This is a continuation of my article series describing the design and development process of my company's product.
For any software product out there, you must do three things before you start any planning or development. First, you must define a problem that you would like to solve. Second, you must define a market niche you would like to place your product into. Third, you must look within your niche to find your target audience.
In the case of Easy Assets .NET, I had seen alot of market reports from Gartner and also had alot of personal experience as a consultant that showed that a vast majority (somewhere around 90%) of organizations out there have either no asset management practices or what they have is “marginal” which is politically correct way of saying that the methods use suck. Also, there are many studies that have been done that point to the large cost savings that can be obtained by using asset management properly in your organization. I saw one report that claimed that proper management of software and IT hardware in an organization can save anywhere from $350 - $800 per user.
So here we have a problem with a well defined cost savings solution. My next question is “Why do so few organizations have asset management software?”. To answer this, I had to do some serious google searching and check out some competitors products. What I found was that there are some excellent enterprise offerings out there from companies like Remedy and Peregrine plus some lower budget offerings from Intuit. But for the most part what I found was that many solutions suffered from the following problems:
- Cost - Enterprise solutions are definately not cheap, and definately out of reach for most organizations.
- Complexity - Enterprise solutions are notoriously difficult to set up and learn to use.
- Visual Appeal - Many of the lower budget offerings are downright ugly. I found many an interface that looked like it was coded in VB 4.
- Extra requirements - Many solutions on top of the software had additional requirements, like SQL server or Oracle 9i, which adds to the cost and requires a higher level of knowledge to install/administrate the software.
So now I had a problem I wanted to solve. The next step was to choose my target niche. Obviously being a one-man shop, I'm not going to be able to compete with gorillas like Remedy or Peregrin, and Inuit's offering was geared towards IT professionals and companies that have a IT staff presence. This lead me to the conclusion that my best bet would be targeting smaller organizations that do not have a strong IT presence.
Small organizations, weak IT presence, well now I just defined my target user. My target user is probably not overly IT savvy. They don't want to have to read a bunch of technical manuals to get started in an application. They also don't want the hassle of administrating a database and probably will avoid using most “advanced” features. So my challenge is to create an application that exposes as many of the benefits of asset management and breaks them down to be easy enough that anyone can pick up the use of the program quickly.