01
Listen
Conversations with operators. What breaks every week, and what people work around instead of fixing.
IDC Studio / 02
Build the first useful version.
Software is the outcome. The business problem comes first.
IDC Studio finds operational problems that repeat inside an industry and turns the strongest ones into MVPs, internal tools, portals, vertical SaaS, and white-label products.
Studio thesis
A painful workflow is often a better startup idea than a blank-page brainstorm.
We look for problems people already pay to work around: quoting, routing, approvals, reporting, requests, matching, scheduling, and coordination.
Problems we look for
Boring problems make the best products.
Nobody asks for software. They complain about a process. That complaint, repeated across companies, is the brief.
- 01A workflow that lives in email threads and spreadsheets
- 02Manual steps repeated weekly by expensive people
- 03Generic tools the team has to work around
- 04Quotes, requests, or approvals with no single source of truth
- 05Data that exists but nobody can act on
- 06A process that only works when one specific person is available
How discovery works
Listen. Find the pattern. Build. Learn.
02
Find the pattern
The same problem in three companies is a product. In one company it is a workflow.
03
Build
The smallest useful version. Enough to be used for real work, not enough to be precious about.
04
Learn
Watch actual usage. Keep what gets used, remove what does not, then decide whether to productize.
What we build
- MVPs
- Internal tools
- Client portals
- Vertical SaaS
- White-label software
- Workflow automation
- Operational products
How MVPs work here
- Scope
- One question the first version has to answer. Written down before anything is built.
- Tooling
- Fast tools where they make sense. Deeper engineering when the product genuinely requires it.
- Users
- Real users doing real work in week one. Internal demos are not evidence.
- Infrastructure
- Nothing built ahead of the business case. Scale is a problem you earn.
Current exploration
Travel and tourism, first.
Operationally heavy, poorly tooled, and full of workflows still running on email. A good place to start narrow.
- RFP workflows
- Quote generation
- Itinerary planning
- Client portals
- Supplier coordination
- Group travel management
- Business matchmaking
- Operational automation