Last month I was on a call with a founder in the property management space. About ten minutes in, she said something I have heard versions of many times:
“We have this Google Sheet that three of us are updating manually. We have a WhatsApp group for urgent stuff. And we have a Notion doc that nobody actually reads anymore. It works, kind of. But every week something falls through the cracks and someone has to chase it.”
I asked her what she wished existed instead.
She described it for about four minutes straight without stopping.
Then she said: “I would genuinely pay for something like that. I have looked. Nothing does exactly what we need.”
That sentence is worth more than most market research reports.
What she was really telling me
When someone has already built a workaround, that is not a problem. That is evidence.
It means the need is real enough that they went and solved it themselves, imperfectly, with whatever tools were available. The spreadsheet is not the problem. The spreadsheet is proof that the problem exists and that someone cares enough to do something about it.
The WhatsApp group means communication is breaking down somewhere. The Notion doc nobody reads means there is information that should be structured but is not. The manual updates mean there is a process that someone understands well enough to do, but not well enough to have automated yet.
All of that is signal. And she was handing it to me freely.
The money part matters
She said she would pay for it. That is important. Not because it validates the idea, though it does, but because it tells you something about the shape of the solution.
People pay for things that save them meaningful time or prevent meaningful cost. If she is managing the WhatsApp group and the spreadsheet on top of her actual job, she is paying in time right now. She just is not paying in money. The question is whether the problem is bad enough that she would rather pay in money and get her time back.
In my experience, when someone says “I would pay for this,” they usually mean it. They have done the mental calculation. They know roughly what the workaround costs them. They are not just being polite.
The follow-up question I always ask is: “What would you expect to pay?” Not to set a price, but to understand how they are sizing the problem. Someone who says “I do not know, maybe 20 quid a month?” is telling you something different than someone who says “honestly, if it actually worked, a few hundred a month would be fine.”
She said a few hundred.
Why nothing out there does what they need
This is the part that usually has a real explanation.
Sometimes the tools exist but she has not found them, or they are aimed at a slightly different market, or they require more setup than a small team can manage. That is worth investigating before you build anything.
But sometimes the gap is genuine. The big platforms are built for larger operations. The simpler tools do not handle the edge cases that make her situation specific. And the people who could build exactly the right thing do not know the domain well enough to get it right.
What founders in her position are usually missing is not features. It is a tool shaped around how they actually work, not how a product team imagined they work.
That gap is where the real opportunity tends to sit.
What I told her
I told her not to hire a developer yet.
First, we needed to be clear on what the spreadsheet was actually doing. Not at a feature level, but at a process level. What decisions does it support? Who looks at it and when? What happens when something in it is wrong?
Once you understand the process, you can figure out what a better tool actually needs to do. And often it is simpler than you expect, because the spreadsheet is already doing most of the thinking. You just need to make it faster, more reliable, and less dependent on three people remembering to update it.
From there, a well-scoped prototype, sometimes just a tightened-up version of the spreadsheet with a bit of automation, can tell you quickly whether you are solving the right thing. Before you spend on a real build.
The conversation you should be having
If you are running a process on spreadsheets and group chats and hoping for the best, you are not alone. Most operations-heavy businesses go through a version of this.
And if you have looked at what is available and found yourself saying “nothing does exactly what we need,” that is worth sitting with for a moment. Because it might mean the gap is real.
The founders who get this right do not start by specifying a product. They start by understanding their process well enough to explain it to someone else. That conversation, the one where you describe what you are doing now and what you wish existed, is usually where the useful work begins.
If you are at that stage and want to think it through, I am happy to be the person you have that conversation with. Book a free 30-minute call and we will figure out whether what you need exists already or whether it is worth building.