OFFLINE Customer Stream Analysis for Small Business
So this is not one of those SaaS-Ideas, but i'd still love to get an opinion on this.
Problem:
You took over your dad's hardware store. Since online shopping has been taking over the market, you'll often find yourself bored and lonely when for hours, few to no customers show up. Here you are, working 6.5 days a week, neglecting family and friends relationships just to break even.
Wouldn't you love to know, what peak times customers come in, how long they stay and how to optimize your working hours for maximum revenue over time
Solution:
I will install a specialized video camera in your store that uses image recognition to track customer behavior and help you optimize your working hours find the best fit between customer needs and your valuable personal time. You can lease the cameras for as long as you want.
Thoughts?
This exists by an alternate mechanism, which is WiFi. Your phone is always looking for spots it knows to connect to, which means it's always putting out signals looking for broadcasting SSIDs.
Retailers buy systems that pick up those signals and even deploy several of them to triangulate devices' locations inside of stores, to measure footfall within a store.
Unfortunately, I forget the names of the vendors at the moment.
I would argue that this is much less invasive (and much easier to develop) than a camera using machine vision.
Wow this is genius... So much simpler than my idea. Thanks for the mention, i'll have look (for personal use anyways)
Have you spoken to business owners to see if they will find it useful?
Part of my prior experience (at Dropcam) was looking into this market segment back in 2009, especially since my dad and members of the family were in small businesses.
The big feedback at the time was that analytics on customers did not really matter. Would this result in shift changes and optimization there? Not really.. You can't go from 1 down to 0 or 2 down to 1 because there are jobs to be done that do not correlate to customers-in-store. And floating open hours isn't a thing.
At the same time, they were not willing to spend money on a solution as the higher priority was around safety and security (so the camera focus was on that). Even when I mentioned catching shrinkage issues, concern wasn't there.
Maybe it's different for the SMBs you will target, so you should definitely talk to them.
Solid advice! Thanks!