Pain points to product MVP, how we did it !
by Abdellah El AbbousI'm a founder who has spent years running various businesses, with all the pain points that every entrepreneur with no prior experience can face. If I could turn back time, I'd love to work with a solution that provides just:
- CRM capabilities, enabling lead importation and conversion through diverse sales funnels into customers.
- Collaboration tools for teams (Marketing and Product).
- Sales document management.
- Management of products and services, whether physical or digital.
- Tracking of payments and expenses.
- Comparison of KPI results across different periods.
Having a tool doing this can be a superpower!
Previously, we tried every tool, trello, jira, clickup .. Then we experimented with several erps including the open-source ones like Odoo and ERPNext, but none satisfied us. Our main concerns were with the user experience and the fact that these solutions focused more on the tool than the underlying problems.
As founders of a tech company, we reflected on that, that’s when, in early 2023, my co-founder and I decided to take matters into our own hands! We compiled all the issues we faced since 2012, and we focused on and prioritized the meaningful ones.
The solution should be process oriented, we asked ourself those questions (ofc no):
- How can we retrieve every old record, including transactions since we started?
- How much we sold last year?
- How much have we paid as bank fees since we began?
- What was our balance each year?
- What is the cost distribution?
- How much have we paid in salaries?
- What is the company’s value?
…
We opted to build a system which we can ask, to get this key metrics without hassle. The solution should be simple, which we will use with love to manage every business we run in the future: We wanted to have a standard business tool that's both practical and intuitively designed. Some of you may argue that this is just customized to our unique case ! But we believe that every business aspires to streamline product sales and customer acquisition.
Over the past six months, we've built a product that is originated from our own challenges and is now ready for market :) . Feedback from testers and potential customers has been overwhelmingly positive, with many suggesting to focus on CRM enhancement in addition with project management to cover 90% of the SMBs market .
We are not seeking direct competition with the established ERP or business management tools market, we know it can be very tough. Our goal is to craft something unique and incredibly valuable for our customers.
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Interesting idea that Devinstock is persuing!
After doing some research into ERP software, I found it to be rather clunky and impractical for small businesses. It seems like the industry is transitioning to a best-in-class approach where each software is niching down into a specific industry. e.g. Manufacturing MRPs with some minimal ERP capabilities.
How do you plan on getting a foothold into the market? Will you focus on a subset of your customer segment to start with?
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Hi thank you for the feedback,
Yes, exactly. The ERP and business management space is saturated with solutions. What we've observed is that the majority of them focus on adding features without addressing the core pain points that entrepreneurs want to solve. At the heart of it all, businesses need to streamline the process for managing leads, converting them into customers, defining products or services, conducting orders or creating project time sheets, and seamlessly generating essential business documents like quotations, deliveries, and invoices.
This core functionality should be intuitive and straightforward, without unnecessary generic modules. Yet many of the solution fail on this.
As i mentioned We aim to create something different with affordable pricing that the customers will love and we plan to move step by step. Currently we focus on optimizing Devinstock, with a list of early adopters, we look forward to add more as we continue the enhancements and landing new users from different sectors.
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The main limitation I found when looking is that not many products offer support for a product-service hybrid business model. Additionally, the fees it takes to get ERPs configured to your specific business case is eye watering. You'll be adding a lot of value if you can save the middle man of implementation partners that charge eye watering fees.
Best of luck!
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Yes, the high fees associated with ERP configuration can indeed be tough for many businesses, particularly smaller ones. We aim to address this issue by either offering support for hybrid models or streamlining the implementation process which could indeed add significant value. A simple and intuitive experience will eliminate expensive middlemen and providing a more cost-effective and efficient solution. Thank you :)
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