

Ask HN – SAAS owners in non-developer space, how did you come up with the idea? - vijayr

If you are running a SAAS business that makes &quot;non-developer&quot; 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?
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palidanx
I created a saas site ([https://www.menutail.com](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/](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
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.

~~~
palidanx
You pretty much hit on a pretty big problem I'm facing. Initially, I charged
$40 a month under an unlimited subscription assuming a vendor would have a new
product every month or so. However, it turned out that most vendors only
needed the service for a month or two in order to churn all their labels out
then cancel.

In terms of price sensitivity, current vendors are charging $100-$150 a label,
so the subscription plan is either an average deal, or a great deal if they
have 5 labels.

The subscription model stems from a problem in purchasing an individual label.
If vendors purchase say one label, there is a possibility where they might
have made a couple of mistakes and they have to fix their label. The thing is
I don't really know if they are fixing the label, or generating an entirely
new label. At the end of the day my goal is to be as hands off as possible.

Of course, I'm open to ideas though.

~~~
bliti
You can operate from the standpoint that most people will be honest (which is
the correct assumption). Grant them a given set of corrections before they can
contact you. For example, charge them $99 per label with up to 5 corrections.
If they need a correction afterwards then have them email you. Which at that
point they will be looking at a new label anyways (charge them again). Anyone
can modify the PDF file and change the settings. What they need is access to
the nutrients calculation logic (which is the actual product you sell).

Or you could do like it is done with barcodes, and charge a low fee per label
generated. Say $20 for every label with no corrections. Just state it very
clearly in there. Twenty dollars is low enough that they won't try and scam
you out of things. Plus you can also sell them a package deal where for $99
they can get 6 labels (5+1 free). It will make sense in their heads because
the $99 deal seems to be the better value.

So:

$20 per label or $99 for 5 labels plus get one FREE.

~~~
palidanx
Thanks for the input, I appreciate it! Some food for thought for tonight.

~~~
bliti
Sure, no problem. Just make sure to A/B test this. Don't take it as is.

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chrissyb
I'm creating [http://www.dwgdrop.com](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.

*Edited for clarity

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avalore
[https://www.lettingcheck.com](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.

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jason_tko
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.

