The Export Request

The boardroom was packed. Slides were glowing on the wall.

A founder was presenting the future of sales ops—sleek dashboards, predictive analytics, and real-time collaboration.
“Spreadsheets are dead,” he said. “Nobody wants to be stuck in Excel anymore.”

Investors nodded. $20M wired. Headlines published. The startup was crowned the killer of spreadsheets.

Fast-forward two years.

The product was out in the wild. Customers were using it. Churn was creeping in. Support tickets are piling up.

And what was the #1 feature request?

Not AI dashboards. Not automations. Not integrations.

Just one line, repeated over and over:
“Can we export this to Excel?”

That’s the punchline. Every SaaS founder who swears Excel is obsolete ends up building a glorified funnel back into it.

Because Excel doesn’t compete. It waits. Quietly, stubbornly, in the background. On every laptop. In every finance team. In every manager’s muscle memory. Rows, columns, filters, formulas—the universal grammar of work.

Excel is the cockroach of software. The immortal. The fallback. The default.

And that’s what most founders don’t see.

They think Excel is weak. Outdated. Ready to be replaced. So they burn cash building “the future.” But what they’re really doing is narrowing a spreadsheet into a prettier, smaller box. Then they act surprised when customers still want the export.

Excel never dies because it isn’t just software. It’s a language. Everyone speaks it. Every SaaS is just a dialect.

You can’t kill default.

And so: Excel never dies.

The Spreadsheet Obituary (Again)

Every startup deck has a slide about the “old way” and the “new way.”

The old way is always Excel.

Ugly grids. Broken formulas. Manual copy-paste. Chaos.

The new way? Polished dashboards. Sleek workflows. AI magic.

The myth is that once people see the new way, they’ll abandon the old way. But that’s not how tools die.

Typewriters died because PCs did everything they did—better, faster, cheaper.
Film cameras lost because digital gave the same joy with none of the friction.

But Excel? Excel isn’t one tool. It’s infinite tools.

A CRM. A budget. A project tracker. A hiring funnel. A roadmap. A database in disguise.

To kill Excel, you’d have to kill every possibility at once.

That’s not replacement. That’s fantasy.

The Operating System of Work

The mistake is thinking Excel is an app.

It isn’t. Excel is a platform. A universal sandbox. A blank canvas with just enough logic to let anyone build something.

Most SaaS is just one narrow slice of Excel, productized.

• Airtable? A prettier Excel for collaboration.

• Notion tables? Excel with docs wrapped around it.

• Monday.com? Excel for tasks, with color-coded stickers.

• Every “lightweight CRM”? A spreadsheet with permissions.

The reality: SaaS verticalizes. Excel generalizes.

Excel is the substrate—like TCP/IP for the internet. Invisible, but everywhere. You don’t replace TCP/IP. You build on top of it.

That’s why every SaaS pitch that starts with “spreadsheets are broken” is already fragile.

They’re not broken. They’re just infinite.

Five Laws of Excel Gravity

So why does Excel survive when better-looking tools exist?

1. Familiarity

No onboarding needed. Everyone from interns to CFOs knows rows and columns.

2. Flexibility

It doesn’t care what job you throw at it. CRM, inventory, financial model—same canvas.

3. Ubiquity

It’s already on every machine. No SaaS can outcompete distribution that deep.

4. Control

Users can bend it, hack it, break it. No permissions. No constraints. Total agency.

5. Composability

Need a new tool? Just add another column. A formula. A macro. Done.

These aren’t “features.” They’re laws of gravity. That’s why attempts to kill Excel fail: they optimize for beauty, but lose universality.

And universality beats beauty. Always.

Every Startup is a Spreadsheet

Look closely and you’ll see the same cycle repeat:

1. Start — Identify a use case where Excel feels painful.

2. Niche — Build a productized version of that slice.

3. Growth — Market it as “smarter than spreadsheets.”

4. Reality — Customers still demand “export to Excel.”

5. Endgame — You either integrate back, or lose deals.

SaaS doesn’t kill Excel. SaaS just makes Excel narrower, shinier, and more collaborative.

That’s why “Excel killers” rarely IPO. They end up absorbed, acquired, or pivoting.

The graveyard of “spreadsheet replacement” startups is endless. But the spreadsheet itself? Still here.

The Tool Everyone Hates, Everyone Opens

Here’s the paradox:

Excel is both hated and loved.

• People complain about version conflicts.

• They rage about broken formulas.

• They call it clunky, outdated, painful.

And yet—when the real work needs to get done, when deadlines close in, when the tool breaks down—what do they open?

Excel.

Why? Because pain is preferable to powerlessness.

Excel may be ugly. But it never tells you “you can’t.” It just hands you the grid and lets you figure it out.

That’s the paradox every SaaS faces:
Customers want freedom disguised as structure. Excel gives it to them raw. SaaS gives it polish. And when in doubt, people run back to raw.

The Avoidable Mistakes

By now the pattern should be clear. Excel isn’t dying. It isn’t even competing. It’s the silent substrate that every SaaS circles around.

Which means, as a founder, there are avoidable mistakes—and unavoidable realities.

Mistake #1: Trying to Replace Excel

The rookie move. You hear “Excel hell” and think pain means escape. Wrong. Pain ≠ churn. Familiarity beats relief.

Build to orbit, not replace.

Mistake #2: Ignoring the Trigger

Excel is the Coca-Cola of software. The reflex. Don’t fight it. Attach to it. Make exports seamless. Ride the habit.

Mistake #3: Underestimating the Installed Base

Decades of models, macros, and workflows live inside Excel. Switching isn’t adoption. It’s migration. Migration is hell.

Mistake #4: Confusing Friction with Opportunity

Yes, Excel breaks. But the mess is a moat. The uglier the spreadsheet, the harder it is to untangle.

Mistake #5: Forgetting the Emotion

Excel gives people freedom. If your SaaS feels like a constraint, you’ve already lost.

The Avoidable Playbook

1. Complement, don’t compete.
   Build tools that feed into Excel, extend it, or smooth it.

2. Go niche.
   Specialize where Excel fails—scale, complexity, collaboration.

3. Embrace exports.
   It’s not betrayal. It’s your bridge.

4. Design for reflex.
   “Open Excel” is muscle memory. Fit the reflex.

5. Sell realism.
   Market yourself as Excel’s ally, not its killer.

The costly mistake is arrogance. The avoidable move is humility.

The Default Always Wins

Every founder wants to believe in revolutions.
That their product will rewrite the rules.
That old tools die when new ones appear.

But reality is slower. Stickier. More stubborn.

Excel is proof.

Decades of startups have tried to bury it. None have succeeded. Because Excel doesn’t compete on features. It competes on familiarity. On reflex. On being the substrate.

It doesn’t matter if you build in AI, no-code, real-time dashboards, or blockchain. The cycle always ends the same:
Export to Excel.

That’s the humbling truth. Tools don’t die because they’re outdated. Tools die when people forget them. And nobody forgets Excel.

The spreadsheet is eternal not because it’s perfect—but because it’s good enough everywhere, forever.

That’s the lesson for founders:

• Don’t mistake complaints for abandonment.

• Don’t fight habits you can’t break.

• Don’t confuse friction for weakness.

Excel never dies because it isn’t software. It’s language. It’s reflex. It’s default.

And default is the strongest moat of all.

The future? It will be built in spreadsheets first. Maybe it graduates to your SaaS. Maybe not. But Excel will always be the garage where ideas begin.

Every obituary is premature. Every replacement is temporary.

Excel isn’t dying.
It’s waiting.