> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.

I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.

50% of those places are using excel and outdated tech because they have 0 budget to spend on tech no matter how good the replacement (in fact even if it is cheaper, approving the alternative is too painful a process), "their problem" is not that nobody had solved their actual problem but trying to convince someone upstairs to approve spend on an alternative solution.

Just check out the number of posts you see on HN where you have people that started "successful" small (< 10 people) SaaS businesses.

In basically all instances:

1. These stories get a ton of upvotes because they're actually quite rare.

2. The total income to the founder is still considerably (like way considerably) less that a senior dev at a FAANG.

If you know of some boring, obscure market niches that are also likely to be profitable, meaning the cost of customer acquisition is easily less than the profit per customer, and is scalably solved with a software product, please either share with HN readers, or at least offer to sell them to us.

They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.

> If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.

Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.

> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.

1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.

2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.

I used to work in internal IT at a Fortune 500 working with different departments in the company to turn Excel spreadsheets and Access97 tools into web apps with real databases. The problem is that the companies/departments where this is the case all have their own workflows and business processes, and 99% of the time are completely unwilling to consider change. It'll be really challenging to develop software that can be sold to multiple companies even when they ostensibly do the same thing.

I’ll add to that: in many industries/domains the incumbents are benefiting from the status quo and have no interest in upending it, while others have accepted some of these as “hard facts”[0].

I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.

[0] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pmf-framework/

>their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.

And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.

Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.

I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.

And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.