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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.

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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). – BhargavPatel Aug 21 '10 at 12:09
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 Aug 21 '10 at 14:47
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 Aug 21 '10 at 14:49

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

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.

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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 Aug 20 '10 at 16:24
+1 - Excellent advice. Don't spend too much time on your search; focus your attention on potential customers. – JeffO Aug 20 '10 at 16:32
up vote 0 down vote

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

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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 Aug 21 '10 at 2:25
up vote 0 down vote

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.

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