Doing something similar. Bought a business in the petroleum equipment service space. Building internal tools for ourselves. Pen and paper still dominates the industry.
I worked in scheduling and timekeeping industry for a little bit, when pen and paper is mentioned you think "oh it's just notes written, and some other things" but in reality it's literally whole departments storing everything in daily/weekly sheets/binders and it's like 20 people's job to keep it all in order and keep the ship running for next week.
When someone asks what the plan is for next week, the answer is normally, it needs to be written out, or I'll have to find this for you etc.
Yeah, my first job at a startup was at an oil and gas saas that ingested unstructured data into a standardized db for smaller operators.*
"How much money did we make yesterday?" was a nontrivial question that required a several people a couple of days to compile manually before our software.
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* Would probably make a killing today; this was over a decade ago and the extraction was 98% regex and custom if statements
Usually... buying proven technology, and marketing lead lists is still a gamble. However, the other YC posters are correct in the "never make what you can buy" advice... if and only if there is still mileage in the product life-cycle.
In general, there are a lot of serious rules around energy and fuel industries. Rockwell and Kongsberg technology still dominate for some very practical reasons. Seeing a few small firms fail hard in the area, I would still call it a fools errand for those looking at low hanging fruit. =3
You want at least a year where you're systemising the owner out of the business without filling their shoes.
You'd also want some kind of break clause so you can back out if it turns out the business can’t run without the owner, or if the team won’t adapt and can’t be replaced.
Do you remember the watches? This was a big thing on watches for a short while in the late '90s, and the cool kids were definitely the ones who could flip the wall-mounted TV on and off when the teacher wasn't looking!
The above comment was pointing out that each 1 centimeter is slightly less than 0.4 inches. If you want to be more precise, each centimeter is about 0.3937 inches.
This looks awesome. Embedded programming doesn’t get enough love. Did you think about making this an MCP (aka plugin) service that general agents a la claude code can leverage?
Not just the context layer: the hardware interaction layer would be incredibly useful as a local MCP. These seem to be your special sauce, not the UI. Allowing users to access these from their preferred editors or cli tools would probably help adoption a lot.
Great work building this. If I was still in the hardware space I'd be all over this.
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