Local Business, Local Tech

Local businesses now have powerful and easy-to-use tools and services for everything from building a website (Wix, Shopify), to Point of Sale and payments (Square), to delivery (Caviar, Instacart). This has unlocked a ton of creativity, which is a good thing for businesses and our communities.

However, the term "local business" paints with a broad brush. It covers everything from "independent coffee shop" to "local grocery store chain." Local businesses that want to grow, and want to make technology part of that growth, may not be well served by what is available. Beyond the excellent small business tools is a world of enterprise software that doesn't really make you feel empowered and effective.

But there is good news! Programming tools and services have evolved to such a degree that most novel problems have easy-to-integrate solutions.

For example, let's say you needed a solution for automated driver routing of deliveries. This is a difficult programming problem, and orthogonal to your concerns -- you don't care about how the routing is done, you just need things routed. There are services that exist today, that didn't exist even five years ago, that can solve this problem for you. Building your automated routing system has become a few days of work, rather than weeks or months.

One of the core beliefs at Lithic is that we can make custom software affordable to local businesses, and allow them to grow and compete in a way that would have been impossible until now.

If you run a local business and have an idea that you think would help you go where you want to be, we'd love to talk!