Engineers are unaware of the needs of these businesses, and often, the businesses are unaware that it's possible to solve some of their problems with software.

Engineers are unaware of the needs of these businesses, and often, the businesses are unaware that it's possible to solve some of their problems with software. That's why successful engineer-founders often have prior industry experience, or a co-founder who is an expert in the given industry. I remember working on a construction survey crew in high school, where all survey measurements were recorded by hand in notebooks, and then manually transferred to Excel to perform some trivial operations. The office had hundreds of notebooks lying around. The leadership had no idea it was possible to have an application built to solve something like this. Perhaps they're using something now — I sure hope so.