Every business eventually asks this question, usually after a process has become painful enough to notice. The honest answer is that most businesses do not need custom software for most of what they do. Accounting, email marketing, and standard project management are solved well by existing tools, and paying to rebuild them rarely makes sense.
The signal worth paying attention to is not frustration with a tool, but the shape of the workaround your team has built around it. If staff are exporting data from one system and manually re-entering it into another every week, that is not a minor inconvenience. It is a process running on human effort that a small piece of software could do automatically and without errors.
Another common signal is a spreadsheet that has quietly become a business system. It started as a simple list, gained a dozen tabs and a few macros, and now three people depend on it working correctly even though nobody remembers exactly how every formula behaves. That fragility, not the spreadsheet itself, is the actual problem.
Approval processes are a third area worth watching. If a request has to move through email, a shared document, and a verbal follow up before anyone can act on it, decisions slow down and nothing is easy to audit later. A small internal tool that tracks status and ownership often solves this more reliably than asking people to be more organized.
None of these situations need solving today. What matters is recognizing that the cost of the current workaround is not zero, even when nobody has put a number on it. Once that cost is clearly higher than the cost of building something purpose made, custom software stops being a nice idea and becomes a practical decision.