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This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than about mobile apps in general. > The mobile app was doing something really cool: y
by krschultz 11y ago
This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than about mobile apps in general.
> The mobile app was doing something really cool: you only had to take a snap of a receipt, and tap a button to export all the data into a beautiful Excel expense report.
That's a feature not a business. That feature already exists in all of the major expense tracking SAAS products that I'm familiar with.
So who is the target market? The sliver of people that have enough of a problem to want to buy a solution but not enough of a problem to buy the major existing solution is just not that big.
- marwann 11y agoI think it's hard to give people the big picture of what the thought process looked inside the company in a 5-mn read. We've cut through some info to focus on a unique message, but we know our target market, researched as much as we could, conducted (literally) hundreds of interviews, tried to determine painpoints, use/edge cases, etc.
- Bedon292 11y agoI was going to say something similar, but I think you put it better. "Had it been done a million times?" They say nope, but I think they were looking in the wrong area. It may have done bad in standalone apps, but that's not where the real competition was. It was a small feature in many apps. I know I keep an app for this exact purpose on my phone all the time, even though I use it once every few months. The problem, for them, is that the app is part of the expense reporting software we use at work. I think there was no real way to sell this app as a standalone thing. It needs to be connected.