I am working on an application that's targeted at smaller print shops, and I'm trying to determine if there's a market for it.
First of all, it does NOT:
...Integrate with your presses, your platers, your RIPs, or any other machines or systems
...Comply with JDF or other industry specs
...Gather shop-floor statistics
...iron your shirts or fetch your lattes
It does, however, provide the following:
...End-to-end job management, escorting work from intake, to pre-press, to proof, to scheduling, to printing, bindery, shipping, and invoicing
...CRM features to manage your customer base
...intuitive drag-and-drop resource scheduling for your presses
...PDF and email invoicing
...Reports to identify stalled jobs, high-value clients, and business trends
...Inventory management to keep your paper supplies current and promise dates accurate
...Hosted, web-based application with no additional software to maintain, in order to keep IT requirements in check
...99.9% system uptime to keep the business moving
...Enterprise-grade offsite backups to protect from catastrophe
...Double-redundant hardware to protect from disk, power-supply, or similar localized failures
...Secure logins for data security, accountability, and logging
...intuitive and attractive UI, requiring only minimal training
...Immediate implementation, able to go from online demo, to payment, to "live" as quickly as you can
If this was available for something like a $4K one-time subscription fee, and $400 per month, is this something that fills a niche for the smaller printers that don't want to, or can't, pursue the larger established players? Or is this too much, for too little? So that I don't run down the wrong road all by myself, I'm very interested in any feedback--either about the price point or the feature set or anything else that captures your imagination.
--AG
Edited by: Aaron Grzywinski on Nov 13, 2007 9:59 PM
First of all, it does NOT:
...Integrate with your presses, your platers, your RIPs, or any other machines or systems
...Comply with JDF or other industry specs
...Gather shop-floor statistics
...iron your shirts or fetch your lattes
It does, however, provide the following:
...End-to-end job management, escorting work from intake, to pre-press, to proof, to scheduling, to printing, bindery, shipping, and invoicing
...CRM features to manage your customer base
...intuitive drag-and-drop resource scheduling for your presses
...PDF and email invoicing
...Reports to identify stalled jobs, high-value clients, and business trends
...Inventory management to keep your paper supplies current and promise dates accurate
...Hosted, web-based application with no additional software to maintain, in order to keep IT requirements in check
...99.9% system uptime to keep the business moving
...Enterprise-grade offsite backups to protect from catastrophe
...Double-redundant hardware to protect from disk, power-supply, or similar localized failures
...Secure logins for data security, accountability, and logging
...intuitive and attractive UI, requiring only minimal training
...Immediate implementation, able to go from online demo, to payment, to "live" as quickly as you can
If this was available for something like a $4K one-time subscription fee, and $400 per month, is this something that fills a niche for the smaller printers that don't want to, or can't, pursue the larger established players? Or is this too much, for too little? So that I don't run down the wrong road all by myself, I'm very interested in any feedback--either about the price point or the feature set or anything else that captures your imagination.
--AG
Edited by: Aaron Grzywinski on Nov 13, 2007 9:59 PM