ImpactMiner is a collaboration tool for business strategy documents like SWOT, Five-Forces, and Cost-Benefit analyses. Inspiration came from seeing a CEO trying to involve the whole company in analyzing the business and from a startup marketing executive collaborating on analysis with industry analysts.

There was also the notion that mid-level executives may want to present a formalized analysis to become involved in strategic decision-making and accelerate their careers, like how top-level executives sometimes hire consulting firms more for brand prestige than an expectation of original insights.

Status

✅ Launched in 2019 and running at impactminer.com, but abandoned and behind more recent competition (just use Mural).

Goals

❌ Find a customer to pinpoint concrete use cases and nail the design and features.
❌ Viral bottom-up growth as people share documents, evolve offerings, profit.
✅ Validate that I can use the stack from PlotDash to quickly crank out new SaaS apps like these.

Main learnings

Do not build for audiences you can not reach or do not enjoy chasing, especially if the problem the product solves is not crystal clear. My original observations that led to the product were more of a “vitamin” rather than “painkiller” nature (nice-to-haves, instead of solving an urgent problem) and needed closer design partnerships or industry connections to stand a chance.

Market outcomes

ImpactMiner was released in 2019 but never went through a big launch. I reached out to a few acquaintances about the app, 50% did not reply and the rest made polite comments but it was clear the app was not fulfilling an urgent need.

I did not have any close connections or credibility in the management consulting industry that could lead to longer design partnerships and trials, so abandoned the product and left it up as a demo.

Tech

ImpactMiner was based on the same TypeScript-based tech stack as PlotDash (React, NestJS and Postgres), including the distributed data model Flushout for collaboration.