Every business I walk into has a story.
Not a marketing story. An operational one. A specific way they've learned to serve their customers that nobody else does quite the same way. An accounting firm that projects an entire year of client tasks in four minutes using templates no generic tool could replicate. A wellness clinic that combines physiotherapy, beauty treatments, hyperbaric therapy, and horse riding under one roof. A recruitment agency whose screening process is so refined it's become their main competitive advantage.
These businesses didn't arrive at their processes by accident. They iterated. They experimented. They built something that works for them - something uniquely theirs.
So here's the question that keeps nagging at me:
Why do all of these companies run their most critical operations on the same generic software as everyone else?
They've spent years perfecting how they work. Then they hand that work over to a tool designed for the average company, built by a product team that has never seen their operation, optimized for millions of users who all get the same features. And when the tool doesn't fit - which it inevitably doesn't - they don't change the tool. They change themselves. They adapt their process to fit the software.
Think about how backwards that is.
Your process is your competitive advantage. Your software should serve it. Instead, it's slowly reshaping it into something generic.
I recently met the owner of a clinic that runs six different service lines across three locations - physiotherapy, beauty, fitness, EMS training, a hyperbaric chamber, and therapeutic horse riding. No off-the-shelf software was designed for this combination. Obviously. Why would it be?
So he settled on a medical booking platform because it handled compliance. But his business isn't just a medical clinic. It's a hybrid unlike anything the vendor imagined when they built the product.
The system crashes during peak hours - between 4 and 8 PM, exactly when 190 patients are walking through the door. Support shuts off at 4 PM. A time indicator line on the calendar - a feature any modern app includes by default - costs 150 EUR per month extra. Processing a voucher payment takes 4-5 clicks and scrolling through a list. There are no analytics. The owner spends three hours every month in Excel manually calculating profitability per therapist because his 8,500 EUR-per-year software can't do it.
His reception team resorts to paper during outages. Paper. In 2026.
He described it in words I hear in different forms from almost every growing business: the software that was supposed to enable the business has become the thing constraining it.
His business model is genuinely unique. His software is generic. And the gap between those two things costs him money, quality, and growth every single day.
This isn't about one bad vendor. It's about how the software industry works.
SaaS products are designed for scale. To reach millions of users, they optimize for the average workflow. They build features that serve 80% of use cases and leave the remaining 20% to workarounds, integrations, or feature requests that may never ship.
For commodity processes - email, basic project management, standard accounting - this is fine. More than fine. It's brilliant. You don't need custom software for email.