Building for the 90%: What Underserved Indian B2B Markets Taught Me
Most SaaS advice tells you to go after markets that are "ready for digital transformation." What that usually means, in practice, is chasing the same enterprise verticals that already have five incumbents. The more interesting opportunity is the opposite: markets where Excel is still the product.
The Excel signal
When I first sat down with a real estate developer managing a ₹50 Crore township project, he pulled up a spreadsheet. Plot numbers in column A. Status — available, booked, sold — in column B, manually updated. Payment records spread across five different sheets, each a different version depending on who last touched it.
This wasn't a small or unsophisticated operator. He was managing a project where a single mis-tracked booking could mean a lakh-rupee dispute. And he was doing it in Excel.
The same pattern showed up when I spoke to an MSME with 300+ employees running payroll. PF calculations done manually, referencing a printed table of slabs. ESIC applicability checked employee by employee. TDS estimated on a calculator. All of it done every month, by one person who held all the institutional knowledge in their head.
Why Excel persists
It's tempting to conclude that these businesses "haven't found the right tool." The more accurate conclusion is that no one has built the right tool for them. Most B2B SaaS is designed for office workers, English-speaking teams, and workflows that map cleanly to Notion or Salesforce. Indian MSMEs have different compliance requirements, different role structures, and different expectations about what software should do.
The gap isn't in awareness. It's in product specificity.
What domain depth actually requires
Building PlotPro meant learning what "development charges" are, why an SVG-based interactive plot layout is a better interface than a table for a sales team walking the site with a client, and why the printable PDF acknowledgement matters to a customer paying a token amount in cash.
Building Shramik-Sync meant understanding that PF is 12% on basic capped at ₹15,000, that ESI eligibility cuts off at ₹21,000 gross, and that Maharashtra's Professional Tax has specific slab breakpoints that differ from other states. None of that is in a tutorial. It required spending time in the domain before writing a line of code.
The lesson
The best B2B products I've built aren't the most technically sophisticated. They're the most specific. They solve the exact problem — not a generalised version of it — for a well-defined user who has been underserved for too long.
Excel persisting is the signal, not the problem. The problem is the fifteen decisions a user makes every day that shouldn't require a spreadsheet at all. When you build for that specific problem, in that specific market, you stop competing with incumbents entirely — because they're not looking at the same market you are.
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