That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.
I work for one of these bespoke ERP companies, our niche is CNC machine shops (huge industy you don't hear much about). Our software was grown organically out of tools we made to manage our own CNC shop, spun out into its own company. That deep domain knowledge is what allows us to make a competitive product.
If this kind of stuff interests you we're hiring: https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/
That is the paradox with ERP: they are sold as off-the-shelf solutions but customization costs twice the licenses and always ends up producing a bespoke monster.
They also sell some easy systems, like a LEGO car, but usually it's better to strip them down and reuse the parts of what you need is a house.
I argue that they are. It is just that the dollar bills are stuck in the mud or hidden under a leaf or just down paths you rarely take.
The bottleneck is knowing about them. You need to be the kind of person who thinks everything is done poorly and then thinks of ways to do it better.
The other bottleneck is that extracting them frequently requires annoying human interaction, but if you are willing to do it endlessly, there is plenty to do. I'm not and I lose out on a lot of projects as I don't want to do that.
But I know some absolutely terrible software developers (i.e. expect to see your password in the source code kind of developer) who outearn most devs I know simply by selling vast amounts of solutions to the thousands of people they meet every year.
Spend the day talking to random shop owners. Spend the night hacking together a fix for them. Collect an ongoing fee.
I remember working on a construction survey crew in high school, where all survey measurements were recorded by hand in notebooks, and then manually transferred to Excel to perform some trivial operations. The office had hundreds of notebooks lying around. The leadership had no idea it was possible to have an application built to solve something like this. Perhaps they're using something now — I sure hope so.
I am into ERP, WMS, TMS and BI software. You don't hear much about this on HN but worldwide it's huge because it is what logistics run on.
Most of the time it's also old software and I believe there is a lot of money to be made. For example machine learning can be used to estimate goods that have to be purchased to keep optimal stock.
The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it?
I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/
People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills.
This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.
There are a ton of these heaps of bills, sure, but they aren't lying around on the floor so much as on hilltops and mountains, to abuse an analogy.
It may help to think of these opportunities as a form of technology arbitrage. In order to take advantage, one or more people have to a) understand the technology, b) understand the problem domain c) understand the workflows and d) identify and communicate effectively to the people who can actually make the decisions.
How many people do you know who are both competent and interested in all of these aspects? It's not that any of these skills are particularly rare, but they are rare in the same person and there aren't natural communities, for the most part, of people who can do all aspects.
Another issue is sometimes (often, really) the technology aspect is the smallest and least interesting part of the problem.
But of course, the people doing those jobs aren't going to go out of their way to make 90% of their job redundant.
And businesses not knowing what _can_ be done with software to commission developers to solve it for them (or if they do, the lack of empathy from the developer ends up with them building a half-assed solution).
And when you get right down to it, and start having the type of deep dive talks need to have with potential customers, you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.
> people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired.
Those aren't the people you should be talking to.
> you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.
That is irrelevant for most as you sell them the implementation of that solution then. It is a $20 bill, not a Y-Combinator worthy idea.
It's one massive long integral math equation.
It rents (yes, rents) out for $20K a week.
There's also coffee logistics software. There's software for private club management(tennis, polo, etc), moving and storage, even software just for spa's.
There is so much opportunity out there, the trick is finding it, and finding a working sales method.
Why aren't they picking up the bills?
But it takes a long long time to pick them up.
"overnight successes" can take years.
I think there's a lot of stuff out there that would provide value to both parties if they could simply connect. Something like Gumtree or Craigslist is an attempt to capitalise on this.
e.g. I have a broken machine. It'll be useful to someone for spare parts, to fix and resell (or for fun), as a placeholder (since it sort of works) until they get something better. I'd probably give it away. But dealing with all the time wasters on such platforms makes me want to just toss it.
It's similar for some ideas where there is definitely profit to be had, but simply connecting with the customer, convincing them that it will help them, convincing them you're actually honest, etc etc, all costs more than it's worth.
1) Being a non-technical founder is expensive
2) Being savvy at online marketing means you probably were able to figure out that the cost of customer acquisition was higher than the price people would be willing to pay for the product
The reason businesses do inefficient things is because humans are stupid habit-driven animals. To break them out of their habits, you have to assault them with expensive messaging and literally shake them until they realize you have built a better way.
Just because something can be done automatically doesn't mean companies can magically discover it and pay for it. You still have to sell it to them.