Haymaker - Round I

November 6, 2007 - Even if you don’t follow boxing (I’m in that camp), you probably still know what the term ‘haymaker’ means. It’s a punch that, when landed, causes trouble for an opponent. If the opponent is unlucky enough to step into the path of a haymaker – they’ll get quick lesson on how to measure a canvas’ thread count. For a visual, watch 38 seconds of this clip . Something tells me that guy didn’t know the sweeping left was coming…

Before I go into why I believe our market so desperately needs a haymaker thrown into the mix, let me back up a bit and talk a little about how we got here in the first place.

A worthwhile market can be defined as one in which there is significant existing or potential revenue to be won. Sounds great, but not really why Smartsheet came about. It was more driven by what we had observed at the hundreds of clients we served at our previous companies….Without fail, people spend far too much time and energy:

• keeping track of what they and their teams agree to do
• getting updates and providing status reports
• understanding how they arrive at destination ‘Y’ when they believe they were marching towards location ‘X’

If at least two of these items don’t gnaw at you or your team members on a daily basis – you’re in luck (…and someone whose genome should be mapped straight away). We don’t care much about how you classify the bullets - call them team task management, project management, or collaboration on structured work (ugh!). What we do care about is bringing to market a solution that greatly improves the simplicity and speed with which such activities are managed and shared.

The pain that organizers and teams face is a dull, persistent ache that gets chalked up as being another ‘cost of doing business’. The tools that exist in everyone’s arsenal (Excel and email) have long been used to track lists and reflect assignments. These tools are a dangerous beast as they serve their purpose so darn well at the outset. Unfortunately as their output moves beyond that initial phase and is shared, tweaked, re-sent, and distributed to clients – life becomes a royal pain for the organizer. Not only do they not know where things stand, their team – which is a lot less invested than they are, is pinging them every 10 minutes asking for the latest information.

Back to the boxing reference. Everyone knows what we talk of is an issue (and for this reason I would argue a big market opportunity). It amazes me that the match has consisted of a bunch of lightly thrown jabs that haven’t caught people’s attention. Big players like Microsoft and Google are in the ring. Smaller players like Basecamp and other Web 2.0 players are in the ring. Most appear to be fighting each other with new little features that the early adopter are telling them are ‘critical’. The winner of the match will be the one who takes down the real challenger to productivity. That's what most of the world is facing.

Bring on Haymaker.

-Mark, CEO