A recurring theme in this string (and rightly so) asks, “Should you build vertical or go horizontal?” It all depends: Will the vertical support development? Are you targeting users or end-users? Are you providing managerial efficiencies or driving sales?

A horizontal strategy is a more viable approach for extremely fragmented service sectors. It gives the developer an opportunity to spread costs and revenue opportunities across verticals. Above all, these independent service providers need clients and cash flow. The soft skills and personalized services that give them a competitive advantage in their markets cannot be easily automated, but perhaps their sales process can. A horizontal strategy helps nullify the negative effects of a fragmented industry by creating greater market liquidity. It also extends the value proposition beyond the service provider to their clients. The sizable challenge with this approach is convincing vendors to choose a marketing channel over their unique business process. You are asking many of them to choose marketing over their self-identity.

At one end of the continuum, you find extremely fragmented markets with low volume and low ticket items. I have an affinity for these micro businesses who compete in massive grassroots service sectors that look like minnow filled lakes. As the smallest of small businesses, they are not well documented. They are too expensive to track. They often have multiple, unique, or poorly defined business processes that if mirrored pragmatically could institutionalize as many of their bad habits as it would best practices. These micro businesses and sole proprietors are experts in preforming a specific service. They don’t have the time or support to do much else. As a result, they may lack the business and IT skills to fully leverage a scheduling tool or to fully value your product. A vertical strategy within these markets would mean that you would have to offer more customized, more robust, turn-key solutions with more support at lower price points.

At the other end of the spectrum, you find unfragmented markets. Vertical builds are most attractive for unfagmented markets where larger businesses or government entities dominate a service marketplace or have internal scheduling needs. These well documented ‘big fish’ have established industry standards, business processes, or support systems that can become more efficient with a scheduling tool. They offer clearer specs, cheaper development, and the willingness and ability to pay. They may even fund your development. Early on, these low lying fruit were wisely picked.

In the center, you find moderately fragmented to highly fragmented markets with either high volume or large ticket items. They too are well documented, and their hearty revenue streams enable them to pay for support service that better drive their manicured business models. They can afford and may choose a vertical solution.

I am a service marketing entrepreneur who founded a company in 2003 that researches and develops business and IT solutions for independent service providers and their clients. As a result, I launched http://www.selfbookit.com in January 2007. Self Book It is a horizontal marketplace for appointment-based services. — Jason Howell

We have been developing a distributed online booking solution for over two years now. The Sentias Booking Server was just released from Beta on March 1, 2007. It took thousands of hours and a year in Beta with over a hundred tour operators and accommodations providers to come up with a solution that works well and provides lots of flexibility for growth and change. The one comment we got from most travel related companies is that you absolutely cannot build a single system that will fit everyone’s needs. Which is why we branched our application into modules for specific verticals like tours and attractions, accommodations, hotel/flight packages, and a custom trip module. I don’t doubt that we’ll have to build additional modules in the future for other verticals like car/equipment rental and appointments. The point being you can dress up your app in whatever fancy Web 2.0 design you want and produce a slick little video to promote it, but if there is no collaboration with actual market users (and that takes time), then the product will miss the mark.

By the way, feel free to try out the Booking Server. It is live, working, has a free and premium service, a fully built XML API (ready for integration), and you can sign up now to try it. Also, the pricing is readily available on the site, so there’s no guessing about how much it costs.

Kind Regards,
Stephen Joyce
President
Sentias Software Corp.
http://www.sentias.com

p.s. we love feedback, no matter how critical, so send it our way.

http://www.hourtown.com

You can create a “business profile” which is kind of like a Myspace for small businesses. Customers can then book appointments from your profile page and you have a cool little calendar/contact manager for free.

We also provide a booking component that easily can be added to existing websites.

Best regards,

Martin Israelsen
Founder
http://www.webreserv.com

I can see a horizontal booking play working well for one-off, individual resources, and think Cameron Yuill and friends are onto something at GenBook. (Anyone remember XTime.com? That was an attempt to do this as well.)

However, if your vertical has very specific needs, often around accounting and/or customer service and/or distribution networks, once you get beyond about 10 resources, it either needs a rich API for add-on information or a full-blown vertical solution.

Regardless, I applaud TechCrunch for finally recognizing this important and growing sector. I believe strongly that we’ll be seeing the demise of classified-ad-funded style verticals, and the rise of pay-per-booking services such as these in the next generation of the web, and I wrote about this trend here: http://stevemurch.typepad.com/....._demi.html

For instance just look at a very specialized company like http://www.hostelworld.com who are very Web 1.0, very focussed and probably earn more than all the ‘06 web 2.0 start ups combined…

Just enabling is not enough - as Henk says you must offer new customers to be relevant.

Charging a business $x for a booking is fine as long as you get them new customers. If you can somehow manage to do that, then it might work.

http://WWW.IHATEBULL.com

We have a simple solution which has been working well with real customers and real revenue (we have managed to bootstrap it up till now). Web users want to stay on the web to make their appointments and businesses are used to answering the phone rather than migrating to a new system for managing bookings. Our solution is simple see more at our website http://www.bookingangel.com

Getting businesses to pay will involve yellow pages style directories changing their business model. Charging a business $X per booking is much easier to sell than $1000 per year for a listing just as pay per click has taken off with google, pay per booking will be even bigger as it will crack the massive small business market and the value of a booking is much higher than a click and easily measurable by the businesses who receive them.

Anyone interested in finding out more. You can contact me at dean@bookingangel.com

Rearden used to be called Talaris and before that was called Gazoo… $100mm raised shows you the size of the problem when trying to connect an average user with a typical low-tech, low-tech business. The past 10(?) years are littered with start-up trying to do this.