I'd agree with that. The one piece of software that I have written that people choose to use (as opposed to being forced to because the code is embedded in the widget they just bought)has got to be the most trivial thing I have ever done - a multicast bridge that I hacked together one afternoon. It has some trace that is very useful for the proprietary multicast protocol that we use.
That stupid bridge, that I wrote because I needed it one day, is now in regular use in three different companies (mine plus two parteners). I get support emails for it to add features or fix bugs about once a month.
If you find it useful, chances are that others will find it useful too.
That said, I think that the Y-Combinator crowd should probably pay more attention to resolving non-programming needs. Most programming tasks already have good tools these days, because if a programmer sees a need, she can code it herself straight away, and programming tasks have lots of programmers identifying programming needs.
For example, I put together a stupid little app a few weeks ago that took a pdf document from Paris Town Hall that lists the addresses of all handcapped parking spaces in Paris. The app reads the list, sends the addresses to yahoo maps to get the long/lat, and then puts the results in a .gpx file for loading into gs devices. Yet another dumb app, but I've had more than 200 downloads of that .gpx file in only a couple of weeks. It's popular because there are apparently few programmers trying to solve problems in the handicapped problem space.
