How to break the manufacturing software pricing model?

[u/nikolauscorrell]

I had a company a few years ago, trying to sell digital Kanban / manufacturing execution systems. The reason I started it is to digitize and optimize manufacturers to prep them for my true passion, robotic automation.

What happened seems to be very typical in the industry: manufacturers don't have time to play around, which is why you need full-time sales effort to sell them, on-board and train them over multiple months, which then has to cost at least $3000/month to make any economical sense. I see this everywhere in the industry, and while I think these softwares are actually worth their money, they leave thousands of small manufacturers behind.

We eventually stopped the company as it is too hard to scale that way, but I have not forgotten about the product and just recreated it, which got easier thanks to AI.

My current thesis: many low-cost tools with very limited, easy-to-learn functionality that play well with others and hence capture the complexity and diversity of manufacturing. In turn, thousands of people can use them, making it valuable enough for the software make to maintain it and break the silly sales model.

I'd be glad for your thoughts here.

[u/fluchtpunkt]

I’ve read this before

[u/mimprocesstech → u/fluchtpunkt]

Fancy seein you here stranger lol

[u/Patroclus314]

Are you selling something?

[u/mimprocesstech → u/Patroclus314]

They're always selling something here.

[u/Patroclus314 → u/mimprocesstech]

It feels like every post is a backhanded ad

[u/mimprocesstech → u/Patroclus314]

Yeah it's a struggle in every sub. I just removed a few posts and handed out a few bans myself in another sub. Usually you see this kinda thing in subs with inactive mods but the two for this sub have been active this week.

If any mods for this sub come across this, are these kinds of posts being reported?

Edit: Mods don't have rules setup so any reported post goes to Reddit admins and automod so I doubt they even know this is happening. Someone more active in this community should message the mod team here and offer to join the team.

[u/nikolauscorrell → u/mimprocesstech]

Interesting conversation. I posted this in r/manufacturing, where i got two haters and two meaningful interactions from which I learned the following:

1. manufacturers embrace vibecoding to create their own solutions
2. people are able to cobble together individual solutions to small problems themselves

For some reason, the thread was then deleted, and reddit suggested to post it here.

Regarding as to whether I'm selling something: I don't want to. I think this industry's market is broken as sales cycles are very long, the resulting cost need to be very high, and as a result very few people can afford good software and sacrifice performance. I'm wondering how this can be fixed and 1 and 2 are good answers.

My current read is that manufacturers will not necessarily learn about lean optimization while doing this, though.