> I think part of it is that things like marketing automation or customer support software, don't seem technically "hard" enough to justify the price-tags
As someone who's built far too many of those because "Buying is just too expensive" ... good god do I never want to do that ever again. Ever. It's so fucking hard. You will shoot yourself in the foot. You will suffer. And 3 years later you still won't have something half as good as the purpose-built SaaS.
If you do that and enjoy it, just spin it off into its own product. Who knows, you might even get more customers with more expensive problems than the original startup.
This only makes sense if you have a significant equity stake in the company you're working for. For the vast majority of engineers, they really don't care about the long-term profitability/success of whatever company they're working for. They just want to get paid, and hopefully grow as a dev in the process.
They'll learn more by building something in-house than by bringing in a saas and just writing glue for a living. If you want your engineers to make the decisions a founder would make, give them a significant equity stake.
It depends. Significant stake helps of course and despite that, I'd prefer solving problems that need solving than spending a bunch of time on problems that don't :)
As someone who's built far too many of those because "Buying is just too expensive" ... good god do I never want to do that ever again. Ever. It's so fucking hard. You will shoot yourself in the foot. You will suffer. And 3 years later you still won't have something half as good as the purpose-built SaaS.
If you do that and enjoy it, just spin it off into its own product. Who knows, you might even get more customers with more expensive problems than the original startup.