RSS Feed

The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

It enables retail stores to publish accurate and attractive signs, shelf-edge labels, fact tags, coupons, and more.

It is designed for retail organizations who want to publish signs across the Internet, an intranet, or an extranet

using Web browsers instead of installing or maintaining in-store software.

The prospective customer of this software product would be Supermarkets,Retailers and Grocer

It would take six to eight months to develop this software product but I am not sure whether I would get the business from the retailer, why would anybody bank on a new software company ?

Could you please guide me.

I will guide you.... I will guide you over to the Business of Software forum which is one link below this one. That's where this type of question belongs. We've answered this question many times over there.

Go do some reading in that forum and you'll find out everything you need to know about why someone would or would not buy from you.

Sounds like a good idea! Especially for signs/stickers of a temporary nature, i.e. special christmas discounts to put on just some products or anything.

Apart from the online system, maybe you could consider also spend attention on how to add value to the actual printing side, i.e. make your system output PDFs that are perfectly optimised for the specialized printer+paper that you recommend, or whatever.

This way you can at least demo it easily and completely to people running the store, preferably just before seasonal holidays :-)

Also, maybe first aim at smallish localish chains, not established brands. The shop owner that is just expanding and has, say, three to ten stores in the area. I guess those could see the great time-saver in not having to distribute these things to all of them every time they want to apply an upgrade/action to their stores.

The limiting factor in a store printing their own signs is the printer, not the software.

You're not going to print out text on a 8x11 or 11x14 piece of paper and stick it outside.

For anything else such as misc stuff stores are just going to use Word.  You're forgetting the most important business rule: people will use what they know.  And what they know is Excel, Word, PowerPoint and maybe Access.

They haven't heard of your software, 99% of them won't bother searching Google to find sign maker software, they're just going to use Word or Powerpoint with some cheesy clip art maybe and call it a day.

Travis, you are only considering the "Mom and Pop" stores. It is true that they likely won't buy sign printing software because they will just use something like Word or even Notepad.

But that isn't really the target market the OP should be aiming for. The OP should be looking to sell to the Tier2/3 market where retailers have around 100 stores but aren't big enough to really do all of their own printing. But they'd want to use a consistent product for signage. This product would be installed/integrated into their locked down store environment as an "approved application". In most of these situations the stores can't even run Word or Excel as it isn't even installed.

So just understand that there are all types of retailers out there that can be sold to. And there are already lots of signage applications available. You need to figure out where you fit in that market.

Printing of banner ads for supermarkets is already done in store.
It uses specialised versions of inkets (eg xaar) there isn't any software in store at large chains - graphic is generated at head office and sent to individual stores. It's replacing the Walmart large numbers in a frame type signs.
The main reason for doing it in-store is to speed - head office can change offers on a daily basis to respond to competitors.

Thank you everybody for responding.

I have been in the signage industry for the last 3 years where I was involved writing software and specifications. I was working for a very well known retailer in UK. Then the company decided to go for out of box solution and I found that there were not much players who can cater their requirements of fast changing business. From the available vendor list the company had selected one and that software sucks.

This encourage me to build my own solution but again I wanted to be sure that once I finsih the development, will I find a buyer else it is not worth putting that much effort.