Tech-savvy startups have the potential for rapid growth with relatively little investment of capital or labor. Identifying a niche market to focus on rather than a broad “everyone is a prospect” approach and applying that technology to address it can yield serious revenue rewards.

Immigration Tracker software, created by PC Legal Tools, is an example of a niche focused technology startup. Designed by electrical engineer Fred Colman to aid his wife, Julie Pearl, in her work, Immigration Tracker shows how necessity really is the mother of invention.

Julie, an immigration attorney, wanted a way to help her clients track their employees. The crux of the problem: the status of work visas, a very important issue for Julie’s corporate clients. She needed a software program that could track every step of the visa process for every immigrant worker on her clients’ payrolls. An ideal program would allow her corporate clients to track and retrieve workers’ documents, while leaving her in control. Basically, Julie wanted a system that would allow her to manage the entire work visa process.

Fred took up her challenge. Today, after more than five years, Immigration Tracker software has evolved into a full-fledged company offering a variety of software solutions. They count nearly 400 law firms as clients and have shown huge revenue growth.

Fred attributes his company’s success to a genuine need among immigration attorneys to manage their cases, coupled with a lack of pre-existing tools to do it. He was able to join his technological skills with the needs of Julie’s Pearl Law Group to develop a partnership and create a product that serves a highly specialized niche market. His technology-driven enterprise has proved to be very popular among law firms that work in the field of immigration law.

With the impending launch of the 2.0 OS for the iPhone allowing third parties to build iPhone applications, now is the ideal time to be rolling out an extension of your existing web system for iPhone users. I’m not talking about a different web version but a truly native app that links to your web system.

There is a huge amount of market hype already and many information hungry users and enthusiasts looking for that new ‘mobile’ application. It may have existed on the web for years, but putting a dedicated version in a user’s pocket takes things to a new level.

Depending on your business model you may be able to publish the application for free but then charge users a monthly usage fee similar to your current web users. This opens up your base of potential users installing the app directly from the Apple App Store.

And since the development platform allows pretty ready access to standard URL based services, you should be able to create that native effort without the huge labor it might take to reskin your whole site for a mobile device. If  you use intelligent caching, the user will never have to care if they’re on the EDGE network, WiFi or 300 feet underground — it’ll just work.

And of course if you’re doing it right, the other advantage is that it’ll force you to identify the top 10% of the features in your web system to build into the app.  iPhone users demand simple and elegant interfaces. This simplifies your development, provides a better user experience and may even help you refocus your web development efforts on important areas too.