Building software for blue-collar users

It's easy to get attention in the tech community when you're building slick software to help high-income consumers do new things. But what if you're in North Carolina, building internal software to help people who install satellite dishes work more efficiently? Wade Minter explains how he switched his thinking to deliver great software to these users.

To read the tech press, one might think that the only way to build valuable technology is target high-income, tech-savvy consumers. If your users have the iPhone X, a high-end laptop, and money to burn, there are numerous best practices, tech guides, and investors ready to help. But what about when your users are blue-collar folks who spend their days on the road, connecting to your site via their Android phones from someone’s driveway, and their paycheck depends on how quickly and accurately they can use your software? Or the people in an office reconciling data between two different providers, for whom bugs and inefficiencies are the difference between an 8-hour and 12-hour day. Wade Minter, a technology leader who spent most of his career in consumer SaaS, talks about making the move to building internal tools for a much different type of user, the rewards of being able to shake hands with every user of your product, and how thinking about the needs of this user base has opened his eyes to the joys of building things that make people’s lives easier.