Unpopular-ish: a lot of “we need custom automation” is just “we haven’t decided the workflow yet”

Seeing this a lot with vertical products — clinics, shops, dealers, brokers.

The founder can describe the industry pain. They cannot describe the happy path in 8 steps. So the plan becomes:

1. Build the product
2. Bolt on automation
3. Sprinkle AI on the messy parts

That third step is doing a lot of work that a written SOP should have done.

If a human still has to decide what “done” means in that industry, an agent won’t save you. It will just generate confident garbage at the exact step where the business rule was never written down.

Custom software is justified when the workflow is the product. It’s a trap when you’re using engineering to postpone naming the workflow.

Where have you actually drawn the line between “this has to be custom” and “just use HubSpot/Zapier/whatever for a year and stop pretending”?