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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs.

A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a month for that.

That kind of thing is trivial to do, but can still have a lot of value. Remember, the small businesses don’t automate anything. Excel is frequently beyond them.

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> a text message to email system ... letting his office assistant manage invoices ... fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him

Oh man... that's what I'm after, problems like that. Would be so neat even if it's small to see it get used(users) and the analytics/small income.

I don't think that is often trivial and it wouldn't surprise me to see junior programmers struggle with things like that, but maybe the average junior programmer is better than I expect.

V1 skimped on many of the things we might consider requirements such as preventing SQL injection. For a long time the username and password for this service consisted of hard coded if statements for each client. Plenty of plaintext passwords. Default admin logins. Even seen a frontend password checker with jQuery.

So it isn't software we would consider production acceptable. The code quality is atrocious. None of these people I know who do this would ever get hired as a software engineer by any company that does a coding interview.

But you pair their can-do attitude with a willingness to sell and tell them to use Django so they can get away with not knowing a lot about key software concepts, and you can make a living off selling niche atrocious software.

Plus, 90% of what most small businesses need could be replicated in Wordpress with plugins.Plenty of money there too.

> in Wordpress with plugins

My first dev job we just crapped out WordPress sites, I mean WP was just a "headless CMS" pretty much, since it has auth/users/routing/editor out of the box. So we just built pretty pages/uis. It was interesting, in that level, the owners of the company were making bank. There was something I made that cost $30K and I was like wow... I was not paid anywhere near that. This other thing a single person developed was over 6 figures... I think that's an example of selling value over quantified time(within reason).

Oh and with WooCommerce you again had this "headless" shopping system and you could throw your own styles on it.

Oh yes.

My aunt paid $8000 for nothing more than a Wordpress gallery for her business and paid $100 for every change she wanted to make.

People who don't know tech will pay a lot for it.

Man whoever sold that sounds like they made bank. I'm not sure what upkeep you have to deal with regarding Wordpress security but yeah. Sounds like it's low-risk enough generally eg. just show pictures.

You periodically need to update the PHP version to keep up. I have a dormant personal website and maybe 1-2 years I have to go update the PHP when I get an email about it.

That sounds nice/convenient. I only recently started adding "down detectors" to some of my sites regarding the automated notification of any upkeep, cool stuff.

but how do you find these small businesses that need these types of things?

Lots of cases really are obvious.

One of my friends lives in a rural area where most businesses never got beyond the Church bulletin board and the phone book.

Suddenly they became cottage country and none of the local businesses were getting any business as they wanted to see websites or at least written down phone numbers and they don't use phonebook.

Take a walk through the small business section of your town and see who has a website. If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify. Lots of desperate closed businesses who will take a gamble on that right now.

The reason tech has not arrived is that there is no person standing in front of them making it extremely basic for them.

> If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify

So ... they then pay you for helping them get on Shopify? I can see how one might be able to convince a business owner that they could benefit from using Shopify, but is there room in there for a third party to sell configuration services?

Please forgive my being a noob with regard to Shopify. Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the business owner just does on their own, so how does one come across as a _useful_ helper for that process?

> Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the business owner just does on their own

You are vastly overestimating their computer savvy in many cases. Lots of small businesses barely have email. So even with the self onboarding option, many businesses need help.

But what I was thinking was more in line with this:

https://developers.shopify.com/custom-development

I am admittedly not a Shopify developer. I just have friends who make decent coin doing it while not being very good coders in general.

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