But man having an IT team or just tacking on sales, account management, support, legal, customization, billing ... and doing it well is a big lift. Some of those things are "soft of" like what folks do internally, but man with another company it can be WAY different. Let alone problems like a company who hasn't done those things fighting its own momentum to do it right....
I'm reminded of a story from Amazon someone mentioned on HN (or linked it) where they were working on early AWS like stuff and supposedly Bezos shows up for a meeting / retreat late. He asks what everyone is talking about. They were talking about "more cooperation" between the folks working on early AWS stuff and their own storefront people and the challenges the storefront folks had using this early form of AWS. Lots of cooperation talk.
Jeff didn't like it and said something about how he didn't like this cooperation idea (more harshly than I said it IIRC). I'll get this next part wrong to some extent but I think I've got the spirit of his next actions right: He then setup a system where the back end AWS folks and the storefront IT folks were actually discouraged from communicating directly. Rather the AWS folks were required to write documentation to reduce the number of interactions directly with the the people running the Amazon storefront. If the storefront folks couldn't figure out how to do something and opened a support ticket (no more direct calls) it counted against the AWS team.
The general idea here was to establish the same systems / practices you would need to deal with outside customers who would one day use AWS... and hopefully keep using it.
It's also a good example about how working on internal applications and external are way way different.