Thanks Alex. Don't sweat the Debbie Downer stuff. No offense taken on my end. I'm certainly aware of the challenges of breaking into a market that's currently a monopoly and addressing your concerns directly would either involve being openly critical of Lightwright or launching into a sales
pitch for my solution, neither of which would be in good taste for a public forum.
I'll only say that the last time I did this it was to
build a rental inventory management
system for our industry - and that effort eventually became Flex Rental Solutions - so this would be a serious, determined effort.
I mainly just wanted to see if the industry was trending toward another solution to the problem other than a standalone lighting paperwork tool. Most of the folks I've talked to have basically said what you said: Yes, everybody still uses it - but good luck getting them to
switch.
I can handle the feature shootout problem, but I'd hate to get all the way to the booth at
LDI only to find out that everyone just uses the lighting paperwork features built into other tools - like
CAD programs, pre-visualization programs, or control consoles.
Thanks again for the insight. It is much appreciated.
I disagree, if a product sucks, people should be welcome to discuss its suckiness in a public forum; a smart product developer will use this
feedback to make the product better. I like and use
VectorWorks, but its lighting paperwork sucks.
I do most of my paperwork in Excel. I do copy and paste from VW, but their paperwork is practically unusable. I'm still on 2016, so hopefully, there will be some improvement when I upgrade to 2017.
I do not want to have to buy yet another program(for $700), to do paperwork, that quite frankly VW spotlight should be doing. However, if you offer a cost effective solution, that can easily integrate with VX, then I am interested.
I'm at the same place with Lightning Tapes, It's a cool plugin, but I still need to use Excel and Word to create my
Fixture labels that match to the info on the
Truss tapes (I'm using excel anyway, so not that big of a deal). I emailed those guys/gals, and they had put off sticker printing in their plugin because the figured everyone was using Light Wright. Apparently, after some
feedback, they do plan to add label printing in the future.
So I guess my
point is that I think there may be some room in the market for this product.
As far as
WYG goes, It is about as expensive for paperwork only, last time I checked, and If you are already using
Vectorworks or AutoCad, you end up doing a lot of things twice. I think the key to a new product will be solid stand alone use and smooth integration with VW, maybe other programs, but I think VW seems to be the standard right now for the Lighting industry.
If you do go through with this development, please consider this. I might have four or six different freelance techs for example, who each need to create paperwork, but only once a month(or less) and at different times/days. It's not feasible for me to buy licenses of a software for each freelancer to use occasionally, especially if they are using their personal computers, but if there were a licence key that could live on our office server(or the cloud), and anyone working for me could login and use it, even only one or two instances at a time, It would be an easy sell for me.
I was planning on doing all of this via FileMaker, but quite frankly, I will probably never have the time to get it working, and working well. So if you make it I will buy it.
