For more background, I'm in the early stages of forming a startup, and just narrowing down problems. I'm trying to get a friend on board as a cofounder. He's great at mobile, and I can handle the backend. We also both worked other careers before switching to software (oil and aviation). I've got B2B sales experience.
When you put this all together, it makes an interesting combo of an app for non-office businesses. I'd really like to make something that's more of a tool than just an app. Think "mobile phones in airplanes tracking your rental fleet" over "weather app".
Any direction-pointing is very welcome!
There are plenty of companies trying to serve ag with what they think ag needs. Most of them fail.
Modern farmers are spreadsheet jockeys with Ag Economics degrees. They are NOT dumb hayseeds like they are often portrayed! But they typically don’t have a lot of domain knowledge around software. Smaller farmers are used to making and fixing their own tools (all know how to weld); bigger farmers run corporations with a lot of employees.
They are unlikely to be interested in a SSAS. Why? The tax law for farmers in the USA and Europe revolves around tax treatment which favors cap ex (which makes sense — they need to buy big equipment which is used only briefly each year. It’s hard to share since all the other farmers in your area need that equipment at the same time). So understand your market and figure out what their specific need is, then meet it.
I work in natural stone. There are several different types of companies just in this niche. Usually the flow of product is:
quarries -> factories -> distributors (us) -> fabricators -> kitchen and bath shops -> end user
There are maybe 5-7 major pieces of software for the first four stages. "Under-served" is an understatement.
Similarly, there are 10s (if not hundreds) of other niches within construction, each with its own vertical. Tons of niche software is missing.
When I see another niche analytics/forms/site chatbot/automate social media startup, I slap myself to make sure I'm not crazy.
There's a whole ocean out there, but most software startup companies are running into each other in Depoe Bay.
Please note that n=2, but both myself and a friend of met have met people working in life science labs that were assigning research assistants to manually count cells in images, and manually sweeping through images to find stills that were in focus.
They're also founded by people that know the business they're dealing with. If you know oil and aviation, think about where customers are feeling pain and focus your effort there.
Add: I often saved them countless hours with some simple Excel VBA or running a loop over a database table. Really simple stuff.
That would open up a whole bunch of possibilities that no one is looking at. Much better than competing with 2000 others at the next soon-to-be-obsolete app.
I've built a great career by asking customers to consider the "low tech solution" first, then building upon it. Amazing how often they love it so much that the "building upon" step never comes.
As I sit here on a client's system with 14 useless windows open, being bombarded by skype, email, voice, chat, webex, outlook, office, text, jira, confluence, and sharepoint notifications from 14 others with their own 14 useless windows open, none of us getting any real work done, I wonder why 2 guys like you who know how to get shit done don't come in and just fix this for us.
My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.
Total market size is about 50 people, though :)
In that earlier era, there were several vertical software companies selling Windows and DOS dealership management systems to the many independent (mom-and-pop) dealerships of manufactured homes
By the time the industry started to recover in the last several years, they had all gone out of business. Because of the timing of the near-death of the MH industry, none of those companies even tried to move to web-based SaaS products.
As far as I know, the only new dealership management (line of business) system for the industry is my own SaaS product, which I started selling a year ago.
I'm a software developer, but my family owned a dealership for decades, so I know the business well. The industry is weird, and different enough from automobiles and motor homes that software for those (seemingly related) industries isn't really a good fit.
I've had some success bootstrapping my business. The industry is big enough at this point that I can make pretty good money as a small player, but it's still small enough that it's unlikely to attract any big operators. The market is too small for them, I'm pretty sure.
I think it would be difficult for someone who doesn't know the way things are done in the industry to create software for it. It's certainly possible, but for sure you'd have to partner with someone who has expertise already.
But I guess that's true of almost any niche industry.
My father had a bypass surgery last year, and the entire documentation process was a nightmare. It was like reams and reams of paper work, bills, prescriptions. The funny part was they would scan the paper forms and send to each other(blood banks, insurance, clinics etc) for quick response. They might as well have online forms and invoices.
(plug: at Commure - developer.commure.com, we are one of them, but that's independent of the larger point).
There are a few mid-sized companies that control a large chunk of that industry. Since they don't have much competition, innovation is more or less at a stand still. Companies like bushel ag are changing that, but lots of opportunity.
I'm not saying you can't or wont' succeed. I have no idea.
But it seems like the first thing that happened is that you decided you wanted to start a business. Usually it's the reverse - you get inspired by discovering a problem and realize you have the skillset and motivation to solve it and then you come to the realization that you need to start a business to do that. For founders/entrepreneurs with experience having done that previously, this is likely a scenario with a much higher probability of success.
But I imagine the success rate of people who say "I want to start my own business" and then look for a business to start have much lower success rates.
I'm not trying to rain no your parade at all. Just wanted to give you something to think about before you spend a fortune in time and/or money starting something. I could easily be wrong, though. Just food for thought.
Navient is terrible. A decent UI would go a long way.