Ask HN: Any Tradespeople Here? I built a document engine for trades and am looking for feedback. I'm happy to give a longer trial and understand better how you are creating estimates/quotes/contracts for your customers. Take a look: documentorium.com - free to use without an account, and get extra features with an account(prefill data, history and more in the future). Bogdan from documentorium (support@documentorium.com) |
I'm trying not to be negative, because this is a very nice platform… But, who is it for? The smaller shops will do most of this by hand, even still. The larger shops will have these features integrated into a management software ecosystem.
Tradesmen will take the path of least possible resistance to their objective. Unlike the IT/IS crowd… downloading (and/or integrating into our work-flow, in the case of an online service) yet another library/program/engine is usually one of the last solutions we'll go after.
Again, this is very nice software, but… I don't see too many of us using it.
Especially whereas one of the big selling points, is the library of templates… but, a plumber is never going to need an electrician's template… I say, don't bother going after tradesmen. Pimp this out to other software vendors. I don't know that ecosystem very well, at all, but I imagine that .pdf aaS will find a wider market with them as a plug-in of sorts, than with the operative crowd.
Just my two cents. Cool stuff, though.
edit: hurrdedurr…
- the ones who do this by hand - they need to keep track of individual files etc, fill them manually each time - i try to solve it for them.
- the larger shops - i am not targeting them and i don't think i compete with bigger platforms here, that's where my price comes into play - cheaper than anything else, without the extra features - it's a clear tool, usable anywhere.
When i decided to build something for tradespeople, i validated this in another market(another country, but a subset of these trades) where "people wanted to create PDFs for their services, and send it to customers". And it worked, it's somewhat successful (hundreds of paying users, almost all renewed their yearly, price is too small to matter as a yearly cost).
I think "no bullshit" tools for this market(0-5 employees) are missing, or are expesive/monthly/per user etc. I think they are wrong.
I also think that the selling point is not the big library - once you're in, you will have the option to only see stuff you actually use, but the clarity and ease of use(lessons learned from the other market) + the output that you care about, FAST.
I'm trying to validate and integrate feedback.
I hope i answered all your points.
Bogdan
edit: formatting