Potentially. It really depends how well they've done it so far. One site I looked at was an image hosting site, where they unfortunately ended up selling for a pittance because they just didn't have patience to have the work done, but they were at a scale where setting up their own simplistic CDN would have allowed them to cut bandwidth bills by about 70%-90% (ideal thing to look for: anything with huge AWS bandwidth bills, as AWS bandwidth egress is extortionate).
Storage as well was an issue there in that their storage backend was expensively redundant without adding much security. E.g. they could have reduced their number of copies substantially by using a backend using erasure coding. They also could have cut a substantial amount off their hosting bill simply by running an image optimiser on upload.
Overall reduction looked like it would have been ~50%-60% at least. It was also under-monetised in all kinds of ways, but cutting even 30% without any improvement in monetisation would have made that example profitable.
There are a lot of companies out there where hassle causes businesses to get sold for a pittance or even shut down because the owners doesn't have the patience to see a process like that through. I talked to another one - actually an image hoster that would have made a perfect complement to merge into the one I mentioned above - that just shut down while I was talking to the others because he didn't even want to go through the hassle. In the end he just refused to even try selling anything but the domain names.
Figuring out a process to get people like that to sell while still a going concern has lots of potential. Of course there are risks there in terms of guarding against people who are in a rush to sell because they're trying scam you. But also a lot of people who are just burned out or feel they have run out of options and want out and who are grateful for any option that lets them recoup something. For a decent person there's a lot of opportunity to both make a good profit and help people out there. Of course there's also plenty of opportunity to be an asshole and profit even more.
Storage as well was an issue there in that their storage backend was expensively redundant without adding much security. E.g. they could have reduced their number of copies substantially by using a backend using erasure coding. They also could have cut a substantial amount off their hosting bill simply by running an image optimiser on upload.
Overall reduction looked like it would have been ~50%-60% at least. It was also under-monetised in all kinds of ways, but cutting even 30% without any improvement in monetisation would have made that example profitable.
There are a lot of companies out there where hassle causes businesses to get sold for a pittance or even shut down because the owners doesn't have the patience to see a process like that through. I talked to another one - actually an image hoster that would have made a perfect complement to merge into the one I mentioned above - that just shut down while I was talking to the others because he didn't even want to go through the hassle. In the end he just refused to even try selling anything but the domain names.
Figuring out a process to get people like that to sell while still a going concern has lots of potential. Of course there are risks there in terms of guarding against people who are in a rush to sell because they're trying scam you. But also a lot of people who are just burned out or feel they have run out of options and want out and who are grateful for any option that lets them recoup something. For a decent person there's a lot of opportunity to both make a good profit and help people out there. Of course there's also plenty of opportunity to be an asshole and profit even more.