One of the things I want us to stop doing is ads. If we spend a $1 on an ad that $1 is lost forever. If we spend a $1 on a product and launch that we control that $1 and can repurpose that product. Iād rather we spend $1000/month on building various Vertical Market Software that takes less than a day to build and launch those on LinkedIn, Hacker News, etc. We then use those to do more effective email marketing since we will then have soft leads.
The steps are as follows:
- Launch a Vertical Market Software on a weekly cadence. These are single purpose apps that take less than a day to build including calculators, datasets, and products. These products should provide a single Job to Be Done and repurpose existing code as opposed to creating brand new code. Further, these apps have a single marketing page either on its own domain or on *.opszero.com powered by System6. The product should offer a free version and a paid version to collect warm leads that we will add onto our CRM.
- Every week we promote these products on various places including LinkedIN, Hacker News, LinkedIn, AWS Marketplace, etc. We either do it ourselves or hire a freelancer to do it.
- We collect the emails that result from the launch and outreach to close the companies on the bigger opsZero services plans. If we generate revenue on the products that is also a benefit.
- Repeat.
The idea behind these is velocity. We are not trying to be perfect, we are not trying to cover everything, and we are trying to be as small as possible to build the product within 8 hours. Furthermore, having multiple products that are named differently but providing the same functionality and different marketing is also fine as we may be targeting various verticals.
opsZero builds Vertical Market Software, modeled after Constellation Software and Tiny, but focusing almost completely on Cloud Infrastructure and APIs. Our goal is to combine different systems together into a coherent whole and sell those as easy to use APIs with minimal to no UX. The Vertical Market Software route is not unique and there are many companies that do it.
- Constellation Software: They focus on mission critical business software that is hard to replace like bowling alley software. Public and Private sector with companies they build maxing out at about $5 million in revenue.
- Tiny: They build and buy various companies including software focused on designers.
- Jack Henry: Build software for credit unions and small banks. Expanded by buying smaller firms.
- Tyler Technologies: Build software for public sector.
- Oracle: Build and acquire enterprise software.
opsZero is pursuing a slightly different approach to play to our strengths as opposed to the companies above. Our goal is to build Cloud Infrastructure tools and services for various niches and do so with almost no frontends instead focused on APIs, datasets, and extensions targeting Cloud Infrastructure. Building admin sites, marketing content, and other UX related things are not something we really want to deal with and we just want to leverage the plug-in ecosystem that third parties provide.
Our strategy for niches is to go after a vertical then develop a platform business providing Cloud Infrastructure. We attempt to make our initial foray small and with outside expertise as we may not understand that vertical ourselves. Once we have done that and have created moats we expand our moats based on the needs of the customer.
Lastly, we build on top of a monolith allowing us to quickly launch new business verticals with little fanfare. As such acquisitions are likely out of the picture and we choose to build our products ourselves. We may focus on acquisitions to grow in the future but we are builders not buyers.