Enough is enough! I'm launching the construction management product I've been building . Here's what it looks like and why I built it.
For the past few months, I've been building a construction management product for small teams called Site Command – you can check it out in my profile on Indie Hackers.
It's way past "ready to go" in the leanest sense, so after some advice this past week I told myself it was time to wrap up those "must have" loose-ends and just put it out there.
So today I'm rolling it out to the world – let's see what happens!
It's funny, in my day job as a PM, I will ruthlessly cut scope in order to ship. But for some reason, on my side projects, there's always a little more to do, a little more to do, and so on, until you realize you've build this huge thing with nobody using it (yet?).
I had to really get out of my head these past couple weeks and say "NO MORE FEATURES". The fact is, if people don't want to use this NOW then I've either built the wrong thing, or haven't conveyed what it does well enough. Additional feature X, Y, or Z is not going to change that at this point.
In case you want more detail, I wrote a piece on medium about how & why, but I'm happy to answer any questions or take in any advice you have in the comments here!
Very nice looking Dashboard, what tech stack have you used?
Thank you!
The backend is built with Laravel, and the frontend is Vue.js and a highly customized bootstrap theme. I'm hosting on a Digital Ocean VPS and the database is managed by AWS RDS. Email notifications are powered by Mailgun. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Thanks for getting back Quickly, I am working on PHP 7 for backend with boostrap4 theme for admin dashboards. Hosting on Siteground
Your service looks really neat!
What I would like to ask you is how you practically talked to construction people - via phone calls, or via your friend's contacts or somehow else?
Thanks!
Hey!
So, for my first customer interview I talked to my friend and his main project manager. We chatted over Zoom for about an hour.
For everybody else, I emailed about 30-40 local contractors and managed to get a call with about 8 of them, and in-person visit with 2. I found their emails through Google, builder directories, and contractor-finding services.
I keep the ask email very short, just a couple lines with a focus on why they bother using their time to chat with me. Fortunately, I think the problem I'm trying to solve struck a chord with many of them and that helped.
Thank you for reply!
I love this approach. How did you describe yourself?
Here's an example of one of the first emails I sent, I'll probably shorten this up when I do it again:
---
Hi Ian! I have a bit of an odd request :)
I'm a software developer based in Guelph, and I'm working on a new app to help construction companies stay on top of their crew, projects and customers.
A good friend of mine has a small construction business in Edmonton, and is starting to have trouble keeping everybody looped in on all the projects he has on the go. I thought I might be able to help, but I need to learn a bit more about the challenges faced by residential construction companies.
I was wondering if there's any chance you might be open to a quick 10-15 minute phone call, or coffee, or beer, where I could learn a bit more about any challenges you face in the day-to-day operation of [company-name]. My treat, of course! I'd be so grateful for any time at all :)
If nothing else, just knowing whether or not you experience similar challenges would be wonderfully helpful.
I know things are probably very busy, so if now's not a great time, no worries at all!
Thanks,
Tom
Thanks a lot! This is incredibly valuable! :-))))
Super cool!
Excited to hear how it goes. From the looks of your story on medium It looks like you have some potential customers already lined up to try it out!
B2B pricing is awesome as well, I love building customer apps, but the price point is often so low that it requires a lot of legwork marketing wise, and can be very finicky.
Congrats man! Keep us updated on how it goes!
Thanks so much!
It's funny you mention the pricing – it's an experiment as much as anything, but I am a fan of the pricing possibilities and tolerances in B2B vs B2C products. With B2B pricing, I might be able to get to "full time side-project" status a lot sooner. For example, at "only" 80-100 customers, I would probably go full time.
Yeah exactly, it takes a lot less customers to get to a full time salary. I've traditionally built software in the b2c realm, but the idea of doing something in the b2b has sounded more and more appetizing price wise :)
For sure!
In my day job I build a B2B product, and it always surprises me how different tolerances are for consumers vs. business. For B2B, if you build something valuable, you can pretty much name your price (within reason) and businesses will pay. Consumers, not so much!
Nice you can certainly take your learnings from building b2b software to what your doing now.
Yeah so true!
Your carrier appears undoubtedly neat!
I want to ask you how you nearly talked to [construction] human beings via phone calls, through your pal's contacts, or by someone else.
Thanks!