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Comment by risyachka | Hacker News Reader

You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software?

So still, for ransom business much cheaper and better to buy software from SaaS vendor.

In this case it was better ONLY because the client is the wife of the developer.

And even now, if he sells this to other businesses - it will be MUCH cheaper to buy his subscription than homebrew the same version of it - as if it starts selling it he will be adding features and support which requires time (which is money).

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> You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software?

No, this is not true. There are so many non-technical users of Microsoft Access that run their won businesses without hiring anyone. A friend of mine had a business with an yearly turnover shy of $3M (which is small, alright) and it was running wired spreadsheets and google forms. 20 people. He never ever bought any software, and existed for more than 10 years, until his wife (yes his waifu) decided to divorce and bring the company down.

Business Architecture is not so much about writing the software, sorry, we as IT professionals would love to think it is, but this is a super weak bias.

So true, we devs are so stuck in our own bubble

Almost every SMB I interact with sounds like this company. Was it founded more than 10 years ago? Probably holding the ship together with spreadsheets and email.

Yep, and there are so many of these examples, as you said - most SMBs. But I know also more recent companies having it similarly.

On the other hand - we did recently pitche some brand new RAG for TBs of complex schematics for a company in the Netherlands, and guess what - they didn't like the enterprise rates that the middleman offered, not because they did not like the demo (which they loved absolutely), and not because it was late or incomplete (it took less than a month). Had I approached this company directly, with normal rates, I would be deploying it in production already. It's very telling, and not good news for large SAAS vendors.

>> He never ever bought any software

>> was running wired spreadsheets and google forms

So he was using someone's software.

Probably he grew his business to 3M for this exact reason - by focusing on business and not playing tech company by homebrewing software. Which only proves my point.

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