners and accountants, it definitely takes a certain type of person with strong, well, planning skills to go through this grind every month. For new accountants and analysts, this cycle can seem pretty daunting, and when you’re trying to submit your budget at 11:57PM the night before the budget locks, you are pulling your teeth out to make your spreadsheet calculate correctly.

I’ve found the less time you have to produce an analysis, the more flexible your spreadsheet needs to get. Sure, if you have all the time in the world to properly forecast expenses and make sure all costs are accounted for, you can double-check and triple-check your work. When you’re under a time crunch, Excel’s flexibility gives you all you need to get your work done without having to extensive risk and audit checking.

Have “Check” Cells All Over Your Spreadsheet

Accounting managers I’ve worked with during the month-end close would send me these super large Excel files that show a running history of the budget and expenses. Buried into these files are many audit checks referenced in the Accounting Today article. In practice, these were simple “check” cells littered throughout the spreadsheet to make sure the end result matched up with another source. Here’s a simple example:

You have a budget of $1,000, and you want to make sure that the expenses you’ve compiled add up to the budget. You can quickly see that the $900 is off by $100. However, sometimes these differences are very minor and due to formatting and rounding, the difference may not be as apparent. That’s why you have the “check” cell at the bottom where you take the budget of $1,000 and subtract it from the Sum cell of $900. This gives analysts a quick way to see if the formulas they are building (and the data behind the formulas) calculate to the right amount. When you have checks that are non-zero, you know you have a problem.

This is a super simplified version of a check. In addition to sum checks, I have seen text checks, boolean checks (true/false), and formula error checks (e.g. cells that show “N/A”).

Spreadsheet Technology Must Be Integrated at the Beginning

Given the cyclical nature of most FP&A groups, integrating a brand new technology in the middle of the month would wreak havoc on analysts. Having said that, doing advanced what-if and risk management analysis where the work is more project-focused is where technology can shine. There are probably a few plugins out there for doing what-if analysis aside from Excel’s own built in what-if tool, and these plugins are probably more user friendly than Excel’s built in tool.

Sharing a spreadsheet with a co-worker has always been a difficult task, and it usually involved pinging your co-worker and asking them when they are getting out of the file so you can start editing them. Then you have to deal with version control and overwriting any work they may have done before you touched the file. This is another area where technology can shine. Google Sheets is the de facto tool for sharing, but for enterprise-level risk and version control, you’ll need to source a more robust solution. Better invest in that technology now instead of losing $100 million for innocent shareholders and tarnishing your brand image.

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We offer premier consultation to small businesses, start-ups and artists.

Does your business need help crafting its story? Are you trying to re-brand or break through to new audiences? KeyCuts Consulting will launch your company to new heights. With years of top-of-the-line experience in various industries, our consulting team will help your business or project reach its peak of productivity.

We have the resources and experience that an agency can offer, but will produce quality work for a reduced rate in the marketplace. We are a passionate team of entrepreneurs and professionals who are dedicated to seeing good ideas succeed.

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To qualify for the free hour of Excel consulting, here are 3 easy steps:

1. Retweet any of our Tweets between today and Monday (December 2nd)
2. The more Retweets, the more likely chance your business will be selected
3. Next Tuesday (December 3rd), we will select 3 small businesses based on the number of Retweets to receive the free Excel consulting!

We are also offering 50% off all our keyboard covers through Cyber Monday. If you need a quick gift for the holidays to give to your friends or colleague, buy a keyboard cover to help them get faster in Excel and to get some color on that boring Macbook! Use this coupon code at checkout: shopsmall13

Continue to #ShopSmall this weekend by supporting your local small businesses!

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1) Picking Your Idea (1 week)

I think a lot of emphasis is put on this stage of the process. How many times have you heard this:

Yeah I want to create a product/business/service but I just don’t have the idea. Once I magically stumble upon that idea for a product, it will be easy to create and sell it since my friend’s brother’s cousin’s uncle makes these widgets in China and I can get it from him for dirt cheap. Then I just throw up a website and I’m good to go!

Parts of this statement are true, but the problem is pretty evident. The idea stage still holds a lot of people up, and my advice is to get something simple produced and get feedback from your friends and family. Back in the day, Google gave away free Gmail stickers to the public.

ZOMG!!! Free swag from Google? Yes, all you had to do was send Google a self-addressed envelope and they mailed you back these awesome stickers you could put on your keyboard to remind you how to Compose an e-mail with a keyboard shortcut or mark something as spam. Those were the good ol’ days when Google was still a “startup,” but I digress.

We first thought, why not create some Excel stickers? I mean, we love Excel keyboard shortcuts and we love these Gmail stickers, seems like a no-brainer. Then after some quick research, we found that there really weren’t any competitors in the market. A few companies have created stickers with Excel keyboard shortcuts like this guy and this guy, but we thought their products lacked some pizzazz and we could do better. We started to look for potential sticker vendors, and we found that many of these vendors have been around since the 90s and their products simply felt “old.”

This is where the light bulb went off. No one wants to put stickers on their keyboard. Unless you worked at Google where this kind of quirky colorful accessory made you the envy of your co-workers, stickers are too permanent and a pain to take off. We needed something more flexible and transient. I’ve seen my parents (and generally older people, for some reason) use keyboard covers to protect their keyboards from dust and dirt. I used to think these covers were super uncomfortable to type on, but they do serve a functional purpose as to protect your keyboard. So this is how the idea started, we would somehow put Excel keyboard shortcuts on these flimsy keyboard overlays.

2) Finding a Manufacturer/Vendor (2 weeks)

This is where I first hit a roadblock. What are the companies that already produce keyboard covers in bulk? Will they be able to customize it? Will we have to create the keyboard cover from scratch? All these questions ran through my mind and I simply started doing Google searches to find the answer. Luckily, there is an amazing website called Alibaba that pretty much answered every question.

Alibaba is essentially a database of suppliers and manufacturers that produce every single object or thing you can think of. No seriously, ANYTHING you want to produce in mass quantities, chances are some company does it on Alibaba. You simply do a search for the product and you’re likely to find some random factory that produces what you want.

Wanna by 100 rescue boats? How about 500 solar-powered street lights? Or 10 tons of dried kiwis? Yup, Alibaba’s got you. Needless to say, we found a couple of manufacturers that produce keyboard covers, but how did we sift through all the different companies? This is where it got a little tricky, since Alibaba puts in all these “badges” for the manufactures to display on their profile indicating they are legit, but you just never know. I sent out the e-mail below to 10+ factories and got a response from each one:

Hi, I am interested in purchasing a large quantity of these keyboard covers. Does your company provide custom text/designs on the letters?

That’s it. It definitely helped that the vendor we chose was based in China, and my Mandarin is decent enough to carry on a conversation. When I Skyped with the factory, it made both parties feel more comfortable in doing business with each other. To quickly close out this point, we set up multiple meetings with different factories, and it became clear who wanted our business based on the timeliness of the e-mails from the factories and how eager they were to do business with us. We also had to negotiate on buying terms, shipping, etc. and all this stuff I just Googled to figure out what the heck “FOB destination” means.

3) Design the Product (3 days)

Unlike other products, we were lucky enough to find a factory that already produces our product so didn’t have to do anything from scratch. This kept our R&D costs down, if I had to put an accounting term on it. We still had to figure out what the colors and text would look like, and this is where our Excel skills came into play. We knew we didn’t want to create a cover with 100 shortcuts on them, since you only end up using 10-20 shortcuts on a daily basis. We took the 20 shortcuts we used the most on our job, and created our first “design” in PowerPoint. I literally drew boxes and text boxes to convey what the design would look like to the factory. Here is an early design (or rather, a PowerPoint slide):

As you can see, the original “design” was very simple and dirty. I ended up having a PowerPoint with 20 some odd slides showing what the text would look like. I also showed the PowerPoint to co-workers and friends to see if it just passed a “common sense” test. After a few iterations with friends and the factory, we finally agreed on the text, colors, and other design considerations.

This design phase probably took no more than 2 weeks. The factory sent us a couple of prototypes and we would make small changes here and there, and then the factory would send us more prototypes with these changes. We simply iterated over and over until we were satisfied, and finally pulled the trigger to order a large quantity from the factory.

At this point, we probably took the most risk as a company. We still were not sure if we could really trust the factory we were working with, and we had wired thousands of dollars to some weird account number for some Chinese bank we’ve never heard of. We assumed at this point, we put all the work in and all we could do was hope for the best.

4) Building an E-commerce Website (3 weeks)

Now that we had our product in hand, we needed a way to sell it. I knew from day one that an e-commerce website would be crucial to our ability to sell our product. Had we tried to get into a traditional retail store, the costs and time could have easily eaten away at our profitability. We had done enough testing with friends and family to give us confidence that people were willing to pay for the product, so we just had to get the word out there.

The first step was to get a simple website up. Nothing fancy, just a website that could take orders and accept credit card payments. I was browsing around the Google Entrepreneurs website and found a link to set up a free website for your company through the “New York Get Your Business Online” program. The goal of this organization is to get all businesses in the U.S. a website, since 58% of businesses don’t have an online presence.

I was more interested in just getting free hosting to set up the website. I also didn’t want to use HTML or CSS, I just wanted one of those simple tools where you could build the website literally by drawing boxes on the screen. Through the Google Entrepreneurs resource, I built our first website with Intuit Websites software, and our site was extremely ghetto. I wish I could show a screenshot of the website, but I already deleted our account. We essentially had an About Us page and the homepage which had a Google Store I set up using Google Wallet. It was simple, easy, and got the job done.

We needed something more legit, so I started looking into real content/hosting platforms. The big ones that jumped to mind were WordPress and Shopify. I ended up choosing WordPress since I wanted to have a little more control and customization of the site. I’ve heard all the pros and cons about using WordPress, but once you start using it and editing the CSS, PHP, and understand where all the files reside on the server, it’s not as hard as it looks. Some additional tools I’ve used to spruce up the site include WordPress plugins (there are over 25K!) and WooCommerce. With these two tools combined, you can create a really robust website with a shopping cart, order page, and everything else you see on a typical e-commerce website.

So how would we accept credit cards? This took some research as well, since we had originally used Google Wallet to handle everything. Now we had to balance all the costs and benefits of picking a payment gateway. We chose Stripe (just because I like the way the website looked) and Mijireh to handle the PCI compliance (still not really sure about the value they add, but without them you have to re-create the final order page for your site with all the HTML and CSS styles).

Again, one of the best things about all these online tools is that many of them are free and they all integrate almost seamlessly with WordPress. Props to WordPress for kicking ass on this!

5) Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (1 week)

Everyone knows you need to do “social” and SEO, but I wanted to do it right  for KeyCuts. With SEO, we set up the usual AdWords and Product Listing Ads. The big thing I wanted to get right was setting up all the social media channels from a business perspective. There’s a buzz now about how to effectively manage social media and content marketing for your business, I just wanted to find one authoritative source on how to do it all.

Alas, I came across this amazing tutorial from Yoast.com that puts all the SEO and social media tips into one lengthy tutorial.  As you go through the tutorial, the cogs start to turn and you realize why you need to have proper title tags and why you should set up a Google+ profile to get better rankings in search.

6) The Present and Beyond

At this point, we were taking orders from the site, and the only thing we have not automated is the fulfillment. Currently our team sends out each order individually, and we are looking for ways to automate this at a low cost as well. We are exploring Amazon Dropship as well as other services, but these options still seem quite pricey for such a simple product like KeyCuts.

That’s pretty much it! We are always looking for ways to automate different aspects of the order process, fulfillment, content creation, but I think we are in a pretty good groove. The real work now is doing marketing for KeyCuts, and this is where the fun comes in. We’ve planned contests to rename our product, worked with Fab.com for a sale on their website, and are even hosting a Google+ Hangout on August 29th to talk about Excel shortcuts and answer Excel questions people have. All these marketing efforts are aimed at making the social media machine work for KeyCuts, and in return we can give back to the community in the form of Excel tips, articles, and special events.

If you are wavering on starting a new company, creating a new product, or just going off to travel for a year, we leave you with this quote from Tim Ferriss. We are huge believers in Tim Ferriss’ “muse” concept a la The 4-Hour Workweek (you should definitely read it if you are ever thinking about starting a side business).

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Here’s the link to the full blog post on Roger’s blog: http://lifelaidout.com/2013/06/16/keycuts-all-about-spreadsheets/

I had the opportunity to meet up with my friend, Big Al, who recently left his job to work on a variety of startup ventures, one of which is focused exclusively on Excel spreadsheets. Given that I love spreadsheets, I had to get the scoop on this business and I thought it would be helpful for you to get a sense of the who, what, why, and where of Big Al’s story so that you may be able to apply some of the lessons to your own life (i.e. why Big Al decided to leave a stable job, how he started something from nothing, and specifically, how he began making money from working on something everyone loves (spreadsheets))!

Joining the Startup Wave
What made you take the plunge and decide to quit your job to pursue startups?
Big Al: I started thinking about taking the plunge about 8-12 months before I quit my job. I had many other interests outside of ad sales at Google, but at the time, I found myself making up excuses for not pursuing those activities. I realized that I’d continue making excuses unless I devoted my full attention to those interests.

Even prior to that, I had been working on a small startup with some friends, just for fun. We told each other that we would quit our jobs if we knew our company would make it big (knowing that the chances of that happening were one in a million). I immersed myself into this startup on nights and weekends, and even sometimes at work. I began to feel very committed to the venture and had very optimistic visions of how I could lead the team to a billion-dollar buyout one day by Google. These kinds of dreams are dangerous for people working at desk jobs they hate, because it fuels the entrepreneurial itch to just drop everything and go follow your passions, interests, and dreams. Needless to say, with the startup, and other business ideas I had brewing in my life, the decision to quit became very simple.

How did you get comfortable with the fact that you wouldn’t be making a regular salary for some time?
Big Al: The freedom to set my own schedule, work on my own projects, and pursue my interests far out-weighed my interests in having a salary. I was very fortunate to have saved up enough to live in an apartment in Manhattan, so I knew I would be okay. Psychologically, I knew it would be tough not getting a regular salary, but when I started looking at my life and career 1-3 years out, I realized I wouldn’t be making any large investments (i.e. house, car, etc.). This gave me more confidence that not having a regular salary would not be as bad as I thought it was. I am a huge believer in Mint and I set up a simple monthly budget for myself. When you sit down and really analyze what you need to simply survive, the monthly cost isn’t that huge after you get past the rent check. This was a pleasant surprise for me since you always feel like you’re burning through cash in NYC on cabs, restaurants, etc. Once you put it all down on paper, you realize where you can make your cuts – eating out and cabs for me – and you realize how easy it is to “get by.”

Did you give yourself a timeline of how long you would allow yourself to do startups before going back to the corporate world (if things don’t work out)?
Big Al: Mentally, I told myself 1-2 years, but this is just a rough guide depending on what progress I made with my ventures and if any life events occur. Maybe my parents will get sick (god forbid), maybe I find the love of my life and need to buy a house; these events would probably nudge me back to the corporate world. The more I pursue my business ideas, the more I don’t want to return to the corporate world, so I may just keep on working at it until I succeed so that I would not need to receive a regular salary anymore.

KeyCuts: A Business About Spreadsheets
What kind of products or services does KeyCuts provide?
Big Al: KeyCuts provides a keyboard cover product for Macbooks that helps you learn Excel for the Mac. The keyboard covers have the 20 most common keyboard shortcuts printed right on the cover so the shortcuts are literally “at your fingertips.” KeyCuts also provides custom Excel consulting if your business is looking to streamline reports and business operations. Finally, we also offer a workshop called Speed Excel, which teaches the most common keyboard shortcuts in Excel, for PC and Mac, to help you be more productive and efficient at your job.

Do similar covers exist already and if so, how is your product different?
Big Al: Our keyboard cover product is different from current solutions in the market because you can visualize the shortcut on the keyboard without having to look at a sheet or a website. The product is also different in that we only show you 20% of the shortcuts that will help you accomplish 80% of the tasks you will face on the job. This way, you are learning the shortcuts in a manner that is efficient for your job as an analyst, MBA student, or whatever.

People who are good at Excel also carry this stigma that they are boring types who sit in cubicles all day crunching numbers. Our keyboard covers come in a variety of colors that make your keyboard stand out from the typical black keyboards on Macbooks, adding some creativity and fun to your computer.

What pushed you to create the keyboard covers and what made you think there was demand for this type of product?
Big Al: My co-founder actually saw these stickers that you stick on your keyboard teaching Gmail shortcuts. We thought about doing something similar for Excel, but realized that stickers are too permanent and just look kind of tacky. I did some research, and found keyboard covers to be a good solution to solve this problem of showing you the shortcuts when you need them, but then being able to easily “hide” the shortcuts as well when you want to go back to your normal keyboard.

At a high level, I had just finished reading Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week and was fascinated with the “muse” concept – a low-maintenance product or service business that generates a residual income. I’ve always wanted to build a physical product and reading this book helped me take the necessary steps to make it happen. I did prototypes, tested it with some Excel users, and saw that there would be a good demand for the product as long as we marketed it correctly. After doing a simple search on Google, we found that there really aren’t many physical products that help you learn Excel on the Mac as well.

How long did you brainstorm and plan before actually taking steps toward production?
Big Al: It took about 1-2 months. We brainstormed the idea for a week or so and I literally created the first mockups in PowerPoint. We sent this mockup to the manufacturer in China and within 2-3 weeks, we had our first prototype. We played around with the colors, formatting, etc. and pulled the trigger and ordered a crap ton of KeyCuts keyboard covers to sell on our website!

In terms of Excel classes and consulting, how were you able to get this part of the business started (i.e. get customers)?
Big Al: It’s pretty much all connections. I’ve had various sales roles in the past, and I always thought it was about pushing your features and benefits until your customer got to the “A-ha” moment and bought your product or service. I’ve realized 90% of the time it’s through your professional network, referrals, and personal life where these opportunities come about. I had no idea I would get into the teaching game, but now I have this under my belt and it’s all about getting the first customer to validate your service by paying you for the service. I luckily had taught my Excel class at Google before I left the company, and had received positive results from my students in the class. This gave me confidence that this class could be helpful for other businesses looking to increase their employees’ productivity and would be willing to pay for this workshop.

For the consulting side of the business, I would echo what I said above: it’s all just word of mouth, and having the first client. I facilitated a class on Speed Excel at NYU Stern last Fall, and one of my students sent me an email afterwards about one of her friends who needed some Excel help for a private investment fund she manages. After getting this investment fund’s business, I’ve been able to legitimize the consulting side of KeyCuts as well as give myself confidence that there are businesses out there willing to pay me for my expertise. To be frank, I haven’t done much marketing for the consulting side of the business, since it just happens organically through word of mouth.

Snagging a Keyboard Cover
If you’re interested in getting some keyboard covers to learn Excel shortcuts (or just to pimp out your Macbook), you can find the full selection of KeyCuts’ keyboard covers here. For information on anything else about KeyCuts, including classes and consulting services, you can take a look at their website.

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