So I don't think it's a foolproof scheme, unless your solution is also programmable/customizable, which is a lot of work.
Here is one random example that comes to mind. "Risk Management" is something every company needs to do or pretend to do.
So someone gets stuck with this responsibility and they create a spreadsheet that looks like: Department | Risk | Likelihood | Impact
So this is a fairly mediocre solution but it kinda works and "risk management" for "Small Company Co" becomes "Bob's thing".
Of course there is very likely software that already does this but in my experience it's usually what the hipster programmers call "enterprise garbage". You know what i'm talking about - buzzwordy site with stock photos, long annoying sales cycles, no online demo or sign up, some java server you have to deploy, and some extjs/jquery interface that is ugly and each click takes 5-10 seconds. You aren't competing with these guys, you're going after the long tail of small companies they are ignoring.
Your move is to register some fun name - "Riskly", "Riskque", "Risksalot", etc. Next, hire a graphic designer to put together a fun colorful site, hire a college kid to make a fun video with royalty free upbeat music and narration showcasing your app, and build a simple CRUD app with maybe some built in risks for certain industries and some cool simulations/reports.
So go spend a few years of your life and see if you can't 'Disrupt/Fix Risk Management'. Or go work for a large company for eight years, take all your earnings, go to Vegas, and let it all ride on a 10:1 bet. It works out about the same.
HR, benefits, invoicing, inventory tracking, project tracking, etc etc
And the fact that there are business providing most of those testify to how good of an idea it is (and how crappy the existing MBA-Sales enterprise solutions are).
While we realized it before starting, we didn't fully grasp how much you need people with "computer literacy" to build these things, for lack of a better term. Just thinking about the schema of the application you need is something a lot of people can't really do yet.
As far as I can tell it's got very little to do software intuitiveness, as I've noticed the same effect on phone calls with prospective customers.
Even as enterprise moves towards managed SaaS platforms, there'll always be a huge place for power-users. Much of the time, even just defining the problem that needs to be solved takes one.
The CRUD application is definitely not the hard part, but it can be the long part.
Or reach out to ethbro . coAtGma il.
Yep, almost everyone you casually talk to about a problem domain is only casually talking about it. They'll dream, but won't let you know about the pitfalls.
After you build something, the next questions are usually, "Can you change this just for us?", which is a fun task if you have 9 other customers that won't want that change.