[duckmysick]

> Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this.

That's pretty interesting. Can you tell us more what kind of problems your software solved and how you convinced them to move from the spreadsheets?

I tried something similar (in another industry) and it's a mixed bag. Companies often straight up refuse to move past the spreadsheets even though it creates a significant backlog on their side.

[kaon_2]

Happy to oblige. Basically we digitized a company from spreadsheets or paper to ERP. We'd introduce accounting software, stock management software, help desk software. But the biggest thing you need is some kind of "Loan Account Management Software" which is the center piece.

This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.

There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.

Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.

In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.