Specifically in our case, we sell used video games.
A lot of very labour-intensive work (pricing, writing listings, getting images) is all done by machine now, and I've recently made some semi-automated flows for shipping (think stage 1 of Manna[1], where a script tells you the optimal way to do a manual job). The next thing is to automatically decay the prices with a cron job to get rid of stale listings.
I think the important thing to point out is that we're not a software business!
We're a retail business that happens to use software to increase productivity and competitiveness in certain areas. The value doesn't come from the fact that the software is particularly technically impressive, but that it allows us to achieve in 50 man-hours per week what takes others 200.
As a side note, I think the whole "I'm a software engineer, therefore I should focus on making software" way of thinking is an incredibly common trap that leads many people towards creating worthless startups.
Ultimately, good software solves some kind of real-world problem, and your understanding of the problem that you're solving is in many cases more important than your programming skill.
A lot of very labour-intensive work (pricing, writing listings, getting images) is all done by machine now, and I've recently made some semi-automated flows for shipping (think stage 1 of Manna[1], where a script tells you the optimal way to do a manual job). The next thing is to automatically decay the prices with a cron job to get rid of stale listings.
I think the important thing to point out is that we're not a software business! We're a retail business that happens to use software to increase productivity and competitiveness in certain areas. The value doesn't come from the fact that the software is particularly technically impressive, but that it allows us to achieve in 50 man-hours per week what takes others 200.
As a side note, I think the whole "I'm a software engineer, therefore I should focus on making software" way of thinking is an incredibly common trap that leads many people towards creating worthless startups.
Ultimately, good software solves some kind of real-world problem, and your understanding of the problem that you're solving is in many cases more important than your programming skill.
[1]https://marshallbrain.com/manna1