If you are running a SAAS business that makes "non-developer" software (something other than project management, social media tools, tools for developers etc) - how did you come up with the idea? How did you validate the idea?
I created a saas site (https://www.menutail.com) which does nutrition analysis and generates pdf labels for nutrition facts labels. The main demographic are small food vendors who are interested in entering bigger markets such as whole foods.
The idea came about from a pivot from a failed app (http://fs.howcookingworks.com/). In that app, users can take pictures of food, and get nutrition info back. It turns out that the need for nutrition analysis is needed much more in the enterprise space.
The validation of the idea came when pitching my local restaurants if they needed nutrition facts labels. It turns out that one restaurant did. After that, I hit the road visiting all my local farmer's markets and have been and gathered my first set of clients from those visits.
You pricing model is a bit strange. Say I only have one product to sell at a farmer's market. Your subscription model will have me paying $100 a month for one label. Which if I only have one, means that I will pay for one month. It will cost $100 for the label. I feel that could be an issue with this type of market.
I'm creating http://www.dwgdrop.com (soon to be DrawVault) we are currently about one month away from a V1.0 launch.
Interestingly in answer to your question i'm building an application in the non-developer space as a non developer. I work in the architecture industry & my app is aimed at providing architects, engineers, building contractors and other related fields with an easy way to send and receive drawings and files, and also keep track of revisions to those files. Effectively its a repo for architectural & engineering drawings. I came up with the idea by employing 37 Signals style "scratch your own itch" method. While searching for a solution to replace the tedium of sending through email and local filing that seems commonplace in the industry i found platforms that are similar available for very large scale construction (read 100m, 1b etc) works but didn't scale well enough to be a viable option (price-wise) for small scale to include projects in the order of 500k - 5m etc.
I think that we hear and talk about "scaling" in the start-up community but we often overlook the possibility of building apps that "scale down" features from a much larger successful software. These smaller apps could theoretically have an untapped access to consumers/businesses that are out-priced by larger software systems.
https://www.lettingcheck.com - This started life as a 'profit share arrangement'. I know, you always hear this is a bad idea but it actually turned out quite well for us.
We were approached to provide a quote, which turned out to be too expensive for them. We liked the idea so offered to do this for a 3 way split (two developers) with the understanding he would take care of sales (his background was sales and marketing). The situation changed after this but that's another story.
He originally came up with the idea from his parents who owned a couple of franchise letting agents and used to do this process with paper, pen and a digital camera.
I started running a business in Japan in 2002-2003. After around 2 years when the company had grown a lot, we started having all sorts of problems trying to manage quotes and invoices.
Unfortunately there was no shrink-wrapped solution that could fix our specific problem that supported both Japanese and English, so I ended up designing and having built some software that generated our invoices automatically.
I spent more and more time working on this, until I realised there was a lot of demand for this product, and a real market need.
I met my co-founder (through Hacker News actually), and we decided to build out a multi-tenant solution for the Japanese mass-market.
[+] [-] palidanx|12 years ago|reply
The idea came about from a pivot from a failed app (http://fs.howcookingworks.com/). In that app, users can take pictures of food, and get nutrition info back. It turns out that the need for nutrition analysis is needed much more in the enterprise space.
The validation of the idea came when pitching my local restaurants if they needed nutrition facts labels. It turns out that one restaurant did. After that, I hit the road visiting all my local farmer's markets and have been and gathered my first set of clients from those visits.
[+] [-] bliti|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vijayr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrissyb|12 years ago|reply
Interestingly in answer to your question i'm building an application in the non-developer space as a non developer. I work in the architecture industry & my app is aimed at providing architects, engineers, building contractors and other related fields with an easy way to send and receive drawings and files, and also keep track of revisions to those files. Effectively its a repo for architectural & engineering drawings. I came up with the idea by employing 37 Signals style "scratch your own itch" method. While searching for a solution to replace the tedium of sending through email and local filing that seems commonplace in the industry i found platforms that are similar available for very large scale construction (read 100m, 1b etc) works but didn't scale well enough to be a viable option (price-wise) for small scale to include projects in the order of 500k - 5m etc.
I think that we hear and talk about "scaling" in the start-up community but we often overlook the possibility of building apps that "scale down" features from a much larger successful software. These smaller apps could theoretically have an untapped access to consumers/businesses that are out-priced by larger software systems.
*Edited for clarity
[+] [-] avalore|12 years ago|reply
We were approached to provide a quote, which turned out to be too expensive for them. We liked the idea so offered to do this for a 3 way split (two developers) with the understanding he would take care of sales (his background was sales and marketing). The situation changed after this but that's another story.
He originally came up with the idea from his parents who owned a couple of franchise letting agents and used to do this process with paper, pen and a digital camera.
[+] [-] jason_tko|12 years ago|reply
Unfortunately there was no shrink-wrapped solution that could fix our specific problem that supported both Japanese and English, so I ended up designing and having built some software that generated our invoices automatically.
I spent more and more time working on this, until I realised there was a lot of demand for this product, and a real market need.
I met my co-founder (through Hacker News actually), and we decided to build out a multi-tenant solution for the Japanese mass-market.