We took a similar route. I was the customer of a business that was clearly hurting from a lack of automation and processes.

I let them know that I build software and am interested in their industry. I asked them if they would be willing to try my app and provide feedback. They said yes!

So, I got to work formulating a MVP feature list. I presented it to them and we iterated back and forth for a while. Then, I started building. More months of feedback and iteration ensued.

Once they’d been using the product for ~6 months we launched to the public.

Fast forward 4 years and we have ~1k customers.

It can be done! The first step is to talk to people, relate to them, and empathize with the issues they face in their business.

That's a really inspiring story, thanks for sharing it. Do you have a blog that talks about it a bit more?

I don't, though I've thought about starting one. I tend to be a bit shy but whenever I do talk about what we were able to do people want to know more.

If you ever want to chat one on one, my email is in my profile.

Can you give some examples?

We did that with B2B consulting in machine learning (rare-technologies.com) => transitioned to B2B products (scaletext.com, pii-tools.com).

Actually, we started even one step earlier, by working on open source (Gensim), no money involved at all.

pivotal labs -> pivotal tracker