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Comment by skinfaxi | Hacker News Reader

There are many opportunities to start the your own invisible company. I once started a small business ($33k/year) that sold exactly one product to one company for a few years. One thing the article glosses over in the Steven Ross discussion is that this guy was clearly entrepreneurial: he was able to see the gaps and find or build solutions to fill them. You can in fact build a business around solving a "simple" problem for one business, and because it is a small scale you are essentially invisible to the would-be competition.

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every large XLS-file/table in any large/mega Corp is basicly crying to get "re-invented" as a SaaS service and being sold to them (-:

This was my mantra when I ran strategy for a corporate venture studio: every existing spreadsheet is a prototype for a potential new product

I worked for a different Steve Ross (Dolphins owner, Related Companies, etc), and we did this in house.

From 2008-2017, “we” (I was a contractor 08-09, and employee 15-17) basically turned every spreadsheet into a web application internally.

We added authentication and authorization, used a LOT of ETL-type processing to move data around. So many things could have been packaged and sold, but that was the “secret sauce” that kept the company so profitable.

Then the end in 2017 when a new CIO came in, killed off IT (laid off all non-managers over the course of a year), and replaced everyone with South African consultants to turn IT from a cost center to a profit center.

He lasted another couple years then left.

Possibly, but straight anecdote...

Our startup noticed our first major-brand customer had a high-stakes B2B process depend on a spreadsheet that looked handmade and perhaps error-prone.

There was a moment of thinking This could be one of those startup pivot points, when what you thought was the incidental to your exciting technology solution, is actually the simple CRUD app/integration SaaS that customers need even more.

Then there was a moment of thinking We don't want to be the communication middleperson on that high-stakes communication, if there was ever a dispute.

Also, either it wasn't a perceived pain point of the customer, or they intended their ongoing CRM-ish conversion to address it eventually.

So we listened to the customer on what problems they (or at least the stakeholder executives' KPIs) actually wanted us to solve, and we continued to consume that spreadsheet in a manual and "zero-impedence" way, for the little bit we could use that info.

(A management consulting firm or YOLO/fly-by-night startup might do that one, though.)

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