Two stealthy and deadly competitors to your SME tool
Having gone through it with Supplybunny, I know that developing a tool for SME customers is tough. Volumes have been written about the need for a killer product-market fit so that you don’t need an army of salespeople.
But there are also two stealthy and deadly competitors to consider.
Excel / Google Sheets
The first thing to ask is: how is your product better than Google Sheets?
Unfortunately, most of the time, the answer is that it isn’t. You can’t just productize a spreadsheet and call it a day. Your product must be significantly better for two reasons.
First, Excel is never going to die and Google Sheets are Excel on steroids. They have excellent collaboration, access rights, change history, and more – all significantly better than whatever you might have built in-house.
Second, your product is going to be less flexible and less portable. You probably won’t even have CSV export to begin with and might not support mobile or offline.
Therefore you must offer something much better so that your users don’t care.
The second is how your product interacts with WhatsApp. If it tries to displace it or put a rigid process in place around, or instead of, what users are currently doing over WhatsApp, it’s not a good sign.
In my experience, the correct approach is to assume that your users will continue using WhatsApp and to make it very easy to do so. And everything should be easily shareable.
For instance sending orders, invoices, drafts, etc. should be very easy and work very well. Progressively you can implement more aspects of the existing process into the tool but never should you try to displace WhatsApp.
The original comment
Here’s the full comment I made on a HackerNews post about a startup trying to do Checklists:
I don’t have many checklists (three in fact) but they’re in a folder in Google Drive. Each one is a spreadsheet that has the template and a when doing a run the template is duplicated and renamed to the date.
With that setup I think I’ve accomplished the main selling points of this tool: central repo, sharing, history, dashboard. Plus I’ve revision history and audit log.
Additional upsides are that it’s an existing tool that I pay for and use and users are familiar with it. Plus I’ve none of the limitations of not having a paid version.