(Not) Reinventing the Wheel

Last time we left off, we had identified an opportunity, and a financial reason to solve it.   We even have secondary reasons such as a labor force with high week-over-week attrition hampering quality and production, today’s small businesses having zero path to a high-cost solution, and CEA and local produce becoming a necessity over being a nice to have.  While the opportunity is large, we also have a growing pile of constraints.  For brevity I will list them here.

Constraints:

1. Low cost (monthly spend can’t outpace value)
2. Low capital entry point (don’t make this a sacrifice something else to accomplish)
3. Quick and Easy to get up and running (days not months or years)
4. Flexible for unknown use cases (every farmer, gm, etc. has their secret sauce)
5. Guide workers to the highest value work (focus/visibility on important and urgent)
6. Insert quality as a first-class citizen (fast crappy work is just crappy work)
7. Create visibility (all the places you wish you had data but don’t)
8. Integrates to hardware and software (standalone solutions have limited value)
9. Language agnostic (Blue collar is a diverse workforce)
10. Assume no/low connectivity (locations in remote, rural, or in 3 world countries)

To be honest, it was a high hill we chose to climb.  Luckily, many of these constraints exist in other industries and by smartly matching patterns we could overcome.  To provide some context, I started in technology before smart phones and the internet were really a thing.  I was there building good and unfortunately bad tech during the internet bubble.  I had front row tickets in the move from the internet to mobile phones to smart phones.  Yes, I distributed the original Droid phone by Motorola (still the best smartphone I ever owned) and the Nexus for Google to developers before they were released to the public.  I did process optimization for Blue Collar Labor in Distribution and White Collar Labor in Consulting and Legal.  I was hired by Amazon largely because of my patents in Robotics and Fulfillment Centers and my proven process/software for maximizing profitability in electronic device returns.  I was a GM at AWS when the shift to the cloud and Saas went from something people talked about to something people were doing.  Want to talk about AI, I have a unique perspective from my Amazon Mechanical Turk (the first gig work marketplace) days and how humans train models.  I received a master’s class on how to run and optimize a diverse remote virtual workforce.

While every industry has unique aspects, they also have a huge amount of commonality.  Lots of patterns to match and leverage.  It is why there are enterprise software and hardware providers solving common problems.  ERP, WMS, HRMS, Payroll, Document Management, Email, Search, Intranet, Extranet…  The list goes on and on.  Most solutions are vertical in their capabilities commoditizing an area while ignoring the unique processes or secret sauce a company may have. An Enterprise company’s solution tends to be Frankenstein’s Monster of cobbled together platforms.  Visibility is lost with every integration and the land of Data Warehouse, Data Lakes, Business Intelligence and now AI is used to combat this.   Many of these companies have outsourced their information technology talent and every addition or upgrade has heavy consulting cost.  From the good and the bad playbooks that took on these shifts over the years we settled on core pillars for a future solution:

1. Embrace the Cloud. (SAAS platform) Lowers the cost to distribute the software, has global reach, is physical infrastructure light, scales easily, no it maintenance, can leverage SAAS based translation services, and democratizes cost with multitenant customers.
2. Mobile Device driven (Android and iPhone) Works connected and offline, easy to acquire, a variety of options, trackable (Geolocated), built in camera and processor, and is ubiquitous worldwide
3. Configuration over code (create a language to describe work and let the platform do the rest) A conversation about your unique process becomes a working solution next day, matches how you do work not changes how you work to match it, morphs as your process evolves, and creates visibility need it to be. (Most of our current customers match this. Don’t believe DM me and I will give you examples.)
4. Focus on work to be done, check for quality, and then remediate in a data driven way (A virtuous cycle) Embrace the bones of six sigma, DMAIC. (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), realize that without visibility there can be no measurement, spot check for completeness and accuracy, and guide to the work that needs to be done planned or unplanned.
5. Embrace Integration (best of breed becomes seamless) Look to integrate or augment existing tried and true tech over replacing, integrates to hardware and software into the platform (standalone solutions have limited value), and allow others to build a better App on top. (Unique applications leveraging the platform)

We now have an opportunity, it has value, we have known constraints, and a general concept of what we want to build.  But a platform of this magnitude is a heavy lift.  Could we prove the idea without the expense?  Show the idea as viable?

At this point I always picture myself as Winnie the Pooh in Pooh’s Thoughtful Spot in the thinkers pose tapping my forehead  “think, think, think…”