From Excel to Enterprise SaaS: How Optera Validated Their Product Before Writing a Single Line of Code

Product validation doesn’t always require complex prototypes or beta software. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Optera CEO Tim Weiss revealed how his team used Excel to validate their enterprise carbon management platform before investing in development.

Starting with Customer Research

In 2015, as corporate climate commitments accelerated, Optera’s team interviewed major brands to understand their challenges. “We interviewed folks from GM and Procter and Gamble and Cisco and Cola, like really super large brands, large companies that were setting more ambitious goals,” Tim explains.

The research revealed a critical gap: enterprises were managing complex emissions data through “spreadsheets and consultants, and they didn’t really have their hands around all the information they needed and insights they need to make meaningful progress.”

Building the Excel Prototype

Rather than immediately building software, the team created an Excel-based prototype. “We built a prototype of our software in excel that we used across half a dozen clients,” Tim notes. This approach allowed them to test their solution with minimal investment.

The results were revealing: “What we saw is that it was delivering value across all of them… If we actually wrote code and build this into a platform, it could deliver exponentially more value.”

Finding Common Patterns

The Excel prototype helped identify patterns across different enterprises. “They didn’t really need bespoke solutions. They all needed something similar,” Tim explains. “And we built it kind of in a way that was transferable across industries, across company size.”

Maintaining Product Discipline

The transition from prototype to product required strict discipline. “Services businesses can go any direction the client wants,” Tim notes. “Then right away when you start building product and software, that becomes completely unviable, where you can’t build everything, you have to build something that works for a critical mass.”

This discipline helped them avoid a common trap: trying to build everything customers asked for. Instead, they focused on solutions that could scale across their target market.

Leveraging Services Background

Their consulting experience proved invaluable during validation. “The power of a services business is you can learn so much from your customers,” Tim emphasizes. “When you are on the hook for really delivering and really catering to their needs, you have to balance that with something that is repeatable.”

Today, with multiple multinational clients and a team of 60, Optera’s Excel-first approach has proved prescient. Their story shows how thorough validation with simple tools can lay the foundation for successful enterprise software.

The key lesson? Sometimes the best way to validate an enterprise product isn’t to build it—it’s to prove the value proposition using tools your customers already understand.