From Excel to Enterprise: How Figures Built a €2500 Spreadsheet into Europe’s Leading Comp Tech Platform
Most founders rush to build a fully-featured product before proving market demand. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Figures CEO Virgile Raingeard revealed why starting with a simple spreadsheet might be the smartest path to category leadership.
The MVP That Wasn’t Supposed to Be “I’m going to take one day off a week from my day to day job,” Virgile recalls of Figures’ earliest days. “I’m going to try to do on the side project to work on the first compensation benchmark for startups in France.”
That side project began as the simplest possible solution: “I created the first version of Figures was just a Google Sheet,” Virgile explains. “You give me your own data, you pay, and I give you a one year subscription to this Google Sheet and I will update it monthly.”
Validation Through Underpricing The initial pricing was deliberately low: “€400 per year for the smaller scale startups to €2500.” While Virgile now calls this “one of the biggest mistake[s],” it served a crucial purpose. The low barrier to entry helped rapidly build their compensation database, creating the foundation for their future platform.
The Technical Inflection Point The transition from spreadsheet to scalable product came when Virgile convinced an exceptional developer to join as co-founder. “My Co-Founder, which is an amazing the best developer I’ve ever seen, agreed to join me when he had like ten offers to join those startups,” he shares. This partnership enabled them to transform their manual process into a true SaaS solution.
Building the Right Features Rather than guessing what features to build, Figures let their spreadsheet service inform product development. Their platform now offers two core capabilities: “The first part of the product is just basically data visualization for companies,” Virgile explains. “How much does a senior product manager in Paris earns? How much does an intermediate or a junior data analyst in Berlin earns?”
The second part focuses on analysis: “Analyzing our client data and basically doing a gap analysis with the market data and telling them, you know what, maybe you know, maybe you don’t. But your overall your tech team is paid as a six years percentile of the market.”
The Price Evolution As they transformed from manual service to scalable product, Figures made a counterintuitive move: “We even lowered the price.” Their reasoning was strategic: “Because we’re mostly a mix between a database business and a product SaaS products, for the data set to become valuable, we need more company.”
This strategy proved effective but eventually required correction. “I started reading some pricing strategies, advices,” Virgile notes. “I realized it was a huge mistake. I devalued the value of our product and I increased pricing by three X June 2021. And it didn’t impact at all our win rate.”
Managing the Transition The shift wasn’t without challenges. “That was a nightmare,” Virgile admits about transitioning early customers to higher pricing tiers. “That was the first hundred or so customers, and those ones have been a nightmare to renew.”
For founders considering a similar journey from manual service to SaaS product, Figures’ experience offers several key lessons:
- Start with the simplest possible solution that delivers value
- Use low initial pricing to build critical mass if you’re creating a data network effect
- Let manual processes inform product development
- Don’t fear significant price increases once you’ve proven value
- Prepare for the challenges of transitioning early customers
The path from spreadsheet to SaaS isn’t always linear, but as Figures demonstrates, starting small and focusing on value delivery can create the foundation for category leadership.