You can have the best performing software in the world and it is still worth exactly nothing if you can't sell. The reality is that cheaply developed software that sells well is usually good business.
It’s all about making money. Almost nobody in business department cares about the quality of software and its actual usefulness as long as its selling. It’s possible to sell shitty software and get high returns through manipulation and marketing.
Yep, and that's what I love about software. If you build and sell something on your own, pretty much everything is profit. You don't have that in many industries.
Depends on the type of software. If you're building transactional software where your business is doing a few bucks cut per user transaction, the software can be tremendously bad before it hits into revenue, as long as you’re not totally busting the user experience
So they seem to output outstanding software for us to use, but when it comes to making money they are still mostly a one tricky pony, but what a pony....
No, it’s bad business because it doesn’t scale. Software is lucrative because you make it once and sell it to thousands of customers. If you’re making every customer their own bespoke thing, you’ll spend all your time for little return.
The shitty software probably isn't the product. It could be some sales/inventory management tool or whatever, that before they got some 'script kiddies' in was just some forms in Microsoft Access (is that what it's called.. the forms on top of database tool we had to learn in ICT at school) orwwhatever.
I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).
I had a similar experience with my first company in college selling software to corporate customers who previously used excel to track everything.
Theres millions of opportunities like that to optimize a terribly inefficient corporate process with software.
But the problem is always
a) the problem set is rarely easily reproduced, meaning you're not really selling a product, but instead selling a product + consulting - since every process is slightly unique
and
b) you're dealing with terribly inefficient systems and the type people who would put together a terribly inefficient system (like you said, not necessarily meaning they are bad people but likely are not a good customer)
I still believe its the most straightforward way to make money in software outside of getting a job at Google/facebook. But its certainly not fun and not a traditional "high growth" startup.
reply