We are doing customer development for our small venture: http://excelpanel.com This is more or less follow-up to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936412
At this stage we are looking for 10-20 partners that would help us shape the product for public beta. HN answers have great value to us, so here is our question: - Who would make the best partner at the early stage? How to find them?
1. Investment Banking Analysts 2. Researchers/Academics
In either case, I would try to find a smaller firm with a relationship to tech that could appreciate what you're trying to do.
I'm not sure I know what you're trying to do but based on "Identify which spreadsheets violate best practices" it sounds like you're trying to provide a better workflow for creating and maintaining large excel documents in the way that developers have version control and continuous integration. Ie. code climate, linters, testing, for example docs.
Sounds cool.