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Ask HN: Does anyone have any experience with civil/env. engineering startups?

2 points by colkassad ↗ HN
I'm a software developer that works for an engineering firm. A few of us here are thinking about creating a civil/environmental engineering startup. Naturally, a startup in this field would have some differences to a company focusing on web development. Does anyone on HN have any experience in this area? How did you go about landing clients in the beginning? Were there any pitfalls that I should be aware of?

2 comments

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aspir
I've done some work with environmental GIS and meteorological services, and the one thing that really caught us off guard in sales was the need for whitepapers for sales purposes. I blew a huge lead due to unpreparedness- never again. We had pdf pitches prepared with comparison charts and the like, but what really sells, and what matters most is a 3-5 page whitepaper outlining your technical competency in the utmost detail.

Also, factor in switching costs when getting out there. We hit a wall when we discovered that even though our services were 9x more detailed and 10% more accurate in our environmental assessment, the people we were selling to had a through infrastructure built around dealing with the existing crappy data and services. It was such a barrier that we had to reposition everything. It happened early though, so we were still in the "feel it out stage."

colkassad
Thanks for the tip about the white papers. We do a lot of that at our existing company so it's good to know it will be useful if we decide to branch off.