3
8 Comments

Show IH: PlanDrive

Hi IH,

We've launched PlanDrive (https://www.plandrive.com/) a few days ago and would love to get your feedback on the marketing site / the platform itself.

It's targeted towards architects, engineers, consultants, builders and construction professionals to help them store, distribute and collaborate around their drawings digitally. There are a few big players in the market but charge hundreds of thousands in annual licensing. There are a couple of smaller, SaaS products that we are in direct competition with but they are still 10x our price point. We see our biggest competitor being email and DropBox - this is how most architects we've spoken to are distributing their drawings to their client, the construction site and their contracted consultants. We hope to break up this sea of lost emails and DropBox links and provide a central, easy-to-use dashboard for all their projects and drawings.

  1. 3

    Hi,

    The site looks really clean and modern, congratulations on the launch! I really like that your offering is targeted at a specific niche, so you have obviously identified a pain point. While I can't speak to the specifics of the construction industry, a few general thoughts / suggestions:

    • It is not clear how this is differentiated from dropbox / box / google drive. It might be worth having a section that compares it to the competitors to draw out the differentiation
    • Are the power-ups per user license? Does the additional cost apply to both the owner and reviewer of a document?
    • Is the currency US $. Assuming it is, but I saw the company is based in Australia, so not sure if that's your initial market.

    Hope this help. Good luck!

    1. 1

      Hi @d33kay, thank you so much for the feedback!

      That's a good idea - I'll add a section that compares the product to the file storage services.

      The power-ups are per team license, I'll make that more clearer. We are allowing unlimited users per team.

      The current is mapped to either US/GBP/EURO/AUD depending on your IP address, so we try to show the currency you'll be charged in (thank you to AWS's CloudFront-Viewer-Country header) so I'll make it clearer as to what the denomination is in.

  2. 1

    Looks good. Are you targeting a certail "typical" user? Suggest to collect feedback and run feature voting to understand existing users.

    1. 1

      We are talking to more and more of our customers. Getting Intercom up and running on the platform has been the single best contributor to that effort.

      If you don't mind me asking, how would you recommend going about feature voting?

      1. 1

        There are SaaS offerings of all sizes available to run feature voting.

        I found the need for feature voting myself (for mobile apps) and created Productific to collect feature requests/ideas and run voting. Simple and straight forward, free plan available. There are various other offerings available each with a different focus.

        Compared to Intercom & similars: These are rather communication/chat focused, they have less focus on feature requests and voting.

        https://productific.com

  3. 1

    Hi,
    First of all a full-disclosure - I myself am looking at the Architecture space - but from a completely different angle so I love your solution and think it's a great niche!
    I wanted to drop one sentiment that might help - NEVER compete on price. It's a zero-sum game that is always lost. Customers never want a cheap solution, they want the BEST solution ( a combination of Cost and Value). If your segment requires something simpler than the enterprise solutions that are 10X your price - give them the BEST solution in the world for their simple needs, and price it accordingly. But remember that Pepsi isn't a cheap Coca Cola. And other Cola brands who are "the cheap knockoff" aren't doing too great.
    Hope this helps,
    Jonathan
    PS If you'd like to hop on a call and discuss this further - feel free to book me https://calendly.com/jonathanoron

    1. 1

      Hi Jonathan, sorry for the late reply.

      It's awesome to find a fellow hacker in the architectural-space! What kind of product/service are you working on?

      I completely agree. I should've phrased that better, that it's not the only angle. We believe that our proprietary drawing processing technique gives us unchallenged detail when viewing your drawings on mobile devices. Our interface is also goes further than just 'lists' as our competitors do - we've spent the time talking and working with architects to design the UI to how they are used to in the real world (i.e. our drawing register) so there's plenty here, we hope it's enough but we are continually improving it.

      1. 1

        Amazing and thanks for the detailed answer!
        I'm actually just at the beginning of looking at the space. My focus is more on the small client and the single architect collaboration. I don't have any grand ideas yet, just looking at the space from 30,000 feet :)

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 17 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments