On the other hand, I've had a lot of success showing people proofs of concept as a way to get the conversation going about various ideas I have. Sometimes people don't know what they want/need until they actually see a pre-alpha version in action.
Indeed. Most people don't know what is possible let alone what is easy / hard to develop.
The answer to everything in my previous workplace was "another excel sheet" when we had a proper Django application with relational integrity and data validation. Showing them that a few clicks on a web form was easier than what they were used to - copy pasting data from one web page, pasting it back into an excel, reformatting it and uploading it, followed by a ton of data validation errors.
