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ChatGPT is the Excel of our time.

The most iconic software product of the past few decades is the spreadsheet.

Before Excel, there was VisiCalc, a spreadsheet software often called the first killer app for computers.

It revolutionized the way professional groups worked and became the sole reason people bought computers. In the 1980s, companies competed fiercely for dominance in the spreadsheet.

New software such as IBM's Lotus-1-2-3 gradually occupied a place. When Microsoft released Excel in 1985, VisiCalc officially entered a period of fierce competition.

With the release of Windows 3.0 in the 1990s, Excel eventually became the dominant spreadsheet software. We haven't looked back since then.

Excel is a great product because it is so easy for beginners to use: just start typing in a cell.

But what makes it a great product is that it’s extremely powerful: expert users can use it to build complex financial modeling, data analysis and visualization, and even build video games.

Excel also has its own e-sports world

Originally, Excel was designed for business users working in finance and accounting, but its versatility has made it a widely used general-purpose tool.It has also become a source of entrepreneurial ideas.

If you want to start a business, you just need to find a user who can manually operate processes in Excel, and then build a SaaS application (Software as a Service) for him.

Patrick McKenzie of Stripe best summed up Excel's creativity when he wrote:

My favorite unmet software need:

Any Excel spreadsheet that is updated by one employee, sent to another employee, updated by the other employee, and then sent back.

As soon as this happens, there is a SaaS angel (investment) ready to take off.

As venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz first observed, over the past 15 years, Excel has been spun off into many other applications, such as Asana, Looker, and QuickBooks.

It is worth noting that this unbundling was possible only after Excel became widely popular and users realized the need for a dedicated alternative tool.

For this to happen, Excel needs to be widely used, and it needs power users, people who can use Excel to implement niche workflows that the software wasn't designed to support.

Once these workflows are created, power users realize that parts of their workflows are inefficient or lack functionality specific to their use cases. They start to feel they need specialized tools — and that’s when the B2B SaaS space becomes a $327 billion market.

Just as Excel gave birth to the B2B SaaS era, general-purpose chatbot applications such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini will give birth to a new era of entrepreneurship for a new generation of computer users.

AI chatbots, like Excel, are a combination of ease of use and powerful functionality. They are also rapidly gaining popularity, and in a much shorter time.

Today's AI users are also becoming more familiar with the atomic units that make up AI-based software: prompt words, context windows, few-shot learning, and multimodality.

They will create workflows with ChatGPT or Claude that are tailored to their specific domain, and in the process they will form their own opinions on how to make those workflows better, simpler, cheaper, faster, and more secure.

This also creates the opportunity to spin off these workflows into a completely independent application. As more and more people use large language models, the opportunities for startups will increase.

I have witnessed this with my own eyes.

About a month ago, we launched Spiral, an AI application that automates repetitive creative tasks like X posts, LinkedIn posts, headline creation, and product launch notes. It already has over 3,500 users and is growing every day.

Spiral

Essentially, Spiral is a prompt word builder. It uses Claude in the background, so technically, anything you can do in Spiral can also be done in Claude.

But Claude’s chat interface isn’t designed for the tasks that Spiral excels at. In Claude, it’s hard to keep track of complex prompts that lead to good results. It’s also hard to share the prompts you’ve discovered with your team.

Spiral offers an interface that is more suited to a specific workflow: creatives and business people who want to convert their content into different mediums. It is popular now because people are used to using ChatGPT and Claude for similar tasks. They are ready to use a dedicated tool.

“AI wrapper” is often seen as a derogatory term.

The implicit implication here is that if people can achieve the same effect with general chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, then people will definitely not use AI tools specifically designed for this need.

But the opposite is true.

ChatGPT and Claude have increased the demand for “AI shell” products because people have found that general-purpose chatbots are not designed to be suitable for specific situations.

In fact, rather than crushing startups, ChatGPT and Claude are great places to discover startup ideas.

If you want to build a startup in the AI ​​age, all you have to do is watch how you use ChatGPT or Claude.

If you're doing something over and over again, and the output is exceptional, it's probably worth making it a standalone app.

Proofreading | Acrylic