>> The flooring industry is another place that might be ripe for "disruption", the software often sucks.
Actually anything in the building industry is ripe for disruption. I've worked with architects and every single firm has a different way of handling documents and change order requests.
There's actually a TON of companies that still use paper trails for change order requests. Some use dropbox, some use SFDC (salesforce.com), some use some archaic cloud storage solutions. It's literally all over the map. And every time one of my firms works with a new sub-contractor then they have to try and sync up how they all handle their project documents - its insane.
If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market. I mean, think of how many companies are involved designing and building a house.
>> If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market.
Not necessarily. Convincing people to fit their workflow into your new software, effectively running their companies around it, is not as easy as it sounds. Coding it is not the hard part.
Truer words have never been said. Selling your vision/workflow/business structure/data presentation is the hard part. Many of the things one may code as a solution will directly and negatively effect the job security of the exact person your are selling to, but that is the challenge. The secondary effect is a chilling of innovation by limiting the automation gains/improvements in some way to limit the impact of value depreciation of current workers.
As someone with a failed B2B company in CV, can confirm. Also, don't think that you just need to sign a contract with a suit — it's only the beginning. Your toughest challenge will be getting their lazy and unmotivated IT department to actually do anything.
Shoot, I work as a professional services consultant doing software setup/hardware installs for a major tech company (actually the market leader in our niche) and all the time I get pushback from the engineers I'm working with who are resistant to change. If I had a nickel for every time I heard "we didn't choose this software" or "management is making us use this", I'd just about double my salary.
I ran into a client where they preferred their home-grown Perl script to our million-dollar solution because grep searches faster than we do, even though we have literally a billion more features.
It's not just a challenge with your startup trying to get name recognition. It's a challenge for the major players, too. Inertia is hard to overcome.
> I ran into a client where they preferred their home-grown Perl script to our million-dollar solution because grep searches faster than we do, even though we have literally a billion more features.
Did they need any of those features, or did they need to search?
> If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market.
Actually anything in the building industry is ripe for disruption. I've worked with architects and every single firm has a different way of handling documents and change order requests.
There's actually a TON of companies that still use paper trails for change order requests. Some use dropbox, some use SFDC (salesforce.com), some use some archaic cloud storage solutions. It's literally all over the map. And every time one of my firms works with a new sub-contractor then they have to try and sync up how they all handle their project documents - its insane.
If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market. I mean, think of how many companies are involved designing and building a house.