A major stimulant to creative thinking is focused questions

There is something about a well-worded question that often penetrates to the heart of the matter and triggers new ideas and insights — Brian Tracy

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.

This week, I want to talk about an app. I saw It recently in one of the forums. This app will give you formulas for different computations available in excel or google sheets. There is a text box, in which you will input what calculations you want to do in excel. Then you click the “submit” button, you will get a formula specific to your query. There is a copy button, it will help you copy the formula, and you can paste it into your local excel sheet. There is another button that can show you other related scenarios that use this formula.

Let us use an example to understand this application. Suppose I want to know “How to find the average of employees salary in column A”.

After submitting my query, I will see the formula “=AVERAGE (A: A)”

The other scenarios it shows are:

- Average age of students

- Average amount of sales orders

After playing with this simple and small app, I found myself asking a few questions. As I was asking these questions to myself, hence I was the one answering them too. While answering them, I tried to be impartial and think from both the perspective of the end-user as well as the founder. Not sure if I succeeded in that, but feel free to correct me or share your thoughts as well.

Q1: Whose pain point does this application solve?

I consider myself at an intermediate level with Excel and google sheets. I use both of them for work as well as for some DIY projects. I create some analytical reports and often look for some Excel formulas to use in my report. But I am a hard-core googler. I go to google for all my queries, and it has never disappointed me. I found all my answers. In the search results, I also see an explanation of these formulas and some alternate ways to solve the same problem. I like these alternate solutions, as it also teaches me something new other than what I had been looking for with my query.

Q2 This application is using AI (Artificial Intelligence) — Why?

I can see that it must be using AI to understand the user query, which is in text format. So there would be some machine learning models in the back end that return the formula against that text-based query.

I had worked extensively on AI projects in my last organization. I understand what problems should be using AI and how much data is needed to train a machine learning model.

In this case, it must be using NLP (natural language processing) to create the models that read the text and matches it with a formula with the highest confidence.

This leads me to think do we need AI for this problem.

The queries would be very clear, I don’t expect people to be fuzzy in their questions. E.g., If my search query is to find a formula to do average on a column. What other ways can I ask this question? If I do not know about these terms — “column” or “average”, Why am I even using excel in the first place?

AI/NLP techniques should be used in the situation when numerous interpretations or representation of a phrase is possible. We train a model that learns from all these different permutations and maps them to one single meaning. Also, AI models need a lot of training data to learn and validate.

Q3: Who would be the user of this app?

They could be non-tech people who just want to get these excel formulas and use this app. But why do these people need to invest their time in such tasks? Either they can take an online course to learn excel first and have more knowledge about it. Or they can hire some excel expert for this work. For people like me, who need help with advanced excel queries, we can always rely on google. This app looks to be another layer on google search which is returning only one search result, whereas google returns numerous search results.

By the way, all the above questions and reflections on them were just another means to grow my idea vetting muscle. I have huge respect for the founder of this app. As I have experienced, we learn a lot by executing an idea rather than by just thinking about an idea. Also, the founder might have many other stronger points for this idea feasibility, that I am not able to think of at this moment. Hopefully, this article will help others to see how we can do vetting of an idea.

Wishing everyone an idea-full week ahead

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