I'm releasing a (sort of) validated MVP, (yet another..) task management app focused on what I believe is a niche market. Thoughts?
It all started with a problem at work, I own a lab equipment distribution company (we sell and offer technical service) and one of the problems we've always had is the lack of accountability and communication regarding each of the orders that we got from our customers. Every time a customer or a manger wanted to know the status of an order we have to locate the information from several sources leading to countless meetings or hours spent researching information someone already had somewhere. Managers had this feeling they didn't know what everyone was doing, and we only found out about problems when the customer was already yelling at us.
We have tried more than 20 task/project management apps (monday, trello, todoist, ora, clickup, favro, planner, to mention some), they all have theirs pros and cons, but all of them lack what we needed.
The problem with us is that we don't have (and don't plan to hire) a project manager or coordinator manager that spends his/her time adding tasks everyday, we receive around 3-4 orders per day, for each order we have to perform around 15-25 tasks depending on the type of order, so every day someone would have to be responsible for: creating tasks, setting due dates, assigning/delegating users. There are just too many tasks to be created. For this problem we attempted to use templates but templates are too limited to static tasks, and even with repetitive orders, there are several tasks depending on customers, suppliers and products.
We also attempted some workflow managers, but those are more focused on approvals rather than on tasks and followups, or they were just too complicated to implement.
We decided to try to create our own task management application focused on distribution businesses, the main difference with most task management apps is that the software is focused on your order, not on your tasks, so we attempt to make it really simple as to only enter your customer, your suppliers, and how much are you billing/paying (all this information you already have from a sales/purchase order), with this data the app will automatically:
- generate all the tasks required to deliver this order to the customer (we consider if customer has several payments, supplier has several payments, supplier is international, if we have to do some installation process etc..)
- Set all the due dates according to customer/supplier customization
- Assign all the tasks to team managers (We have in the road map to assign directly using a resource allocation algorithm + ML)
The concept is: Create your order in 2-3 minutes, everyone gets their assigned tasks, and employees can complete a tasks with just one click in main page.
Ultimately the customer will be able to access the app and check a real time status of their order.
We are focusing solely on distribution businesses, preferably those that sell b2b industrial equipment.
What are your thoughts? Do you know someone that fits this niche market that may be facing our same issues? If you have had experience with task management apps, does this make sense?
We have rolled out our MVP and are looking for feedback from potential users.
Thanks in advance!
