EDIT: If you want to see the platform you can go here: www.dev.leadeem.com
Only one account can receive and send texts, here are the details:
- email: [dispatcher@gmail.com](mailto:dispatcher@gmail.com)
- pw: Leadeem123!
Takes a second to load because the dyno might be sleeping. Make sure to add a phone number as a technician and a phone number as a lead generator because SMSs from unidentified numbers aren't ingested.
An acquaintance reached out to me 8 months ago with an idea - a Saas solution for the technician industry. I had been taking a few full stack development courses, and was into the idea as I could apply my learnings. We agreed on 50/50, and I went ahead and built it for him. I hustled, but when his turn came to lock in customers, he couldn't close the deal. Two months went by, and he comes to me with excuses and comments about the platform not being up to par. It was all BS. I told him I want out, and that I'm not going to work anymore on it. He said he'll lock in customers eventually, and to give him a price for my share. I gave him a price, but he's gone MIA.
So now I've got this platform up and running, just no customers. I'll write a small synopsis below on how the industry works for more clarification. For now, I'm not sure what to do. It is relatively solid. Plus or minus a few features, it could be worth something. Is there a place where I can sell what I've built? What would be a good step to take in this situation?
Maybe, just maybe - this platform might have utility for someone on here. Below is how the platform works + the industry, maybe some ideas can spawn from there.
Industry Breakdown:
Let's say it's 11PM at night, and you're locked out of your apartment. What do you do? You search on Google for a locksmith nearby that can help you out. Whether it's the first page of Google, or Yelp, the websites that you will initially see are called "Lead Aggregators" - websites/businesses that specialize in marketing and SEO to rank high in search results. You click on the website, and you'll see a phone number to call - these businesses usually have some kind of team to handle incoming leads.
So you're Larry locked out of your apartment on Main Street at 11pm. The lead aggregators will collect that info, but more often than not they sell that info in some sort of subscription model to businesses that operate locksmith technicians (sometimes, if the business is sophisticated enough they'll do both - aggregate leads for their own technicians, and sell off leads they can't handle to other businesses or some kind of variation of this). Let's say John's got a locksmith business with a team of 10 technicians. He pays the lead aggregator $20 for each lead they send to him. He just got Larry's info, and calls Henry the technician to see if he's available for the job and get Larry back into his apartment. Henry takes a commission from the job, the rest goes to the business.
Now the industry gets more intricate than that - a la "dispatchers". After years of this industry growing, a new player comes in that sits as a middleman between lead aggregators and technicians. They're not abundant, but there are a fair amount of them. What they do is that they buy leads from lead aggregators, and they have their own roster of freelance technicians - techs that operate independently. Instead of managing them as an employee in an organized business, they just use them as contractors and pass on jobs to them (the freelance economy, as we all know, is growing. Contract work is becoming more and more common).
The majority of technician businesses and dispatchers operate with traditional excel/google spreadsheets. They collect their data that way, and they close accounts at the end of every week - meaning, they collect commissions from their technicians, and pay the lead aggregators for their leads usually on a Friday. Specifically dispatchers - they could be receiving up to 50,000 texts per month, and often have to use multiple smartphones to handle all the traffic.
That's where my platform comes in - the dispatchers (like I said - this product is niche) is the target customer. They're given a unique phone number, and they have to send all their leads there. What the platform I built does is it ingests the SMS, and puts it into an organized "job log". It tells the dispatcher from which lead aggregator it came from, and the full job description.
With a few clicks, they can easily forward the job to a technician (they have to populate the platform with technician details), and an SMS is sent to their phones (a lot of technicians are not very tech savvy. There is a strong preference for working with traditional SMS rather than downloading an app - though there are businesses that use apps like Jobber to manage their own internal operations).
The technician just has to either accept or reject the job by sending either a Y or N, and the job log updates. At the end of every week, all the jobs that went through the dispatcher are logged, and they can export a csv file in case they want to analyze it. Instead of calculating how much each technician is owed, or how many jobs and how much they owe lead aggregators, everything is done for them automatically in a Weekly Report tab.
The guy I built this for couldn't lock in any dispatchers, and I don't know anyone in the industry or enough to know if this is even needed. So I'm shooting my shot here - anyone see utility in this? Maybe there's something this could be spun into?
[link] [comments]
