Comment by rchowe

Comment by rchowe 18 days ago

I wrote a small business preventive maintenance and calibration tracker (https://pmcal.net) as a side project.

A few manufacturing companies that I have a close relationship with are using it and love it, but I have kind of hit a wall with other growth avenues (Google Ads, organic promotion on the web).

I have been thinking of marketing directly to ISO 9001 auditors, because “can you get email reminders” is a question they have asked at multiple companies I have worked at. I feel like cold mailing them something branded (e.g. notepads) might work, but I am not sure how much money I want to spend on it if it doesn’t and it’s also a bit nerve-wracking to put myself out there like that.

protocolture 18 days ago

Thats really nice. I think I want to install this on a small Raspi at the end of a baseball bat and use it to assault some customers.

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HeyLaughingBoy 17 days ago

Nice. A calibration tracker is actually on my list of possible future projects :-) I'm surprised to see it here since it's not typical HN fare!

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rchowe 17 days ago

Thank you. My day job is as an engineer in manufacturing so I felt like I had a unique opportunity to "build what I know" and have seen people use and enjoy.
It's a worthwhile project to build yourself. If nothing else I found out that I definitely do not like the date-fns library in JavaScript. I built it using AWS Amplify, and although I like that it scales to zero, but I think there are too many gotchas to Amplify, and especially DynamoDB, for a startup app that you want to move quickly on. I wrote up one of the major ones after I got really frustrated. [1]
Like I said in my original post, I am trying to figure out how to get it in front of the right people (who are less likely to be on HN). I have kind of decided that the B2C sales experience is not great unless you get a critical mass; my experience doing sales in manufacturing is working the booth at trade shows, talking to people about engineering, and using our process tools to develop a solution to the customer's problem. The more scattered "compete for attention" advertising/promotion sales model doesn't seem great unless you have a lot of money behind it.
I'm rambling, but if anyone likes this or feels it needs a certain feature, feel free to reach out. If you're in Boston / Providence I'll happily grab a drink with you.
[1] https://gist.github.com/rchowe/1db32f1f26d74688a9b4083a19f6a...

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- HeyLaughingBoy 17 days ago
  
  Two places that might be useful to learn about additional pain points or features, if you haven't tried them yet:
  reddit /r/manufacturing
  PracticalMachinist.com has a Metrology section and there's always a healthy discussion going on in the General forum.
  
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  rchowe 16 days ago
  
  Thank you for this. I have been on r/manufacturing and if someone asks for a solution like this I am ready with a link :) I will check out the forum.
  
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