Built on the floor, not in a boardroom
I spent a stretch on the phones at a telecom operator, about 100 calls a day. The setup was stone age: to quote someone I'd hunt down the right invoice, open a text document where our active prices were written out, punch the numbers into the Windows calculator, and keep my notes in Notepad. Every call, while the customer waited on the line.
So I built a small tool to do my own job faster: enter the customer's details, get the right price and a clean quote, done. That was the first version of InstantInvoice.
Later I got connected with a middleman who sells across several providers, and built him the next piece: drop in the customer's situation and instantly see the best offer across every provider, correct price, ready to send on the call.
That's the whole product. It exists because I felt the problem first, not because someone decided to sell software.