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So I've never used Deputy or Route but my quick take on them:How does your SaaS differentiate itself from ones like Deputy or route? I'm new to the commercial cleaning industry and have never heard of any cc biz owner fully happy with what they have. The main advantage to deputy is GPS tracking of staff I believe.
- Deputy: More a generic timeclock sort of tool similar to something like Chronotek that is very popularly used in the cleaning industry - not really management software or a "unified" solution. But more and more "generic" solutions keep entering this market for example Quickbooks Time sheets.
- Route: Never heard of it before but this looks somewhat close to what I am building/have built - the website doesn't explain too many of the features and the video was pretty generic too. Looks pretty early concept type stage to be honest looking at the scheduling section.
I agree with that statement of what you said "have never heard of any cc biz owner fully happy with what they have" - what I plan to do with my software is making a subsection of the market basically 100% happy with the software which requires making opinionated features instead of generic tools. It is going to be more a system for running a commercial cleaning business that also has slick software rather than just bland software that just kinda helps. It will be based on a list of pain points I experienced running my cleaning business for 3-4 years.
My current target customer:
- Has at least 10 cleaning employees and at least one supervisor
- Has already tried at least one other janitorial management software
- Employs their cleaners mostly and rarely or minimally subcontracting
- Is not using a sales CRM and/or not experienced with tracking leads/prospecting in a systematic way OR does not like their current CRM flow
Small-ish update that relates to above:
Day job and school have been all kinds of busy for me - under quite a bit of pressure - free time has been almost non-existent but have tried to make progress. So far this is notable things I've done:
- Got domain repurchased and fixed some email issues that were hanging about from when I last was trying to stand this up which ended up with dealing with some previous unpaid invoice that was sitting in an email box I thought was forwarding but was not.
- Applied for and was accepted into Microsoft Azure's startup program. This will help keep costs down and as long as I am proving out my concept can potentially cut out $150k in costs over next few years as I keep applying for higher tiers.
- Previously my marketing site was built into the web app code - I decided instead to have the marketing site be a wordpress site so its more maintainable SEO + content wise. This was a bit of a learning curve but got it up and going on Azure Wordpress. Bought a theme and while configuring it and its underlying Elementor implementation decided it was junk and moved to Bricks.
- For now it is really just a "sign up for an email when we launch" page. Bricks has built in support for MailCheat(Chimp) and sendgrid - so applied for sendgrid account and was given some lame denied email with no information provided. For now I whipped up some code to save the emails to a google sheet so I can move on.
- Ran into a lot of annoying issues with Azure's preconfigured CDN but worked through that now.
- @MTF recommended some SEO tools to me that I've begun messing with but haven't actually pinned down the first post I am going to write to get content started on the blog side. Honestly I am hemming and hawing here from reading peoples opinions on AI generated content but I need to just go for it. By end of next week I will have the first article up (hopefully much sooner but my schedule this week is insane and most likely the peak busy I will have before finishing school).
- Have started piece by piece re-implementing my backend server. The code is now ~3 years out of date library wise and very coupled to my custom auth solution so I am manually moving it to a new codebase, upgrading libraries, and correcting some bad patterns that developed there while migrating to Google Firebase auth. Local environment setup is also getting way more streamlined and simplified.
- So far was able to get most of the libraries updated (with a lot of code still waiting to be reimplemented), database migration scripts working again and stood up a copy locally, running off of a simple npm start, and a very very early Google auth token flow.
- Reason for a lot of this is the following goal: Do the bare minimum needed to simplify and re-establish a working local environment with the new auth + libraries so that I can contract out the work on upwork while I do my day job. I plan to review their merges and provide guidance in the early mornings and evenings once I am at this point. I will contract out the mobile app, backend, and front end to different people to help make sure no-one person has my code. Each of these already exists but needs tweaks and re-stood up before they are even contractor ready or I am going to deal with more time and money explaining things to them than it is worth.