Is my head in the clouds on this one?
Hi all,
I would love any perspectives to help me with validation on a product I'm considering. Apologies if this gets too long to read, won't blame you moving on! To give some quick context - Up until 2019 I was working for an employment services provider (contracted to Australian government to deliver employment services for welfare recipients). Left to pursue study in software development (ending this year), and eventually a career in it - but the dream is to establish my own business(es), which lead me to the IH podcast, and then here.
Service Providers in the employment services industry use Case Management software provided by a third party, which is focused on a variety of service obligations and business operations such as case noting, expenditures, tracking employment 'placements', etc. I have a concept for a product that address a subset of the functions of these, which passes what I have since learned are some markers for a promising project.
Now to my problem. At the moment, the innovations I have relate to a subset of functions provided by the existing solutions - primarily to job vacancy management and the internal referrals and tracking process - job vacancies and referrals are huge part of personal, site and company targets. I'm confident I can majorly improve those functions, and extend them to certain types of vacancies and workflows within the referral process that they don't even handle.The existing solution for this particular function is mostly unused at the company I worked for - opting for emails which is hugely inefficient. The software is otherwise frequently used for all other functions, so I boil this down to the software fundamentally ignoring what these mechanisms need from the perspective of people who have to manage vacancies at site level.
I'm concerned though that this project might be futile, since they're likely not going to want to pay for concurrent systems providing the same service. Which leads me to the conclusion then, that I'd have to build a full-scale case management software directly competing with the existing solutions out there. This would be a huge undertaking in terms of development, and database requirements, also would need accreditation to be in compliance with government third party IT provider laws. Maybe impossible for a one man show, but I could probably involve others.
Do I have my head in the clouds right now if I want to bootstrap something like this? My understanding is these products are quite profitable - I'd really just need one customer of the ~60 providers to make this potentially worthwhile.
I'm also investigating another route, which, could maybe drop everything that the other products do, and work alongside it. I think the industry needs collaboration software, and some tools that help with a bunch of common processes that Sites employ to achieve their targets. I could maybe build it to interact with their existing case management solutions to enter case notes, etc). I'm just concerned that it'll all be a bit too over the place in terms of trying to slot a third piece of software in that deals with a lot of the same data, where the existing solutions solve 90% of what they need. But the 10% could be some pretty damn significant improvements to site performance, efficiency and organization.
That was a bit of a mess, would love any perspectives on anything I've thrown down here, thank you in any case for taking the time to read!
Sorry, had to skim over a lot of that ;-)
First, I think it's a great idea that you're looking to solve a problem in an industry that you've worked in - a lot of very successful people started out that way!
Second, have you tried to network and get contacts in the industry? I imagine a lot of bureaucracy, and likely difficulty reaching the people who you would need to sell it to. But like you said, it only takes one!
I'd highly recommend try to get in touch with someone and talk to them about their problems. See if what you're thinking about even registers to them or would save them money (that's what they pay for, after all!). But most importantly, just building it won't get you anywhere, so if it's difficult even getting to the point where you're talking to them, it could likely be out of your reach.
Good luck! Indie hacking is fun and difficult!
Haha thanks Andrew, I don't blame you, tried to shrink the post but I can't help myself. I have plenty of contacts in my old company and a few elsewhere, a couple in higher positions but probably not the right ones. Definitely need to start chatting with some people in the industry to get some feedback. Cheers!