[ericb]

I made a website for real estate brokers to manage their apartment listings. One of my partners was a sales guy. We made very little sales headway as the problem wasn't pressing enough to brokers--getting available apartments by fax and keeping them in 3-ring binders was a "good enough" solution for them, and in terms of paying a monthly fee, they just didn't have the money to spend on something they saw as a luxury. Services can be great businesses, but creating them for their own sake is a recipe for failure. My real estate agent co-founder was sure this service should exist. He was just wrong about the extent of brokers' willingness to pay for a better mousetrap.

[unalone]

I'm not in the same situation. I don't gamble on services that are slight improvements - such things are never certain. Instead, I think I offer something genuinely new. So hopefully there's a chance to be had.

[ericb]

There is nothing particularly slight about moving from a paper office to digital. We even offered data entry of their inbound faxes, and a consumer facing website back end. This was new to them.

I'll put it more plainly--if you don't know if your market has money, and a real problem, there's a good chance you're wasting your time. They liked our service--just not not enough to justify the expenditure of money they didn't have.

Best of luck, and I hope it all works out.

[unalone]

In that case, the model - charging people for a potential risk - had a fault. Perhaps following a different model would have worked.

And thanks.