How We Invest

We study the market before we spend a dollar building.

Good software starts with an honest map of the market. Before we fund a product, we learn how the work actually happens, where the money moves, and which friction is painful enough that people will pay to remove it.

Key takeaways

We map the workflow as it really happens, not as a slide says it should.
We size the friction, because only expensive problems fund durable products.
We talk to the people doing the work before we talk to ourselves about the solution.

We map the work, not the org chart

Most software is designed for the person who buys it and endured by the person who uses it. We invert that. Our research begins on the floor where the work happens, watching how a salesperson actually spends a day, how a finance office actually moves a deal, how inventory actually gets listed and lost. The gap between the official process and the real one is where the best products hide.

This is unglamorous work. It means sitting with the people who will use a product long before there is a product, and taking their improvised workarounds seriously as evidence of what is broken.

We size the friction

Not every problem is worth solving. A problem funds a durable product only when it is frequent, expensive, and painful enough that a customer will change their routine to escape it. We quantify friction before we commit capital: how often it occurs, what it costs in time and lost revenue, and how much a buyer would rationally pay to be rid of it.

Frequency. A problem that shows up every day compounds into a product people cannot live without.
Cost. We look for friction measured in real money, not mild annoyance.
Willingness to change. The truest signal is a customer already paying, in time or dollars, to work around the problem themselves.

Research never really ends

The market keeps moving, so our research does too. Every company we operate is a listening post: support tickets, product usage, and daily customer contact feed a continuous picture of what is changing. That is one of the quiet advantages of owning an operating portfolio rather than a spreadsheet of holdings. The next opportunity usually shows up first as a pattern in the last one.

Questions and Answers

Questions about market research

How does DotNet Holdings research a market before building?

DotNet Holdings researches by observing how work actually happens on the floor, sizing the friction in terms of frequency and real cost, and confirming that customers are already paying in time or money to work around the problem. Only frequent, expensive, and painful problems justify funding a durable product.

Why does DotNet Holdings focus on workflow over features?

Because adoption is decided by the person using the software, not the person buying it. By mapping the real workflow rather than the official process, DotNet Holdings builds products that fit how people already work, which is the difference between software that gets used and software that gets ignored.

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More on how we invest

Investment overview

StageProduct-Market Fit

Product-market fit is the moment a product stops needing to be sold and starts being pulled. We look for that pull with evidence, not optimism, and we prove it before we pour capital into growth.