Horizontal products need a wedge
Bobby Pinero, CEO of Equals, on bringing joy to finance teams
The hard part is not building spreadsheet features, it is choosing one buyer and one job before the product gets pulled in 20 directions. Equals started as a broad spreadsheet for analysis, but the practical lesson was that broad positioning attracts finance, ops, support, agencies, and other one off use cases at once. That makes demos, onboarding, sales scripts, and product priorities much harder to standardize, so Equals narrowed around reporting workflows that repeat across many startups.
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Equals found that calling itself a next generation spreadsheet brought in wildly different prospects, from finance hires to school administrators and pet resort managers. The product could serve many of them, but the go to market broke because each group needed different examples, connectors, and onboarding.
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Other companies in the category reached a similar conclusion. Causal says horizontal spreadsheet products often struggle until they lock onto an initial market, and credits FP&A as the wedge that got it off the ground. Pry likewise focused tightly on startup FP&A rather than trying to replace every spreadsheet workflow at once.
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Equals then moved from selling time savings for one analyst to selling dashboards and reporting that executives can see every day. That shift matters because a tool that only saves an individual contributor a few hours is easier to ignore than a shared dashboard tied to revenue, CRM, and board reporting. Equals now packages dashboards, BI spreadsheet workflows, Slack pushes, and governed dashboard sharing as the core offer.
This category is heading toward narrower entry points with broader product depth behind them. The winners are likely to look horizontal in architecture, because they connect many data sources and support many analyses, but vertical in packaging, because they land through a small set of repeatable workflows like revenue reporting, CRM reporting, and planning for startup finance teams.