1. office space, you can co-work, work from home, do virtual office etc these days, not much to invent there.
2. accounting and bookkeeping, you can hire a CPA at about $300/month, or quickbooks/etc for $30/month, not much to be done there.
3. hardware, computers are not expensive these days. Unless you're doing IT, windows 10 and a NAS and printer etc can get you going, if you're geek please use linux/bsd, again not much new stuff here either.routers/hubs are easy to get too.
4. communication, online video conference, cellphone, skype, various video calls etc, slack for IRC, they're all affordable even for a startup.
5. that left with some legal advice, sales and marketing, develop your own products etc, which is common for all size businesses.
Might be missing something in the list, but I could not see anything major to be disrupted in SMB space myself, especially, they're mostly having a tight budget and fighting for survival from the start before considering being your customer.
You're missing a big one, their transaction / business system(s); What software actually runs the business. If it's a small shop, that would be inventory, vendor, customer management / POS. Any other company has their own flavor of niche software that is used outside basic every business software.
There is some off the shelf software but they are mainly served to businesses that have a lot of competition: pawn shops, small stores, restaurants, etc. Everyone else has to mangle together what they can find if they can't hire a developer to build them one. If you mangle something together, you are more than likely to have scale problems when you least need it: when you are growing.
POS is pretty mature plus square, verifone etc for mobile paying now. there is online CRM too: sugarcrm, zoho crm,etc, what is missing here in this space?
I think most if not all the resources existed and just spread everywhere, just need a nice checklist and write down for non-techie SMB owners to follow, instead of developing yet another solution.
Well maybe not disruption, but there's plenty of space for consultation and integration. So pretend you're a medical doctor starting a business around a medical device you invented - you don't read hackernews, you've been busy the last 8 years doing medical stuff. Also you don't live in the Bay Area and thus aren't generally knowledgeable about all these different solutions.
Now you need to figure out how to get office space, remote work, accounting, hardware (what is linux? You can share folders on a local network? Printers can connect to the network, really?) communication (oh slack I've heard of that, never used it) etc. There's money there.
1. office space, you can co-work, work from home, do virtual office etc these days, not much to invent there.
2. accounting and bookkeeping, you can hire a CPA at about $300/month, or quickbooks/etc for $30/month, not much to be done there.
3. hardware, computers are not expensive these days. Unless you're doing IT, windows 10 and a NAS and printer etc can get you going, if you're geek please use linux/bsd, again not much new stuff here either.routers/hubs are easy to get too.
4. communication, online video conference, cellphone, skype, various video calls etc, slack for IRC, they're all affordable even for a startup.
5. that left with some legal advice, sales and marketing, develop your own products etc, which is common for all size businesses.
Might be missing something in the list, but I could not see anything major to be disrupted in SMB space myself, especially, they're mostly having a tight budget and fighting for survival from the start before considering being your customer.