Talk to the users, try to find out how many others are also using it. Rewrite it in modern technology, sell it back to all the current users (and ideally, also sell to others in the same line of business who might need it).
On top of that consulting opens door, you get very valuable insight inside certain industries and get paid for it.
Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one who is not interested in the slightest in building a unicorn or dealing with investors/VCs.
Building software with no clients requires capital, I'd rather keep mine for my family rather than burn it in the wind into something that is most likely to fail.
Do work for customers. While doing work, try and find a shared pain point across your industry/customers. Build software for it and use your existing relationship to sell it. Or sell it and then build. Whichever.
And then ideally via the consulting you find a niche(s), build your own processes & tooling for your niche to deliver value to clients, and then can product-ize once you actually understand the space and the market, who the customers will be and how to reach them, because you're already doing it via the consulting and just need to scale up.
It also serves as a sanity check that you're actually building something that has value, because you prove it to yourself via invoices for your work rather than investment in an idea.
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.
HR, benefits, invoicing, inventory tracking, project tracking, etc etc
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).
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.
The CRUD application is definitely not the hard part, but it can be the long part.
Or reach out to ethbro . coAtGma il.
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.
Your advice is spot-on, although I would likely CAPITALIZE the words "build something better". Not so easy a proposition.
Accenture is #493 of the S&P500, at $101k of revenue per employee. (!) They're doing a bit better than McDonalds (#497). The scalability argument holds -- compare to Netflix, which scales quite well (#23, $1.9M/employee).
I've noticed this pattern in both business and in individual engineers.
You either have a spectacular product that theoretically could sell itself with initial exposure, or you have the best marketing and a product that might as well be vapor.
Usually it's the mediocre product that's somewhere in between that wins.
In engineers I've noticed that some of the brightest I've worked with are unsociable, or have no self esteem, and get stuck in the same place for 20 years, and on the other side of the spectrum are talentless hacks that are great at selling themselves and moving around enough to increase their salary.
Meanwhile I feel like a fraud because I'm not the best, but good enough to recognize my worth and sociable enough to put myself out there.
I leverage the shit out of that and feel somewhat guilty about hoping that the really talented local engineers don't catch on to the idea.
Younger company with unknown decent product? More heavily spending on sales.
Older company with industry recommendations from previous clients? Spend less on fewer, more technical sales people.
Older company with no recommendations from previous clients? You're doing something wrong, and sales isn't the place you should be spending your money.
I feel like normally this logic is inverted at the C-level though. Sales are low and product isn't getting traction? Hire more sales and marketing folks and put off those engineering hires.
Consulting requires linear increase of resources. Software product requires logarithmic increase of resources. Therefore product business is more efficient to scale than consulting.
When people say "it scales" they are largely referring to the cost of serving incremental customers. Software does that well, consulting doesn't.
One pragmatic strategy to find product/customers:
There is a lot of 'cybernetic' processes that are a mix of humans with domain knowledge and machines with spreadsheets for schemaless storage and querying. Generally the move is to encode the domain knowledge into code and standardize the storage (i.e excel -> RDMS) to make it more useful.