Lynch, Jonathan wrote:
>>What do you do? > > I have the pleasure of coding Transcript nearly full-time, crafting > vertical market products for myself and my clients, with the balance > spent assisting with the marketing of those products. > > What is a vertical market?
A market that stands on its hind legs and begs for attention. :)
"Vertical market" describes a relatively specialized sub-market, in contrast to broader consumer and business markets.
HyperRESEARCH is a good example: It's a cross-platform tool for qualitative analysis, used by sociologists and psychologists for broad-sample research studies, corporate marketers running focus groups, and can be used well to help collate and organize data from comprehensive usability studies as well. Definitely not for everyone, but in its market it does quite well (we just doubled sales over last year).
WebMerge is another one: as a tool that generates static web pages from just about any database or spreadsheet content, it tends to appeal to a subset of webmasters and business owners who need to put something on the web quickly without the hassle of setting up a live database. Out of the larger market of all webmasters, WebMerge addresses a need found only by a relative few -- fortunately there are enough of those "few" that it's rather popular for the somewhat specialized task it does.
I think sub-market-specific tools like these represent a certain "sweet spot" for Rev development among smaller software publishers.
With broader markets like the office suites we were discussing earlier, there's too much competition and often from large teams, so small companies will find a tough time entering the market and a tougher time staying there.
But by focusing on specialized sub-markets you have little competition, and often from other small shops but who are saddled with the encumbrances of traditional development tools.
The strong return-on-investment proposition inherent in working with a very-high-level language like Transcript works quite favorably in such circumstances: It will likely cost you the same amount to build a feature as it'll take a C-based company to have a meeting about it, and you can use the balance to out-market them.
In broader markets you may still have the same ROI proposition, but just as likely you'll also be up against a larger development team so the time-to-market advantage may not be there. And in most cases you'll be up against a larger marketing budget too, so even a message about a superior product can easily be lost in their deluge.
The ways people work are ever-changing, so it's my belief that there are at least 10,000 new software categories waiting to be discovered by anyone willing to explore new ways of thinking about task analysis. If I can assist even a half-dozen specialized tasks with a fresh take that the market responds to I'll be a happy man. :)
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation __________________________________________________ Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
