Why I Built A Xero Export Utility

Looking for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ideas

I was looking around for startup ideas. I wanted something Business to Business (B2B) with a high Total Addressable Market (TAM). I had read the Lean Startup and I caught onto the idea of trying to identify a complicated spreadsheet that could be appropriated into a dedicated SaaS app, bit by bit. Around me there was a REIT with a Master Trust composed of several smaller Trusts each with their own Xero file. I built the Xero eport utility to solve the problem of consolidating the multiple Xero Company files into one Spreadsheet. This was a task that the company Analysts were doing manually. Other possible applications include:

• a Franchise business composed of multiple smaller Franchises
• any application where a Xero customer wants to consolidate multiple company files

"Good heuristic for creating SaaS startups: find a commonly used spreadsheet (eg cap tables) and turn it into a dashboard (eg Carta). Replace email attachments with workflows. Spreadsheets are the long tail of datasets that don't have their own SaaS tool." @davidsacks on the all in podcast (e146 1:03:10).

How does this tie in with the Property Feasibility Analysis projects?

As previously mentioned I built this for a REIT so I had a keen interest in Real Estate and property. After bringing the product to market I looked around to plan the future roadmap. I identified that the key performance metric for evaluating the feasibility of a commercial property is IRR. So I built an IRR calculator on the back of my knowledge about from building the Xero product. The basic idea is that Revenue, Expense, Asset and Liability items can be forecasted for the life of the project such that the IRR can be calculated for forecast cashflows. And after that a budget can be set up to track against the actuals from the Xero sync. All of this can effectively be done in 'real time.'

Barnacle on the Whale Strategy

I built the app as a marketplace app instead of building a standalone accounting app to be the barnacle App on the Whale of Xero. Xero has 2m customers so if I can capture a small percentage of that then the goal will be to maintain that percentage as Xero grows. Xero has hired a US based CEO so Xero's future investment in US expansion is likely to be significant and that is where a lot of their customer growth is likely to come from. US Based Staff include: Michael Strickman CMO (US) Ashley Grech as CRO (US).

Related: Alexandra Botez takes on the Besties in a 1v4 simultaneous chess match ~23 mins All-In Summit.

More details coming soon...