[unity1001]

> The shitty software probably isn't the product

The shitty software is what sells the product, from the description. Even if the shitty software is a sales/inventory management tool or 'whatever', from the description it is obvious that it is vital to whatever business they are doing.

It doesn't matter whether it was built with Microsoft Access and Excel files. If its contributing a major part of that $20m /year, its not shitty, its golden.

Anyone who understands the trials of modern business, including any tech lead who had to deal with even merely stakeholders and low-level business decisions would prefer to have a $20 m/year sh*t before a well-crafted, 'properly built' architecture. The difficult thing is getting to that $20 m/year. The difficulty of rearchitecting or maintaining things pale in comparison to that.

> I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).

Everyone is aware of that. Many are also aware that getting to $20m/year in WHATEVER form is more difficult than architecting a 'great' stack & infra.

[OJFord]

Well, I don't agree. You'd struggle to do it without any software at all these days, but you can certainly do it without anything written in-house.

My point about Access (or Excel or whatever as you say) was that that would be the very early days of something starting to happen in-house, that wouldn't even be the hypothetical 'script kiddies'.

[unity1001]

> but you can certainly do it without anything written in-house

Nope. Not really. Your average SV startup idea in which the end users will do some simple, but catchy things with your app - yeah, go all no-code if you want to get it started.

But, in real business, in which there are inventories, sales, vendors, shipping companies, deliveries, contracts, quotas, FIFO and LIFO queues and all kinds of weird stuff, things don't work that way. You may end up having to code something specific in order to be able to work with just one vendor or a big customer even. They may even be using Excel. You do it without blinking because millions of dollars of ongoing revenue depend on such stuff.