7 questions to identify whether your domain expertise can become a software product
It may come from operators in construction, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, EPC, field services - people who understand a real-world workflow better than software people do.
For 20 years, physical-world businesses bought software. In the next 10, the best of them will become software companies themselves.
Not because they want to look modern. But because they’ll realize their deepest asset is not just operations, relationships, or execution.
It’s judgment.
The repeated judgment hidden inside:
how they estimate risk
how they price projects
how they plan operations
how they handle exceptions
how their best people make decisions under ambiguity
For years, this lived in people, process, and tribal knowledge. Now it can be encoded into software.
That changes everything.
The real shift is not: “How do we become software-native?”
It is: “What part of our domain expertise is valuable enough to turn into software?”
And once that happens, a physical-world business stops being just an operator. It can become the system, the workflow standard, even the intelligence layer for its industry.
The next great software companies may not start in Silicon Valley. They may come from construction, logistics, manufacturing, EPC, healthcare, and field-heavy businesses.
From people who know a particular world deeply enough to encode it.