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Comment by paulsingh | Hacker News Reader

http://notarycrm.com and http://mailfinch.com are doing pretty well for me. Still side projects but they're both profitable and steadily growing.

My rule of thumb: if you see a business using spreadsheets to manage something, there might be an opportunity there

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Awesome rule of thumb Paul.

Now that I think about it, I think you planted the seed about that idea through one of your blog posts last year. Thanks! :)

Ha, really? This post I'm assuming: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/microsoft-excel-is-the-wo...

TONS of Micro opportunities here.

Yep, this is definitely the post I was referring to.

FWIW, I fundamentally believe that smart people tackling brick-and-mortar-businesses-using-spreadsheets will make obscene amounts of money over the long term. (Not only are my products examples of this but, few people know this about me, I actually bought a gas station earlier this year to force myself to feel the pain.)

For anyone thinking about doing anything like this, feel free to reach out - I want to help you. :)

Paul, have you found any significant points in the gas station business you think could be improved by leveraging soft-tech?

Abso-f*cking-lutely. :)

CRM: who's buying from me, what are they buying and what should I market to them so that I can make more money.

Inventory Management: what's in stock, what do I need to re-order, are my employees stealing from me?

I can keep going... :)

interesting. i'd love to hear more about this.

I'm sending you an email.

I maintain an in-house developed 'enterprise database app'. When someone suggests new additions to this app, I tell him/her to use Excel to test their idea for a few weeks first, and then ask again. This gives a pretty good idea what they really want, because if people have to track stuff themselves they'll do only the barest minimum, and that's eventually what should go into the enterprise application.

That is exactly what I do and it has worked out pretty well. If they don't use the Excel sheet, then I know they wouldn't much care to use my ERP module either. Saves time and resources.

I’m very impressed by mailfinch, the idea that someone will upload a file and address let you print and mail it still blow my mind. Now you’re making money on it, Great job guys!

For MailFinch, does it take a lot of time to operate since you have to print the paper out and mail it?

Yeah, it can get tedious and time consuming. Though, at this stage, I've got a pretty cool process hacked together (think temps, cronjobs and sweat) so I've gotten a lot of my own time back to work on other things.

So, pretty much all businesses? That's quite a market..

Not sure if you're bring sarcastic, but I'll bite.

Yes, but you need to peel off a specific problem within a given vertical. I bootstrapped both of these ideas and, because of the limitations that come with bootstrapping, I targeted them specifically.

MailFinch is on demand direct mail for real estate agents. Over time, companies that send a lot of invoices started using it too.

NotaryCRM is for notaries - plain and simple. Over time, it became apparent that signing companies were also looking for a solution that solved their specific pains.

I was a little bit of both. Thanks for the extra info!

Paul -- would love to hear a summary of what you did to market these sites. SEO? Direct marketing? Word of mouth? Online ads? What was your approach, and what did you learn?

Edit: I suppose one could read this post: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/distribution-distribution...

Happy to share... I think I'll write an entire blog post on this.

MailFinch: Cold calls and asking for referrals. NotaryCRM: lots of SEO (notice the "find a notary" directory and the theme of almost all of the blog posts)

For both, there was a lot of call-to-action testing (in terms of verbal calls to action during my phone/in-person conversations) and rapid iteration (breaking features down into the smallest chunks and deploying often).

More recently (like, a week ago) I built a really basic site to force myself to learn a little more about consumer-focused community building.

As with all of my ideas, making money comes a close second behind the most important thing to me: learning something new.

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