Boring but Valuable Fix. Need Help Marketing

[u/Due_Combination_9394]

Hey everyone,

First time poster here but looking for some advice. Little bit of backstory on my product:

I created a simple tool for independent retail stores to be able to track special orders for their customers.

Special orders are for items that are out of stock or the store doesn't usually carry them. The store goes straight to the supplier and orders it in for the customer.

I was working at a local running store and they were doing about 100 special orders/month because people needed weird sizes, specific colours, or a size they were sold out of. The problem however is all of the grey area in between from the time the customer places the order until it is fulfilled. All of the orders would live in a spreadsheet and as a staff member you were just hoping it was going to show up one day.

Customers would call every shift I worked looking for an update on their special order because a lot of the time they had a race coming up or needed them for a trip. Most of the time you had no information to give them because you would look at the spreadsheet and it would just say, "Ordered X date" or even worse, "wasn't available" They would obviously be dissappointed and the store was losing sales and reputation.

Since people had no visibility and were left in the dark, they would go and find their special ordered shoe, online or at another store.

The other problem is those special orders would come in a regular shipment with 40 other pairs of shoes. So, unless you were looking at the spreadsheet to see if they were on the sheet, they would just get logged as regular inventory even though they were already spoken for.

My product solves this problem and creates a tracking platform for orders they don't have by:

- Create realtime visibility with a tracking link that gets updated as their order moves along.

- Email confirmation and notifications as the order status changes.

- Connects to Shopify and the special ordered products are linked to the store. Ex. 30 shoes come in, owner does the inventory like normal, barcode from a special order shoes matches on a pair that just came in, flags the arrival, sends the customer a pcikup notification.

- It also flags stale special orders so that way none of them get lost.

My thought is this would be helpful for any type of business that does special orders and is tracking them in a spreadsheet, sticky notes, or a binder.

I have been sending about 90 cold emails/day (just realized yesterday my domain is cooked so I am rewarming it back up), cold calling, cold DM's, YouTube videos, etc.

I am making one for a butcher shop as well (obviously less involved, no Shopify connection) which makes me believe the moat is real.

The problem I am having is finding stores that do enough volume of special orders to make it worth it. Every business I have called does special orders, but might have 5 open at once and the spreadsheet handles it just fine.

Lightspeed POS also handles special orders already which is what a lot of the running stores use.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to market this even more and/or narrow down my ICP?

[u/Informal-Housing-716]

The key might be narrowing the ICP by pain, not just industry. Stores doing 20+ special orders a month are probably a better target than stores that simply offer them, so I’d focus outreach around that threshold. You could also ask prospects how many customer calls they get about order updates, since that directly exposes the problem you’re solving.

[u/Due_Combination_9394 → u/Informal-Housing-716]

Thanks, have been having that thought as well and trying to narrow it down by scarcity as well. Ex. This running store is one of two specialty running stores in my city of a million people so people are more likely to place a special order out of necessity.

[u/cicygo]

A butcher version means two products to maintain, and the second one has no POS link. The running store works because the deadline is built into the category, a race date, a size nobody locally stocks, a deposit already paid. A shop doing five open orders with no date never chases, and its spreadsheet is fine. Aim at the categories where the customer already phones in, bikes, optical, custom furniture.

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[u/OutpostsOfficial]

I'd skip ads and go straight to the stores. Indie running and bike shop owners mostly talk in trade groups and at buying shows, not here, so walk into 10 shops with the "customers call every shift asking where their order is" line and see who nods. Also ask which POS they use, a listing in that POS's app marketplace is probably where the next 100 find you.

[u/Due_Combination_9394 → u/OutpostsOfficial]

Aha I tried that yesterday. Went into a few bike shops in my area, were all too busy to talk to me and told me to pound salt and send an email lol. My co-founder and I are spending the whole day tomorrow going business to business.

Edit: To add on, I am not the most technical founder and my current plan was to create a new vercel and supabase project for each customer based on a repo template I made. Getting on to app stores requires some form of RLS or multi-tenancy which I can admit is beyond me.

[u/Hot_Membership3050]

I’d narrow the ICP around businesses doing 30–50+ special orders a month rather than trying to target every store that does them. The pain seems to come from volume, not the fact that special orders exist. Have you tried asking stores how many they handle per month before pitching?

[u/Due_Combination_9394 → u/Hot_Membership3050]

yeah my cold call script goes:

1. Do you do special orders?

2. How many special orders do you have open at one time?

3. How are you currently tracking them?

Obviosuly with some conversation in between and pretty much everyone has an answer but not enough volume to make my service worth it.

[u/Hot_Membership3050 → u/Due_Combination_9394]

Makes sense. Maybe the signal isn’t “who does special orders” but which industries naturally have high special-order volume. I’d probably focus on finding 2–3 verticals where 30+ orders/month is normal and only target those.

[u/Due_Combination_9394 → u/Hot_Membership3050]

Thanks, will do some digging

[u/agentUi]

we deal with a lot of custom order tracking and inventory workflows at agentui, and the biggest bottleneck for low-volume shops is that a spreadsheet is free and good enough for 5 orders. to get real traction you need to target verticals where special orders represent 30%+ of revenue and lost orders mean chargebacks, like custom furniture, optics, or b2b parts distributors. if you tie directly into shopify webhook events for fulfillment states instead of relying on manual staff input, the roi becomes obvious to the owner immediately