Reaching for Vertical Markets

There is a great feeling of discussing your application with potential customers if you believe in your product. My wife use to work in this particular vertical market that this customer is from, so I had some insight on how they were currently doing their scheduling. I don't know why I didn't think of this particular vertical before. It seems so obvious to me now. The company currently uses Excel to create its schedules and emails them out. Needless to say, WWS is a huge step up for them.

But first I needed to decide if I should make the required customization. There is a slippery slope on doing customizations for clients. It is hard to scale and if you are selling a $50 service, you might actually be losing money by doing the work. But since the changes they were asking for will be useful to every company in the vertical market, and most likely in other markets as well, then it was an easy decision to make.

And having active customers to work with is a huge motivation factor, so I was able to bang out the changes (and a slew of other issues that had been bothering me) in a few days. During the whole time I kept in contact with the customer, trying to understand their scheduling process, their current pains and what I can do to help. By being proactive in the relationship and delivering a capability that will solve their problem, I hope that I will have a new happy customer.

Even better than that, is that I have a whole new vertical market to go after. This small niche is currently under served and could be a big success for me. It pays to get to know your customers, because you never know what you might learn. In this case, I discovered a new niche market.