On Starting a Software Business
Consulting doesn't scale, software does.<p>One pragmatic strategy to find product/customers:<p><pre><code>    1) Pick an industry
    2) Ask someone in that industry what they use spreadsheets for
    3) Build something better
</code></pre>
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.