SaaS Grid’s Playbook: How to Turn an Internal Tool into a Viable Product Without Losing Focus

Internal tools rarely make successful products. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ethan Ruby revealed how SaaS Grid’s evolution from a VC’s spreadsheet template to a vertical BI platform offers a blueprint for founders considering a similar transition.

Finding the Initial Signal

During his six years at Craft Ventures, Ethan developed a comprehensive Google Sheets template for evaluating SaaS investments. “My main job at Kraft was to build a process for doing financial diligence on the SaaS company that Kraft was evaluating,” he explains. “And so I got a couple thousand reps, literally over the six years of craft about digging into early stage SaaS companies.”

The pivot from internal tool to product wasn’t planned. As Ethan notes, “We ended up sharing that Google sheet with some of our founders after we invested, and they’re like, oh, this is helpful. This is basically a helpful spreadsheet template.” This organic validation sparked a crucial insight: if portfolio companies found value in the template, perhaps other SaaS companies would too.

Starting Small and Focused

Rather than immediately building a complex platform, SaaS Grid maintained the template’s core functionality: “What if instead of being a spreadsheet template, we hired a few contract developers and turned this into a really simple product? And I’m talking incredibly simple, that you literally, you just upload, you upload an Excel spreadsheet and we pop out a few charts for you.”

This minimalist approach served two purposes. First, it validated demand without significant investment. Second, it forced the team to focus on solving one specific problem well before expanding the platform’s capabilities.

Building for Real Pain Points

The initial success revealed a broader market need. As Ethan describes, companies were struggling with a common challenge: “My company’s starting to take off. I have all this data spread across HubSpot, stripe, salesforce, QuickBooks, whatever platform they use. And I need metrics to both pitch investors, but more importantly, to make good decisions about my business.”

This insight led to SaaS Grid’s core value proposition: simplifying SaaS metrics and analytics for companies drowning in data. The platform evolved to serve this need while maintaining its focus on simplicity and ease of use.

Scaling Without Losing Focus

As demand grew, SaaS Grid discovered interest from unexpected quarters: “We are also a very compelling platform for later stage startups, for relatively large growth stage. It turns out I’m drowning in data and don’t know what to do with it. Problem doesn’t magically go away as you scale.”

The challenge became maintaining product focus while serving different customer segments. The solution? Keep the core product simple while adding depth through integrations and customization options.

Key Lessons for Founders

1. Validate organically before building. SaaS Grid waited for clear market signals before investing in product development.
2. Maintain the core value proposition. Even as they expanded features, they stayed focused on their central mission of simplifying SaaS metrics.
3. Let customer needs guide evolution. As Ethan emphasizes, “If you find a really amazing pain point, if you find a business user that’s being absolutely driven crazy by a problem and you could solve it elegantly and get them to pay even a little bit for it, I think you have the basis of being successful.”

In just four months since launching their paid product, SaaS Grid has signed dozens of customers with an average contract value approaching $10,000. Their journey from spreadsheet to platform demonstrates that with the right approach, internal tools can indeed become successful products – as long as you maintain focus on solving real customer problems.