I'm finding more and more apps and services started out with key parts of the eventual back end initially being processed manually.
As a consultant I see a lot of people put way too much effort into developing bespoke software to automate or "improve" workflows that don't even really exist in their business yet, only to find out that the real bottlenecks exist in places they never even knew (and that they've wasted a bunch of money building something they'll never really use).
It's like a "real life" analogue of the adage "premature optimisation is the devil".