## Scoping a Vertical SaaS Project: Notes from Building Flooring Industry Software

These are working notes from a scoping exercise I ran a few months ago — might be useful for anyone thinking about building trade-industry tooling.

### The problem space

Flooring contractors sit in a weird spot technically. Their workflows have real complexity — material estimation, job costing by room, subcontractor scheduling, customer approvals — but most of them are running it all on a combination of Excel, email and pen-and-paper measurement sheets. There's no dominant software player that's locked this market down, unlike say construction project management (where Procore owns a lot of the conversation).

### What a proper data model looks like

A flooring job isn't just a ticket. You need to track:

- **Rooms** (dimensions, substrate type, prep work required)
- **Materials** (SKU, waste factor %, supplier lead time)
- **Labor** (rate by job type — install vs. demo vs. leveling)
- **Quote → approval → purchase order → invoice** lifecycle

That four-step lifecycle alone touches at least three separate data tables if you're doing it properly. Most off-the-shelf CRMs don't model it at all.

### Reference points worth looking at

Before writing any spec, I spent time reviewing what teams that specialize in [flooring software development services](https://bitsorchestra.com/industries/flooring-software) actually ship. The feature depth — particularly around material waste calculation and multi-trade job costing — gave me a much better baseline than anything I'd find in generic SaaS docs.

### What I'd do differently

Start with the quote builder, not the CRM. That's where flooring businesses feel the most pain day-to-day, and it's a natural forcing function for getting your data model right before you build anything else.

Open to feedback if anyone's worked in this space.