There's a moment in every rocket launch that looks, from the outside, like a catastrophe. The first stage — the big, expensive, thundering engine that got the whole thing off the ground — separates and falls away. Drops into the ocean. Gone.
And that's not a failure. That's the plan.
I've watched companies buy software for decades. ERP systems that cost more than the buildings they were installed in. SaaS platforms that promised to change everything, and mostly changed the invoice. Each one was a genuine solution to a genuine problem at a genuine moment in time. Stage one did its job. Nobody should be embarrassed about that.
But here's the thing about stage one rockets: you cannot ride them to the moon. At some point, you have to let them fall.
The reason so many companies haven't let go isn't technical. It's psychological. For years, "custom software" was a curse word in corporate circles, and not without reason. Custom meant expensive. Custom meant risky. Custom meant a two-year engagement with a consulting firm that billed by the hour and delivered something held together with hope and duct tape.
That world is gone. And many executives haven't noticed yet.
The tools available today — AI-assisted coding, elegant lightweight frameworks, code assistants that work with you the way a genuinely talented colleague would — have made custom development something close to unrecognizable compared to what it used to be. What once required a team of ten and a budget with too many zeros can now be built by a small, focused group moving fast. Sometimes by one person moving very fast.
This isn't about replacing your IT department. It's about finally being able to build the thing you actually need, instead of bending your operations to fit the thing someone else built for a theoretically average company that looks nothing like yours.
You already know this problem intimately. You just might not have named it.
It's your spreadsheets.
Think about that for a second. Despite decades of enterprise software innovation, despite billions of dollars spent on platforms designed to automate and integrate everything, spreadsheets are still everywhere. They're in your finance team. Your operations team. Your sales team. Probably your executive team, if we're being honest.
Why? Because spreadsheets do something that off-the-shelf software has never been able to do: they bend. They meet people at the last mile of a process where the packaged product simply stops. They're flexible in a way that enterprise software, almost by design, refuses to be.
The problem is that spreadsheets are also data traps. They create silos. They introduce errors. They live on someone's laptop and disappear when that person leaves. Everyone knows this. Nobody has had a better option — so the spreadsheets stay.
That's the gap. That last mile of automation that off-the-shelf has never reached. It's real, it's expensive, and it's been hiding in plain sight under the label "miscellaneous spreadsheets" on every operations review I've ever sat through.
Here's what's changed: you can now build into that gap. Precisely. Affordably. Fast.
Custom applications that handle the specific, idiosyncratic, this-is-just-how-we-do-it processes that no SaaS product will ever prioritize — because those processes belong to you, not to a market segment. Code assistants don't just speed up development; they fundamentally lower the barrier to entry. You don't need a room full of senior engineers to build something elegant and functional anymore. You need clarity about what you're trying to solve and access to tools that have become genuinely remarkable.
The last mile is now buildable. The data that's been trapped in spreadsheets can be freed. The processes that have been duct-taped together across three platforms and a shared drive can be replaced with something clean, yours, and built to grow.
Legacy SaaS will keep doing what legacy SaaS does — adding features for the median customer, acquiring adjacent products, layering AI on top of architectures that were never designed for it. It's not malicious. It's just the nature of building software for everyone, which is another way of saying building it for no one in particular.
Your stage two rocket doesn't have to work for everyone. It just has to work for you.
That's not a luxury anymore. It's the mission.
And the moon isn't going to wait.
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