"Nothing Fits Us" Isn't Always the Real Problem

Something I often hear from a new client is some version of: "We looked. There's just nothing out there that fits us." There are different reasons that could be true, and which one you're dealing with changes what actually needs to get built — sometimes it isn't a software problem at all until you've worked out what you're really asking software to do.

Sometimes the combination really is too specific

Off-the-shelf software gets built for a category — retail, trades, hospitality, logistics — and it works reasonably well as long as your business fits neatly inside one of those categories. Plenty of businesses don't. Picture a business that's really three or four distinct operations grouped under one ownership — say, a retail arm, a logistics arm, and a trade services business — each with its own way of working, but sharing customers, sharing overheads, and needing to report as one entity.

No vendor builds software for "a retail, logistics, and trade services group." That's not a market category anyone's targeting, so the search for an off-the-shelf fit comes up empty — not because the business is doing anything unusual, but because its shape doesn't match a shape software gets built for.

Sometimes the tool exists, but it's built for someone much bigger than you

A different version of the same problem: the category exists, the tools exist, but they're built for large organisations. Virginia Fleming at Aotea National Leasing ran into exactly this when she went looking for asset management software. She put it plainly: "We're not a big leasing company. All the asset management tools I found were too massive for our needs. I only needed about 5% of their functionality." The tools weren't wrong, they just weren't sized for her — and she was still expected to pay for, and wade through, the other 95%.

And sometimes you're searching under the wrong label entirely

This is the version I find most interesting, because it's not really a software gap at all — it's a diagnosis problem. A manufacturer with a paper-based, error-prone process naturally goes looking for "manufacturing software" or a "production management tool," because that's the label attached to what they do. But when we actually dig into where the pain lives, it's often not in the physical making of the thing at all.

The Shed Shop is a good example. They build custom garden sheds — you'd reasonably assume the gap was somewhere in production or manufacturing scheduling. It wasn't. Their entire paper-based headache was on the other side of the business: tracking customer specifications as they changed, making sure nothing got left off a quote, and coordinating deliveries across the North Island without losing track of who needed what, where. The tool we built, ShedHQ, barely touches the manufacturing process itself. It centralises orders, customer communication, and delivery scheduling — closer to how a business manages its customer relationships than anything you'd find under "manufacturing software."

That's a pattern I see often enough to trust it: the label a business reaches for is usually borrowed from what the business makes, not from where its actual day-to-day pain lives. A search built around the wrong label will keep coming up short, no matter how good the available tools are, because you're searching in the wrong part of the market entirely.

Sometimes the tool would work — but only by flattening what makes you different

Off-the-shelf software is built around a generic version of how businesses in your category are assumed to operate — the standard workflow, the standard sequence, the standard set of fields. For a lot of businesses, that's a fair trade: their process isn't especially unique, so bending slightly to fit the software costs them nothing.

But for some, the way they actually work is exactly why customers choose them over the competition — a particular way of quoting, a sequence nobody else in the industry follows, a level of customisation built into every job. Buy the tool that fits everyone else in the category, and you're being asked to reshape your process around the software's assumptions instead of the other way around. That's not a minor inconvenience. It's asking a business to blunt the thing that makes it competitive, in exchange for software support on everything else.

This is where "just use what's already out there" quietly stops being good advice. If how your business operates is the differentiator, keeping it intact is worth more than the convenience of an off-the-shelf fit — which usually means whatever gets built needs to work around your process, not the reverse.

The actual job isn't matching a label

None of these situations get solved by searching harder. The group of businesses under one roof needs something built for the shape they actually are, not a category that doesn't exist. The business that's smaller than what the available tools were built for needs something sized down to match, not discounted enterprise software. The business searching under the wrong label needs someone to help them see where the real problem sits before any searching happens at all. And the business whose edge is in how it works needs software that protects that, not one that quietly sands it off.

That diagnostic step — figuring out what the technology actually needs to do, before deciding what kind of technology that is — is most of the value in this kind of work. It's also the reason "there's nothing out there for us" is so often true and so often the wrong conclusion to stop at. The tool that solves your problem might not exist under the label you're searching for. That doesn't mean it can't be built.

We use the AI Contribution Scale defined by Blair Enns to disclose the use of AI in our written content.  This article is rated as: AI-4: AI Drafted. The content was drafted by Claude from our own content and ideas, we then refined the output.