Most software is built for someone else
Walk into a family-run workshop, a neighborhood restaurant or a trading business that has been in the same hands for three generations, and you will usually find the same tools: a notebook, a calculator, a phone full of contacts and a memory that holds everything else. It is tempting to read that as reluctance to change. In our experience it is almost always the opposite. These businesses tried the software on offer and found it was built for someone else.
Enterprise platforms assume an IT department, a training budget and a desk. Consumer apps assume a single user with nothing at stake. The businesses in between run on thin margins and long hours, with real complexity and no patience for tools that add work. They are one of the largest underserved markets in technology.
Over the past two years we have shipped two products into that gap. MurtiTrack runs the business side of Ganapati idol workshops in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Our QR ordering and restaurant management platform is live at Fusion Feast Bistro in Malkapur. Building them taught us more about product design than most enterprise projects do, because there is nowhere to hide. If the software adds friction, people go back to the notebook the same afternoon.
Here is what we learned.
1. Language is a feature, not a setting
The idol trade works in Marathi: owners, staff, artisans and customers. Every business tool on the market was in English, and translation was treated as something to add later, if at all.
We built MurtiTrack in Marathi from the first screen, with English one tap away. That meant more than translating labels. Numbers, dates, invoices, WhatsApp messages and downloadable reports all had to work natively in the language. The payoff was immediate: owners who had never used business software were taking orders on it within a day, with no training.
The wider lesson is that "localization" is usually scoped far too narrowly. The question is not whether your interface has been translated. It is whether someone who thinks in that language would feel the product was made for them.
2. Design for the busiest day, not the average one
A Ganapati workshop takes on a surge of orders in the weeks before Ganesh Chaturthi, against a deadline that cannot move. A restaurant lives or dies on Friday and Saturday nights. Software that is pleasant on a quiet Tuesday and falls over during the rush is worse than no software, because it fails at exactly the moment it is needed.
So we designed for the peak. In MurtiTrack, several people work in the same workshop at once, each from their own phone, and the app keeps working when the mobile signal does not. In the restaurant platform, guests order from their table, which takes order-taking off the staff at the busiest times. And the platform is engineered so that a busy Saturday night costs about the same to run as a quiet afternoon.
3. Meet people where they already are
Asking a customer to download an app, create an account and remember a password is a high price for ordering dinner. So the restaurant platform asks for none of it. Guests scan a QR code, browse the menu and order in seconds, and can sign in only if they want to keep their history.
MurtiTrack takes the same approach to customer communication. Invoices, payment reminders, statements and dispatch photos go out on WhatsApp, the app every customer already uses every day. Sending a clear Marathi statement over WhatsApp turned an awkward phone call about money into a simple, professional follow-up. Owners are now recovering balances they had previously written off.
The best adoption strategy is not to need one. Put the product inside habits people already have.
4. Put the owner in control
On a typical restaurant website, changing a price or marking a dish as sold out means waiting for a developer, so the website and the printed menu drift apart within weeks. In our platform, the team updates dishes, prices, photos and availability themselves, and the change reaches every guest's phone within minutes. Discount codes can be launched, capped and retired in an afternoon.
Small businesses cannot afford to file a ticket and wait. Every routine change should be something the owner can do in under a minute, on a phone, without help.
5. Shared records build trust
Artisans in the idol trade are paid per piece at agreed rates. Without shared records, counts and payments were regularly disputed, and those disputes cost more than money: they strained relationships that a workshop depends on.
MurtiTrack records rate cards, work logs and advances once, and both the owner and the artisan see the same numbers. Pay disputes have ended, not because anyone was policed, but because there is nothing left to argue about. Software is often sold as a way to control people. In small businesses its greater value is giving everyone the same version of the truth.
6. Small business does not mean small engineering
There is a quiet assumption that small customers get simplified, lower-grade technology. We think that is backwards. A restaurant that takes orders online needs totals calculated and checked on the server, never trusted from the guest's phone, and protection against automated abuse. A workshop that holds its customers' details and payments needs passwordless sign-in, verified payments and strict separation of every business's data.
We built both products with the same engineering discipline we bring to enterprise systems. What changes is the packaging, the pricing and the patience required to make something powerful feel simple.
7. Learn on the floor
None of this came from a requirements document. It came from understanding how a workshop actually runs through the season: how orders are taken, how artisans are paid, how customers are kept informed. We designed around those habits rather than asking owners to change them. The same principle drives the immersion stage of The Idea Forge, our discovery process, with clients of every size.
Why this matters beyond small business
Every lesson above applies to large organizations too. Their frontline teams speak many languages, work through peak seasons, live in messaging apps and lose time waiting for changes they should be able to make themselves. Small businesses simply make these truths impossible to ignore.
A trade that ran on notebooks now runs on a secure, modern platform, in its own language. We think that is what good technology should look like everywhere: built for the people who use it, not translated for them after the fact.
Read the full stories of MurtiTrack and our restaurant platform at Fusion Feast Bistro. Both are Unitary Tech products, built in collaboration with Univolute.
