Most of the businesses I work with did not come asking for software. They came asking for a website, and the website was not the problem.
A laundry taking every booking by phone. A store whose theme broke the moment the twelfth app went in. A publisher writing five articles a day by hand. The fix in each case was the same shape: find the part a person repeats, and build the thing that does it instead.
That is what custom software for a small business actually is. Not a platform to migrate onto. One process, the one that costs you an hour every day, moved off the phone calls and the spreadsheet and into something that runs whether or not anybody remembers to run it.
Five businesses this is written for
- 01The agency with more work than capacityBuild, WordPress and SEO delivered under your name, to your deadline.White label work
- 02The service business dispatching from a whiteboardBooked, assigned, done and paid, without the morning phone round.Home services
- 03The store whose theme ran outCustom sections, a catalogue that scales, and apps that stop fighting.Shopify work
- 04The business whose spreadsheet became the systemCustom business software that holds the process the sheet is pretending to.Custom platforms
- 05The WordPress site nobody has touched in three yearsUpdates, backups, malware cleanup and someone to call.WordPress care
None of those quite you? Start with whether you should build at all. Plenty of businesses should buy a product instead, and that page says so.
Tell me what keeps going wrong
The order taken by phone, the spreadsheet nobody trusts, the site you cannot update. Describe it in your own words and you will get a straight answer about whether it is worth building.
Where to find him