Digitizing Conventional Businesses leading to Convenience and Growth
Over the last several years, we have seen a significant rise in mobile applications that are coming as digital enablers for conventional businesses. In the first round around, mobile apps would enable software tasks on the move.
But the activity was mostly limited to software services or digital services that had not connection with conventional businesses. This in fact isolated the mass of Small and Midsize Businesses from participating in the digital economy (The digital divide.) However, recently, we are seeing a great push of extending business processes in conventional brick-n-mortar to mobile application space and thereby providing convenience, time savings, easy tracking, transaction and tracking, marketing, loyalty and ordering of services, and many more.
Few examples would be a bicycle company having its app where it can market new products, connect with existing customers, provide promotions, repair and installation instructions and much more. The startup could create a bike store app and have stores/biz sign up on an ongoing SaaS basis to create their own portal for their customers.
Another would be clinics or healthcare facilities. Next would be restaurants and food providers/caterers. Think about how platforms could be created around existing niche services and make them available to current customers or promote to new customers as value added services.