The skedsheet concept
When we first started talking about skedsheet, we thought we’d make something that could integrate with JobTracker… but, as we kept trying to simplify the concept, it seemed better to start from scratch. 
Since it’s been a while, I wanted to review the “why and how” behind skedsheet for myself.
If we make skedsheet really easy and really cheap (or maybe free, in some limited cases), there seems to be a big opportunity, even within our existing markets. The biggest obstacle to our existing business is the sales and support cost of “implementation”. If we can get over that hump, we can blow away any competition and actually have a whole new way to approach the business.
Maybe it’s just a dream, but we’d much rather be in the business of selling inexpensive software to lots of people rather than relatively expensive software to fewer customers. The progress on skedsheet has been slow, because it’s hard to take resources away from JobTracker, which is what pays the bills. But, we’re trying to get far enough along to have a “proof of concept”.
The idea of a prototype like this is to figure out:
- Can we make it self-explanatory? Without being dead simple, this is just a different approach to what we already do. This is probably the number one thing problem that we need to solve to have a product with little or no sales and support cost.
- Can we make something valuable? If there’s no value, nobody will give us any money for the chance to use our software. I think there’s value, but until we run it by a few potential customers, we won’t know for sure.
- Can we do it and make any money? There’s always the chance that we can make something that people will pay for, but the development costs will be too high to recoup. Is it worth spending 10’s or 100’s of thousands of dollars on an experiment?
So, getting to a prototype is a big step… but we’re not there, yet.
