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Every company running NetSuite has a list of problems it decided not to solve.

Not because the problem was unclear — because the quote came back at six figures and living with the spreadsheet was cheaper.

That calculation was correct when it was made. It is also out of date.

The cost of building software has moved, and it has moved most for the unglamorous parts. Sign-in, roles and permissions, an audit trail, deployment, environments, testing, an API — the scaffolding that used to consume the first two months of any project. When all of that already exists before anyone writes a feature, what's left to build is only the part that was ever specific to your problem.

So the threshold moved. Problems that sat just underneath the old one — worth solving, never worth six figures — are above the new one.

The other half of this is honesty about what's actually true, even when it costs me the sale. There's a version of this business that inflates urgency to close a deal — a deadline that doesn't really exist, a risk that isn't really there. I'd rather tell you the thing that talks you out of hiring me and be the person you call when something is genuinely wrong.