They're in an absurdly low-tech niche. I'm going to call it gardening. Their business model since the dawn of time has been "You call us up, we send a van of guys to your house, they uses scissors to trim your bushes."

Five years ago they got a brochureware website, but they were still doing everything the same way: phone, van, guys, scissors.

Then came Groupon, of all things. See, their number one problem was getting more bushes to trim. Groupon solved that very efficiently, but now they had a different problem: paper no longer scaled sufficiently to schedule everybody. So they started tracking their phoned-in appointments in (I think) Google Calendar.

This pretty much opened the floodgates. They now use one of the help desk SaaSes because the email volume was getting too big and the business owner and office manager were having communication issues. Both of them bought iPhones so that they could run the business from the road, because the owner of a small gardening firm still needs to use scissors on occasion. They bought Appointment Reminder to free the office manager from X00 phone calls per month, so she can spend the time taking bookings and managing their (packed-to-capacity-and-beyond) schedule again. Things are booming.

They're now a software, van, guys, scissors business... and the owner is a wee bit weirded out by it.

It is the earliest source, that I know of, of the theory that software and the web will destroy every other industry - and it was from the mid-90s (the HBR article was).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Economics-Information-Trans...