This has the added benefit that you can then sell those SuiteCRM plugins to other businesses.
Quickbooks is nice if you're an accountant who likes entering stuff into tables. But I am not an accountant and I'm bad about keeping on top of my accounts. It takes too many clicks to send a stupid little invoice once in a while.
This is a space that could really use chat bot support. I want to quickly type something or go through a wizard to do my accounting. "Hey Accounty, can you send Client B an invoice for The Big Package at $200 for 12 months? Make it recur annually". And Accounty goes and sets everything up and sends the emails. No interface. Completely automated. When an account is overdue, it'd message me and say "Hey, Client A is overdue, shall I send a reminder?" If someone replies to the invoice email, it'd say "Hey, Client C replied to the invoice and asks 'Can I pay later?', how do you want to respond?". Wire that up Siri or some other speech to text engine and I can do my accounting on the drive in to work.
As a general rule I'd say nearly any business would pay 10k/year for:
- Anything that would offer 2x that (or greater) in ROI
- Anything that would automate or handle routine tasks that otherwise an expensive person must perform (there are many of these if you think about it)
- Anything that saves 10k+ worth of someones time (this is not too hard to identify if you focus on the expensive persons)
- Anything that generates 12k+ of new revenue
- Anything that replaces 10k+ worth of annual contractor/consulting work
- Anything that undercuts competition charging more for the same service, without a degradation in service quality
You probably want specifics, so two areas I often see smaller businesses struggle with are email lists and security/software updates.
There is substantial opportunity in finding new ways to monetize the boring old email/customer list in nearly every industry. I frequently hear small, medium, and even some larger businesses struggle to monetize an email list in any meaningful way, and so instead the primary metric is always about 'engagement' and other buzzword centric statistics that rarely translate into revenue. Private practice doctors and dentists often struggle with this, as do everything from bakeries, app developers, web sites, authors, interest groups, etc. There are many businesses with large customer lists or customer prospects in the form of email lists that make $0 from those lists.
Another is anything related to security, particularly anything that takes a perceived complicated task and makes it easy or handles it outright without any downtime or complication to the end user(s). Whether it's routine client and server software updates, routine security audits, moving web apps/sites to https, maintaining and keeping up with web/email/crm/accounting software updates for small businesses, etc, there is huge opportunity out there for much of this to be a subscription type service rather than expensive periodic consultant or contract work that is often very distracting for the small business to implement.
Anyway, those are just two simple ideas that I see/hear frequent issues with. Usually a focus on something common that already exists but needs improvement will be much easier than trying to do something completely unique.
1K - 10K https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=4
10K - 100K https://www.oppslist.com/?payment_level=5
[Update: just saw your response to another comment]
- source code management - server monitoring and metrics - payment processing - testing tools - continuous integration tools
Any of those could easily cost 10K/year, or more, depending on what the team is doing and how fast they are growing.
Beyond that, anything that ties back to revenue. Email marketing, PPC, SEO. Also possibly things that optimize finances, analytics or anti-fraud.
For me networking so far has been the only consistent way of attracting quality clients. I don't dislike networking at all but it takes up a considerable amount of my most finite resource: Time.
Therefore I'm always eager to hear about alternative approaches especially if those are more scalable than me personally having to put in time for networking efforts.
We tend to describe ourselves as "the tech team for your (tech) startup", our goal is to be a one stop shop for tech-heavy startups and companies.
We work with Node.js, TypeScript and React/React Native. We've created a bunch of quite unique libraries and components that help us develop a lot faster and with less bugs (I can get into detail over e-mail).
The company is new (founded in March 2017) and so far I just used my contacts from the past to find us work (7 developers, 2 analysts/consultants), but this source is quickly drying up. Right now we're finishing our website and my plan is to go to some meetups, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to help and I'm afraid I'm going to lose time.
Our biggest problem is that we don't have much of a portfolio, only a bunch of internal applications we can't really show. Clients I found online don't trust us and/or want our services extremely cheaply, which is a problem because our developers are senior guys that charge a bit - but that was a deliberate choice, we want to make high-quality software.
- Create a tiny free product, that solves a tiny problem for your target customer - Promote your side project. Since it's free and frictionless, it's so much easier to have it spread on the internets. - On that side project, there should be an email subscription form somewhere and your main service as an upsell.
This exact model is pretty much all we do and it's resulting into at least 5+ figure each year worth of client work. We spend zero time networking or doing all sorts of stuff that is time consuming.
The only guaranteed way to get 100% accurate text from PDF is ... to not do it :) Instead, get the text from the same source that is used to generate the PDF. Obviously, that will not always be possible, but when it is, it is the better solution.
Otherwise also fundraising (as someone else said).
Though for both of these, if the business is cash-strapped, the results would have to be pretty much assured.
Deploying ERP for enterprise customers means writing tons of custom modules & processes specific to the customer. That's why integrating an ERP for the first time or switching vendors is costly and risky. Most successful ERP systems for enterprise customers are basically domain-specific frameworks to create customer-specific solutions.
However, there is still a big market for business management software for SMBs. The market is so big and ever expanding that I doubt it can ever be saturated. Aside from english-speaking market, there are even bigger opportunities for localized solutions.
Oh my god, i would pay so much for that...
This is not low hanging fruit.
There's a landmine of bugs in even the best EDA software. I'd just like for the software to run nicely once, like TensorFlow... sigh.
If you're thinking getting into this field, I might suggest a modular software architecture where the non-proprietary parts are open source and everything NDA-sensitive is kept closed source (pretty much anything the foundry touches/provides).
There are other problems too. Just in general, lots of bugs. For example, we'll run something and we'll get an obscure error, and then we'll ask the EDA company, and then two weeks later we'll get a generic "we'll look at it".
The hilarious thing is, sometimes the more expensive EDA companies aren't necessarily the better ones, our current partner isn't necessarily known as the most expensive tool suite, but we've actually had (so far at least >.<) had a much better experience with them than the bigger vendors.
Is your company big? Usually bigger EDA vendors don't care much for smaller design houses.
Btw. how are your experiences using Xyce? Do you get much speed up using its parallel processing capabilities?
Xyce is new and has some syntax differences, so it's not a mature software quite yet, so there are some troubles there. But as we've been starting to make it work, it's given us some amazing speedups on large clusters.
I could definitely see the value in having a plug & play design flow.
Also, I forgot to mention - we did have an Slack clone called Mattermost running and the overall response from the dev team has been positive. The only reason it was shut down is because of some open-source fanatics who thought Mattermost wasn't open-source enough (apparently the fact that it's backed by a big company providing support is a sin) so we've switched to this XMPP abomination.
I'm leaving soon anyway so I wish them the best of luck with this (and I feel bad for some of the people who actually wanted to get work done instead of fighting with broken and outdated tools).
Yes, we do have people wanting connectivity via XMPP, IRC, Discord, Slack, etc. There's "matterbridge" that offers those options for Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
It needs to be company wide for you to understand the truckload of channels, the spam of notifications and gifs, the poor mobile app, the poor replacement of emails, etc.
Its almost as if Slack is the JS of the team chat world.
I am interested because writing these support tools IS effort+time+focus but not usually a technical problem.
Now here's a similar post, what would you pay "$10,000/yr" for.
You can label me a skeptic, but I wouldn't buy anything from anyone who's primary motivation for starting their business is to make X amount of dollars in Y timeframe.
By contrast, every disgusting corrupt snake who has ruined the world for everyone else has started out with the goal of making X dollars in Y timeframe. So while I'm not saying they're all going to be evil, all of the evil ones share that trait.