>Our website looked good, our app looked stellar thanks to Ryan's design skills, and everyone we talked to said that what we were building is awesome (not "awesome" enough to give us any money though).

This reminds me of "The Mom Test" and why even people who are nice and helpful give you completely useless information and advice if you don't know how to parse it.

As an aside, "parasitic software" is often how you approach these kinds of things - someone complaining about a process in Salesforce or Outlook that they have to do manually probably won't switch to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it.