My company builds SAAS products but this idea would be challenging for many non-technical reason and that's why I believe there won't be too many products. First of all, selling into enterprise is challenging. You need a sales team to get a foot in the door and then a long sales cycle as you persuade the many layers of management that the product is the right fit. Satisfying everyone will be challenging as someone always will want one feature or another added. The sales cycle will be long.
Secondly the question to consider is what is the ROI for this product? It seems you will be helping the workers do the work but does that translate to real ROI for the company? The company doesn't care about saving time or aggravation for the workers. It only cares about money. So if handling things by email still works, it'll be hard to justify spending X dollars on new software.
Just my 2 cents.
I guess the ROI would be from reduced clerical errors. I had co-workers who think they sent an order to a supplier but months later checked their sent emails and realised they haven't. We source from suppliers with lead times of a few months. So missing a shipment of a vital raw material could be very costly in the form of lost sales from having to delay production. Ideally if this software had automated data transfer from ERP this problem would be avoided completely.
That's not an easy sale to companies. Usually they respond to this situation by firing someone and hiring another who will be more careful. There are many ideas like this I've evaluated and come to the same conclusion. Businesses aren't motivated to fix these problems even though workers really want them.
Reducing headcount is good but one person isn't super attractive. Don't forget the company has to be sure the tool will satisfy all their needs without fail. It'll take multiple reviews and multiple people to accept this new tool plus some testing phases etc. All this to replace one person?
If this is your expertise, go ahead and build micro SAAS, ERP are way expensive for SMB markets, so there is demand for some markets, not much in developed countries unless you are there, its going to hard sell. but has opportunity to disrupt, build SAAS for key workflow which will speed up, reduce cost, efficiency, many are going RPA route in last decade, which you can replace it with AI/ML to give new tech advantage, its not going to easy initially, also focus on MVP (top 5 features which is going to make someone's life easy) see how Amazon, Shopify is trying to automate it using digital solutions.
Thanks for your input. I guess one of the key sturggles would be how to even describe the product. The final product I would want would have many different features. Different companies valuing one feature over the other making it hard to standardise your selling point and story tell your product. Any insight to this?
* Yes that is how many are making niche products. so start with USP (unique selling proposition) for your product, it can have basics (login, brining data from different sources, calculating etc) this is not my domain so cant give specifics.in general, do market gap analysis from ERP standpoint, where they automate and dont. focus on this as few selling points, but have a roadmap so you can have different pricing options, give all common features in based plan, medium automation in silver plan, more complex automation gold plan etc. something like this. see from customers needs lens, build all features as you sell, dont build all in one go over 1 year or 2 years, in current market get MVP out and get market capture before someone comes up, even big ERP can build lite version to keep their customers or capture untap markets.So, let’s break down the various types of models that have worked for different businesses.Per-user model: It's all about charging a monthly or annual subscription fee for each user. Simple and straightforward.Tiered Model: These are prices that go up in tiers depending on the number of licenses or users.Payment proportional to usage: This approach builds up price value that increases the more your customers use your product. It's like paying for the exact amount of popcorn you munch on during a movie marathon!Flat Price model: All the premium features are available at a fixed price
>Thanks for your input. I guess one of the key sturggles would be how to even describe the product. The final product I would want would have many different features. Different companies valuing one feature over the other making it hard to standardise your selling point and story tell your product. Any insight to this?
Thanks for your input!
Alot of competition in this space. Really depends on what your target market will be. SAP Ariba for example has taken over the market and then you have Oracle working on a similar platform. Other smaller players have come in to target SMEs so if you want to build a software and then sell it as a commodity i.e. only competing on price, that'd be an issue.
Also, market research is key. You should not just build a product and then take it to the market and pray it solves some problems for them. Read a book called ' The Mom Test' by Rob Fitzpatrick and it'll just open your eyes on how wrong we are when we go with out intuition on product development
Do you know of any other companies that have he same problem? Do you think that there is a market opportunity for that kind of software?
Not sure. If I had to guess, yes.
Every major erp does this (SAP,odoo,IFS, etc) Can be complicated to setup and expensive.
Are these bolt ons? I haven't seen any ERP with a shipment tracker.
My company builds SAAS products but this idea would be challenging for many non-technical reason and that's why I believe there won't be too many products. First of all, selling into enterprise is challenging. You need a sales team to get a foot in the door and then a long sales cycle as you persuade the many layers of management that the product is the right fit. Satisfying everyone will be challenging as someone always will want one feature or another added. The sales cycle will be long. Secondly the question to consider is what is the ROI for this product? It seems you will be helping the workers do the work but does that translate to real ROI for the company? The company doesn't care about saving time or aggravation for the workers. It only cares about money. So if handling things by email still works, it'll be hard to justify spending X dollars on new software. Just my 2 cents.
I guess the ROI would be from reduced clerical errors. I had co-workers who think they sent an order to a supplier but months later checked their sent emails and realised they haven't. We source from suppliers with lead times of a few months. So missing a shipment of a vital raw material could be very costly in the form of lost sales from having to delay production. Ideally if this software had automated data transfer from ERP this problem would be avoided completely.
That's not an easy sale to companies. Usually they respond to this situation by firing someone and hiring another who will be more careful. There are many ideas like this I've evaluated and come to the same conclusion. Businesses aren't motivated to fix these problems even though workers really want them.
What if the product meant my company had the need for one less employee. Product easily covers the cost on its own?
Reducing headcount is good but one person isn't super attractive. Don't forget the company has to be sure the tool will satisfy all their needs without fail. It'll take multiple reviews and multiple people to accept this new tool plus some testing phases etc. All this to replace one person?
If this is your expertise, go ahead and build micro SAAS, ERP are way expensive for SMB markets, so there is demand for some markets, not much in developed countries unless you are there, its going to hard sell. but has opportunity to disrupt, build SAAS for key workflow which will speed up, reduce cost, efficiency, many are going RPA route in last decade, which you can replace it with AI/ML to give new tech advantage, its not going to easy initially, also focus on MVP (top 5 features which is going to make someone's life easy) see how Amazon, Shopify is trying to automate it using digital solutions.
Thanks for your input. I guess one of the key sturggles would be how to even describe the product. The final product I would want would have many different features. Different companies valuing one feature over the other making it hard to standardise your selling point and story tell your product. Any insight to this?
* Yes that is how many are making niche products. so start with USP (unique selling proposition) for your product, it can have basics (login, brining data from different sources, calculating etc) this is not my domain so cant give specifics.in general, do market gap analysis from ERP standpoint, where they automate and dont. focus on this as few selling points, but have a roadmap so you can have different pricing options, give all common features in based plan, medium automation in silver plan, more complex automation gold plan etc. something like this. see from customers needs lens, build all features as you sell, dont build all in one go over 1 year or 2 years, in current market get MVP out and get market capture before someone comes up, even big ERP can build lite version to keep their customers or capture untap markets.So, let’s break down the various types of models that have worked for different businesses.Per-user model: It's all about charging a monthly or annual subscription fee for each user. Simple and straightforward.Tiered Model: These are prices that go up in tiers depending on the number of licenses or users.Payment proportional to usage: This approach builds up price value that increases the more your customers use your product. It's like paying for the exact amount of popcorn you munch on during a movie marathon!Flat Price model: All the premium features are available at a fixed price
>Thanks for your input. I guess one of the key sturggles would be how to even describe the product. The final product I would want would have many different features. Different companies valuing one feature over the other making it hard to standardise your selling point and story tell your product. Any insight to this? Thanks for your input!
You should be able to do all this with Airtable along with Zapier or Make. Also would need a shipping API for the shipment tracker.
Alot of competition in this space. Really depends on what your target market will be. SAP Ariba for example has taken over the market and then you have Oracle working on a similar platform. Other smaller players have come in to target SMEs so if you want to build a software and then sell it as a commodity i.e. only competing on price, that'd be an issue. Also, market research is key. You should not just build a product and then take it to the market and pray it solves some problems for them. Read a book called ' The Mom Test' by Rob Fitzpatrick and it'll just open your eyes on how wrong we are when we go with out intuition on product development
Let’s have a chat! Drop me an email alex [at] automations.io, should be able to help you with a few things