I've heard this before, but part of the appeal of the spreadsheet is that Patty from accounting or Joe from HR can modify it without having to ask any IT staff, including you.
So I don't think it's a foolproof scheme, unless your solution is also programmable/customizable, which is a lot of work.
Here is one random example that comes to mind. "Risk Management" is something every company needs to do or pretend to do.
So someone gets stuck with this responsibility and they create a spreadsheet that looks like:
Department | Risk | Likelihood | Impact
So this is a fairly mediocre solution but it kinda works and "risk management" for "Small Company Co" becomes "Bob's thing".
Of course there is very likely software that already does this but in my experience it's usually what the hipster programmers call "enterprise garbage". You know what i'm talking about - buzzwordy site with stock photos, long annoying sales cycles, no online demo or sign up, some java server you have to deploy, and some extjs/jquery interface that is ugly and each click takes 5-10 seconds. You aren't competing with these guys, you're going after the long tail of small companies they are ignoring.
Your move is to register some fun name - "Riskly", "Riskque", "Risksalot", etc. Next, hire a graphic designer to put together a fun colorful site, hire a college kid to make a fun video with royalty free upbeat music and narration showcasing your app, and build a simple CRUD app with maybe some built in risks for certain industries and some cool simulations/reports.
So go spend a few years of your life and see if you can't 'Disrupt/Fix Risk Management'. Or go work for a large company for eight years, take all your earnings, go to Vegas, and let it all ride on a 10:1 bet. It works out about the same.
Proper risk management is serious business. "Risk" "management" in smaller businesses may just be pretended. This illusion will cost some time, focus and money to keep up. I believe that's the market referred to.
And the fact that there are business providing most of those testify to how good of an idea it is (and how crappy the existing MBA-Sales enterprise solutions are).
This is actually largely what we're trying to do at Sonadier.com. The basic idea is that you can build most enterprise CRUD applications with drag-and-drop forms.
While we realized it before starting, we didn't fully grasp how much you need people with "computer literacy" to build these things, for lack of a better term. Just thinking about the schema of the application you need is something a lot of people can't really do yet.
As far as I can tell it's got very little to do software intuitiveness, as I've noticed the same effect on phone calls with prospective customers.
Even as enterprise moves towards managed SaaS platforms, there'll always be a huge place for power-users. Much of the time, even just defining the problem that needs to be solved takes one.
It sounds like you may have an opportunity to offload some of that power-user/consultant content to contractors who just integrate your platform in their gigs. Or, operate a linearly-scaling in-house consultancy and have your platform be a means to optimize revenue per employee.
The CRUD application is definitely not the hard part, but it can be the long part.
Spot on. We've had success with in-house consulting for medium-to-large development projects, and we're in talks with a few MSPs now to help them offer managed custom applications to their customers. In terms of long-term scaling, getting more contractors on board is our biggest priority.
>So I don't think it's a foolproof scheme, unless your solution is also programmable/customizable, which is a lot of work.
Yep, almost everyone you casually talk to about a problem domain is only casually talking about it. They'll dream, but won't let you know about the pitfalls.
After you build something, the next questions are usually, "Can you change this just for us?", which is a fun task if you have 9 other customers that won't want that change.
So I don't think it's a foolproof scheme, unless your solution is also programmable/customizable, which is a lot of work.