Today, building new software for businesses is not that hard. But, building software that creates value for your business actually is.
At Main Street Labs, we believe the way to create value today is through specialized solutions. And we have the team and expertise to help you build them.
Over the past two decades, B2B software companies have paved the way for incredible progress, making it easier than ever for businesses to run their business. We've seen groundbreaking technological advances and entirely new categories of software brought to market—from novel platforms like Shopify, to elegant APIs like Stripe—new technologies that all of us on this team have spent the majority of our careers building.
These technologies have reset the baseline for how most companies operate. This is especially true in many traditional industries, with the rise of vertical market software aiming to address the needs of a particular sector. Vertical market software, like ServiceTitan, Mindbody, and Toast, have helped consolidate independent solutions into single, one-stop-shop platforms.
But the rise and success of recent solutions have shifted how software is being developed. In most cases, the software now needs to be a broadly-reaching platform rather than a hyper-focused, single-problem point-solution—as the latter typically has a smaller potential customer base that’s desired by the investors that fund these new ventures. This means that today, the majority of vertical market software being developed aims to be a one-size-fits-all platform solution. Jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none.
By building for everyone, the industry has inadvertently diluted the ability to focus on high-impact problems with precision, particularly for those with a more specific subset of customers. In fact, we see that many of the new entrants in software today are just trying to be better versions of their teenage siblings, with some tweaks and incremental changes, versus truly conquering the next big hurdle.
Hence, we believe that software being developed today often fails to deliver a meaningful ROI for many companies, especially mid-market businesses who have already upgraded their tech stack to the latest industry favorite.
This observation is less a reflection of technological shortcomings, but more so a misalignment of software capabilities with the specific needs of a business. Software providers are just not incentivized to provide outsized impact on individual customers—their primary goal is to maximize software sales. And we think it’s time for that to change.
At Main Street Labs, we believe it’s time to revisit individually tailored solutions—bringing product development back to the fundamentals by truly understanding the problems to be solved.
Our approach is to diagnose a company's income statement top-to-bottom and zero in on the biggest opportunities to drive value creation through innovative software. We do this by partnering closely with management teams to learn, collaborate, and design in tandem to build needle-moving solutions that seamlessly integrate into existing systems and workflows. We blend the domain expertise of our partners with our own ideas and perspectives from collective experiences developing groundbreaking technology and solving similarly-shaped problems to create truly impactful solutions.
While businesses have outsourced technology development to consultants and dev shops for decades, the perception (and sometimes track record) of these firms is often tactical—not strategic. We differentiate ourselves with a team composed exclusively of talented individuals who have built great products and scaled industry giants like Stripe, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Uber.
Our approach combines strategic partnership with technological prowess, setting a new standard in bespoke software development. We are targeted and deliberate with the products that we build, and optimize for outcomes that will have a more tangible, measurable, and outsized impact on the business’s bottom-line.
Today, we believe the opportunity for value creation through a strategic technology partnership is immense. By moving away from the current one-size-fits-all mentality and focusing on customized, high-impact solutions, companies should begin to see that ROI on software that they once saw before. At Main Street Labs, we are committed to redefining the landscape of software development for businesses and harnessing the full power of technology to help our partners reach new heights.
