Anything that any salesman or customer service employee mentions that plugs into salesforce. A mail button for sales force ? A print button for salesforce ? A make my phone call customer button inside salesforce button? Oh sweet only $20 per month per salesman....so we have 50 people on salesforce so only 1,000 a month, only $12,000 a year? This should help get us out of dept so fast !!! FML.
I'm guessing you weren't pushing for Salesforce, but out of interest, did your company evaluate any other CRM platforms? If so, do you know why they chose Salesforce?
Interesting, I have no direct experience with salesforce but I have heard numerous people discuss similar things as either consultant centric services or outright business models. Is this that common?
I need an easier way to send my clients quotes, invoices, and reminders.
Quickbooks is nice if you're an accountant who likes entering stuff into tables. But I am not an accountant and I'm bad about keeping on top of my accounts. It takes too many clicks to send a stupid little invoice once in a while.
This is a space that could really use chat bot support. I want to quickly type something or go through a wizard to do my accounting. "Hey Accounty, can you send Client B an invoice for The Big Package at $200 for 12 months? Make it recur annually". And Accounty goes and sets everything up and sends the emails. No interface. Completely automated. When an account is overdue, it'd message me and say "Hey, Client A is overdue, shall I send a reminder?" If someone replies to the invoice email, it'd say "Hey, Client C replied to the invoice and asks 'Can I pay later?', how do you want to respond?". Wire that up Siri or some other speech to text engine and I can do my accounting on the drive in to work.
Great question, there are many opportunities here. Network with entrepreneurs, sole proprietors, private practice physicians/dentists/etc, and other small business owners and you'll often hear similar complaints or pain points.
As a general rule I'd say nearly any business would pay 10k/year for:
- Anything that would offer 2x that (or greater) in ROI
- Anything that would automate or handle routine tasks that otherwise an expensive person must perform (there are many of these if you think about it)
- Anything that saves 10k+ worth of someones time (this is not too hard to identify if you focus on the expensive persons)
- Anything that generates 12k+ of new revenue
- Anything that replaces 10k+ worth of annual contractor/consulting work
- Anything that undercuts competition charging more for the same service, without a degradation in service quality
You probably want specifics, so two areas I often see smaller businesses struggle with are email lists and security/software updates.
There is substantial opportunity in finding new ways to monetize the boring old email/customer list in nearly every industry. I frequently hear small, medium, and even some larger businesses struggle to monetize an email list in any meaningful way, and so instead the primary metric is always about 'engagement' and other buzzword centric statistics that rarely translate into revenue. Private practice doctors and dentists often struggle with this, as do everything from bakeries, app developers, web sites, authors, interest groups, etc. There are many businesses with large customer lists or customer prospects in the form of email lists that make $0 from those lists.
Another is anything related to security, particularly anything that takes a perceived complicated task and makes it easy or handles it outright without any downtime or complication to the end user(s). Whether it's routine client and server software updates, routine security audits, moving web apps/sites to https, maintaining and keeping up with web/email/crm/accounting software updates for small businesses, etc, there is huge opportunity out there for much of this to be a subscription type service rather than expensive periodic consultant or contract work that is often very distracting for the small business to implement.
Anyway, those are just two simple ideas that I see/hear frequent issues with. Usually a focus on something common that already exists but needs improvement will be much easier than trying to do something completely unique.
Extra good point for security. It's easy for us to say we are using 10k security product to make 60k customer happy but we can also brag to any customer from there on.
I do fraud investigations for a bank. We spend an insane amount on labor costs because all of our transactional data resides in different systems. Want to review credit card data? Go pull system X. Want to review wire transfers? Go pull system Y. Etc etc. some of these things have to be separated out of necessity (e.g. card data is stored in a particular way due to regulations), but I would easily pay 10k / y to be able to get a complete view of customer transaction activity from a single place. We'd save millions in labor costs if someone could pull it off correctly.
Anything that increases team productivity significantly. If my team of developers is > 10 then I'm probably spending about 100k per year in supporting tools:
- source code management
- server monitoring and metrics
- payment processing
- testing tools
- continuous integration tools
Any of those could easily cost 10K/year, or more, depending on what the team is doing and how fast they are growing.
Beyond that, anything that ties back to revenue. Email marketing, PPC, SEO. Also possibly things that optimize finances, analytics or anti-fraud.
I'd like to hear how your pitch to upper management differs on spending for tools for a revenue team vs spending for tools for a development team. Customer service and sales gets whatever they want at my job but it's pulling teeth asking for anything for increasing programmer efficiency.
those are some pretty high quality clients then. What type of projects do you do. We've implemented a pretty good model for our agency to attract quality clients without networking and doing all sorts of stuff that we don't like. Happy to help.
Extracting at least text from PDFs is not always 100% perfect, due to inherent issues with the PDF format (partly because it is a graphic format, and does not have a one-to-one mapping to text, also maybe because of some weird decisions they made). I both read about this and was told about this by a key person at a PDF software product company, whose product I researched and then used in a project. The product was xpdf (a C library, it also had binaries or EXEs), from Glyph and Cog. I was contracted by a client to research PDF libraries for extraction of text from PDF; found and evaluated a few, then recommended xpdf to the client, and used it in the project. That is how I know this.
The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it :) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the better solution.
We do a decent amount of work in this, lots of scraping the web and extracting. Unfortunately we dont do it against pdfs that have any strict format or even a loose format at all, I wish it were government forms or any type of forms. Would you say the pdfs you guys are looking at have some type of format and the readers are just hit or miss?
Correctly identifying if the customers are going to pay their bills or run after two months without paying, leaving a bill of ~1000 (consider that the State justice system doesn't work and the customers are individuals).
I maybe wrong but some people in my team were building a Customer HUB at a point. My understanding from the project was you could buy third party data to help you out with this.
Enterprise pays the most for ERP. If you can create a better SAP, then you will make millions. I am saying as an SAP user, it is good but really expensive.
Creating an standard ERP system is not the hardest part (it's still really hard tho).
Deploying ERP for enterprise customers means writing tons of custom modules & processes specific to the customer. That's why integrating an ERP for the first time or switching vendors is costly and risky. Most successful ERP systems for enterprise customers are basically domain-specific frameworks to create customer-specific solutions.
However, there is still a big market for business management software for SMBs. The market is so big and ever expanding that I doubt it can ever be saturated. Aside from english-speaking market, there are even bigger opportunities for localized solutions.
I'm interested in this field. What are the current pain points with EDA tools? And are we talking device level, process level, circuit level or all levels?
[+] [-] cdevs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notadoc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbob2000|8 years ago|reply
Quickbooks is nice if you're an accountant who likes entering stuff into tables. But I am not an accountant and I'm bad about keeping on top of my accounts. It takes too many clicks to send a stupid little invoice once in a while.
This is a space that could really use chat bot support. I want to quickly type something or go through a wizard to do my accounting. "Hey Accounty, can you send Client B an invoice for The Big Package at $200 for 12 months? Make it recur annually". And Accounty goes and sets everything up and sends the emails. No interface. Completely automated. When an account is overdue, it'd message me and say "Hey, Client A is overdue, shall I send a reminder?" If someone replies to the invoice email, it'd say "Hey, Client C replied to the invoice and asks 'Can I pay later?', how do you want to respond?". Wire that up Siri or some other speech to text engine and I can do my accounting on the drive in to work.
[+] [-] thepredestrian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tixocloud|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notadoc|8 years ago|reply
As a general rule I'd say nearly any business would pay 10k/year for:
- Anything that would offer 2x that (or greater) in ROI
- Anything that would automate or handle routine tasks that otherwise an expensive person must perform (there are many of these if you think about it)
- Anything that saves 10k+ worth of someones time (this is not too hard to identify if you focus on the expensive persons)
- Anything that generates 12k+ of new revenue
- Anything that replaces 10k+ worth of annual contractor/consulting work
- Anything that undercuts competition charging more for the same service, without a degradation in service quality
You probably want specifics, so two areas I often see smaller businesses struggle with are email lists and security/software updates.
There is substantial opportunity in finding new ways to monetize the boring old email/customer list in nearly every industry. I frequently hear small, medium, and even some larger businesses struggle to monetize an email list in any meaningful way, and so instead the primary metric is always about 'engagement' and other buzzword centric statistics that rarely translate into revenue. Private practice doctors and dentists often struggle with this, as do everything from bakeries, app developers, web sites, authors, interest groups, etc. There are many businesses with large customer lists or customer prospects in the form of email lists that make $0 from those lists.
Another is anything related to security, particularly anything that takes a perceived complicated task and makes it easy or handles it outright without any downtime or complication to the end user(s). Whether it's routine client and server software updates, routine security audits, moving web apps/sites to https, maintaining and keeping up with web/email/crm/accounting software updates for small businesses, etc, there is huge opportunity out there for much of this to be a subscription type service rather than expensive periodic consultant or contract work that is often very distracting for the small business to implement.
Anyway, those are just two simple ideas that I see/hear frequent issues with. Usually a focus on something common that already exists but needs improvement will be much easier than trying to do something completely unique.
[+] [-] cdevs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdiamand|8 years ago|reply
1K - 10K https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4
10K - 100K https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5
[+] [-] tunetine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tommynicholas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tixocloud|8 years ago|reply
[Update: just saw your response to another comment]
[+] [-] tomascot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ellius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lox|8 years ago|reply
- source code management - server monitoring and metrics - payment processing - testing tools - continuous integration tools
Any of those could easily cost 10K/year, or more, depending on what the team is doing and how fast they are growing.
Beyond that, anything that ties back to revenue. Email marketing, PPC, SEO. Also possibly things that optimize finances, analytics or anti-fraud.
[+] [-] adius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdevs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMarius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fairpx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vram22|8 years ago|reply
The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it :) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the better solution.
[+] [-] cdevs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocrcustomserver|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giblet|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsylvie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gm|8 years ago|reply
Otherwise also fundraising (as someone else said).
Though for both of these, if the business is cash-strapped, the results would have to be pretty much assured.
[+] [-] maxwin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hakanderyal|8 years ago|reply
Deploying ERP for enterprise customers means writing tons of custom modules & processes specific to the customer. That's why integrating an ERP for the first time or switching vendors is costly and risky. Most successful ERP systems for enterprise customers are basically domain-specific frameworks to create customer-specific solutions.
However, there is still a big market for business management software for SMBs. The market is so big and ever expanding that I doubt it can ever be saturated. Aside from english-speaking market, there are even bigger opportunities for localized solutions.
[+] [-] badshar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepnotderp|8 years ago|reply
Oh my god, i would pay so much for that...
[+] [-] mud_dauber|8 years ago|reply
I could definitely see the value in having a plug & play design flow.
[+] [-] Tomminn|8 years ago|reply
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