I created a Google sheet to help startups solve the right problem
This started as a Medium blog post The Problemeter and turns out that a few hundred other founders have experienced this problem too.
In a nutshell the best investors use very complex calculations to decide if a startup is worth investing, and I wanted to create a very simple, early version of this.
My Vision:
The Problemeter will be a virtual accelerator platform where thousands of startups enter their info, get scored and benchmarked against similar startups.
After getting scored the startups will get immediate feedback based on the questions they did poorly on (i.e. Very Low Total Addressable Market) and tips for improving in each specific area, including examples of successful companies that have excelled in this area.
This will create a dataset that can then be further back-tested against other successful companies to fine tune even further (i.e. based on category like SaaS, Ecomm, MarTech, etc.).
For stickiness and retention on the platform we will use machine learning to constantly find insights based on the data that we collect. This can be in the form of a weekly digest of similar companies or articles from pros specific to areas of improvement for the startup.
Honestly I think there may be better monetization models that I am not even thinking of.
What I Need:
Try The Problemeter Google sheet and I would love your feedback.
Next steps will be to find a technical resource who can help me create the initial webapp MVP--maybe a chatbot interface? :).
If you would like to participate in this project feel free to reach out and lmk how you can help.
About me:
I am a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of BizPayO and founder of Algohive.
Hi Marc, Looks like you want to help people. I like it. One note, your dropdown for urgency goes up to 3 max but the gauge goes up to 5. so even if the urgency is "now" the most, it shows 3, and yellow.
I'd suggest, because of your experience, to add in tips for improvement in this sheet. It's easy to do with a filter. You mention in your post that you know which companies do well in each of these categories. Show that.
Your MVP could be as simple as a google form. Users submit their data, then get an email with their results. This allows you to crowdsource, and engage people.
Also I emailed you a video of some improvements I would make to the sheet.
I made some aesthetic changes. This is to make it easier to read and work with.
I made bettersheets.co to help ppl make better google sheets. Hope the video I sent you is helpful and you can make a better version. In fact you can use the one I made.
@AndrewKamphey this is amazing feedback. I will check out your email and dig into this more today. Bettersheets looks like something I wish I had a year ago haha. Congrats and thank you so much.
Great stuff :) I already forwarded it to few people
Thanks much for the support Ben!
This is great, I was looking to develop something similar but not sure where to start. I am full stack dev, would be interested in designing MVP, feel free to ping me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pingjassingh
Awesome thanks much! Still a ways to go but will reach out soon.