How to research about an application before doing it?


6

I am planning to make an application to digitalize and organize documents a company, or forum, etc may have.

  • The first thing that came to my mind
    was about how i should look around
    for possible competitors that already
    have their product on the market to
    see what i am against in ?
  • Once i know about the other companies
    doing this same application i am
    planning what should i consider
    before taking the step to do it or
    look for something else ?
  • Is there a public or a good resource
    where i should look first about the
    type of application i am planning to
    make ?

Best regards.

PS: hope i did'nt do wrong posting this here aswell and i am sorry about my poor english.

Software Market Research

asked Aug 20 '10 at 16:18
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Prix
133 points
  • Alright, I read your comments. It makes sense. I'd say John gave really nice advice. You can try asking people who work in any kind of corporate structure if this is a good idea. It will be easier to share documents for sure. How is the app going to function (this isn't related to your question, I am curious about this application now). Are you going to have some kind of LAN connection or are you going to make an app where people can access company url (example: Microsoft.yoursite.com) and then have people login, and then they can download/upload files (if they have enough permissions). – Bhargav Patel 14 years ago
  • It is mainly to companies with high volume of documents transactions where the application supports MySQl, MS SQL or SQLite and if at later point you need to migrate from one of the databases to another you can. So lets say your company receives 10k letters dayly, 5k court documents and so forth, all those documents are usually organized and put into archives, using my application you will be digitalizing those files and they would be accessible within the application so every – Prix 14 years ago
  • computer that has the application installed could access the files if the user has access to the given file (yes, you can define access to every file digitilized), once the file is digitalized into the applications, you will be prompted to a few question like the document name, registration date, who delivered it, all those question are configurable since it may be usefull to some companies and not to others so tehre is a lot of things that are customizable aswell. You have the option to also save into that file register where is its physical location. – Prix 14 years ago

3 Answers


5

The fastest place to start your research is through google. Search on the terms that describe your product and see if someone is already in that space. If no one is in that space its possible that there is no market for it. If there is a lot of people in that product it maybe difficult to get into. If though a few new products have gotten into it it might be an emerging market niche.

I normally go to download.com or some other software site if it is for the desktop to get an idea of the download counts also if a web 2.0 service I'll look through the search terms in google to get an idea of number of searches per month, if it is trending up and about how much it would cost to advertise for the wording (search term competition) that desribes the product. With this you get a rough idea of market size on the internet.

In the end though you will want to find the people that would be the customer and ask questions to them and see if there would be an interest in buying what you are planning on creating. If you can get some commitments or interest with the above quick interenet searches I think you can go into that market and give it a go.

Good luck.

answered Aug 21 '10 at 00:29
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John Bogrand
2,210 points
  • Thanks John i was actually looking for something like download.com to actually start having an idea of what keywords i should be using to find in my case the digitalize app, google is a nice option but only if you have a more strict keyword otherwise you will get too many useless results aswell. search terms is indeed a nice idea aswell. once again thanks :) – Prix 14 years ago
  • +1 - Excellent advice. Don't spend too much time on your search; focus your attention on potential customers. – Jeff O 14 years ago

0

This is a new question, but not a new idea. It has been done before, and it has been done by huge influencing companies. You will, and I mean for sure you will, have a hard time getting started. Thats not to say that you can't have any profit at all.

You want to digitize and organize documents, this is already being done by Google Docs. Its what I use to keep an online copy of all our documents.

Anyways, read 6 Strategies to Take On an Established Competitor

answered Aug 21 '10 at 11:33
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Bhargav Patel
784 points
  • It is not a web service it is a desktop application and at least on my own country there is plenty market for this sort of tool which is why i wanted to make it in first place :) – Prix 14 years ago

0

I would try to talk to some prospective customers first. Find out from them what the competition is doing wrong and build a better solution. That doesn't necessarily mean just a better technical solution, but something that lets your customers achieve their goals better. Don't look at what your competitors are doing, try to figure out what they are not doing. Research on the internet can only get you so far; get out there and talk to people. Get some people interested, build the system, let them play with it, improve the system, and start selling it.

answered May 25 '11 at 08:31
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Hollance
119 points

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