Gala's story has been posted here before. It's inspiring insofar as he identified a need, built software to fill it, and got rich. But one aspect is maybe not so repeatable: he funded it with $600K of his own money.
The most interesting part to me is how he found a programmer capable of building the product. It wasn't luck. He spent money on a few bad programmers, figured out that they sucked, and changed course. That's intelligent and rare behavior for someone in his position.
Edit: another thought was nagging me about this and I just realized what it is: although the articles about this guy present him as a non-technical founder, that's slightly misleading. He may not know a programming language, but the stories make it clear he's a technically minded person (e.g. he wrote the first version of the software himself, in spreadsheets).
That doesn't put fulfilling the need of such a project beyond the reach of any qualified coder to try and fill the gap himself.
It doesn't cost much for, a group of friends in college to start working on a project, or some colleagues meeting to throw ideas around, it costs nothing, and might be the beginning of such a dream.
It just takes an idea, and the will to take the risk.
You'd still need to build relationships with companies or have some experience with a "normal" company and identify a problem that is common among a bunch of similar businesses.
I wouldn't put much money on a just out of college programmer's ability to come up with a great problem that needs to be solved... without some exposure to the industry in question.
That's where the years part comes in.
Although I am confident a qualified programmed could solve the problem in question with little effort. Marketing is the hard part.
At first, I wished Inc's dashboard section would also tell us exactly what Altametrics made or did. Then I went to altametrics.com's About Us page but there, I found that the BuzzWords:English ratio approaches 1 (seriously, go read it).
The best I can do is "We write software that helps restaurants become more profitable by controlling costs"
This is a very typical story and a good lesson. I've worked on many "specialty" software packages and all the good ones started the same way, as a one-off package designed and developed by the users for one specific business.
The best 911 software I ever saw was designed by paramedics, the best distribution software by people who bought and sold stuff all day long, the best medical software by doctors and nurses, you get the idea. These were all designed with the intent to use.
Some of the worst packaged software I ever saw, OTOH, was designed by programmers with the intent to sell.
The most interesting part to me is how he found a programmer capable of building the product. It wasn't luck. He spent money on a few bad programmers, figured out that they sucked, and changed course. That's intelligent and rare behavior for someone in his position.
Edit: another thought was nagging me about this and I just realized what it is: although the articles about this guy present him as a non-technical founder, that's slightly misleading. He may not know a programming language, but the stories make it clear he's a technically minded person (e.g. he wrote the first version of the software himself, in spreadsheets).