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Ask HN: How can you monetize a VBA excel ribbon?

5 points by allsystemsgo ↗ HN
I have a friend and co-worker who is incredibly talented at VBA. He has developed a handful of very robust excel ribbons that automate accounting type work. Those in the Big 4 would love to have it or something similar. We were mulling over how he could monetize it but, I'm unfamiliar with how you could "ship" a tool such as this.

How can you turn robust excel VBA macros into a product?

4 comments

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samwillis
You should convert the VBA macros into an Excel plugin, the API is almost exactly the same and so it shouldn't be too hard. We recently converted an Outlook macro here at work into a plugin so that it was much easier to distribute through the office, it also avoids all the security warnings you get with macros.
endersshadow
Firstly, you'll want to look into Visual Studio so that you can build a plugin. Secondarily, you'll also want to do some market research. The Big 4 all have internal tools that they use, anyway, so I'm not sure that's your target market. Your market will probably be SMB's that are doing everything in Excel. Some enterprises do a lot of accounting in Excel, too, but almost universally, the heavy lifting is done in a robust ERP like SAP or whatnot.

Once you build out the Excel plugin, you can simply sell the software via the web. Set it at a price point that's going to be less than what an average accountant needs to get approval for (typically $500 is the max, but it varies by company). This way they can just buy it and expense it, and not have to worry about it. The last thing in the world you want to get into is trying to (a) sell into the Big 4 or (b) sell into enterprise accounts. Both are going to be more trouble than it's worth.

Also, make sure your co-worker won't get into legal trouble by selling this. That IP may be owned by your company, especially since he probably uses it for his job.

oz
Seconded. I used to be a sysadmin in one of the Big-4. They had custom MS Office Plugins for accounting, wordprocessing and presentations (usually branding-related)

It might be difficult to sell to them though, as those machines are locked down tight and the accountants can install nothing without IT intervention. IT is usually controlled by a central group that runs IT for everyone (as in, all the member countries), so it's gonna be difficult to get an exception for your product, as they have internal tools developed that fit in with their other custom Audit Workflow Applications.

So avoid Big 4, but try selling to 'average accountants' as endersshadow says, who might work in a less locked-down environment.

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