Build Vs. Buy Is Mostly Really Now Vs. Later

Julkaissut Platon

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In the early-ish days, maybe even as far as $10m-$20m in ARR, as you talk to larger prospects you’ll have a lot of “Build vs Buy” discussions. We didn’t hear these as often in the peak crazy times of late 2020-early 2022, when budgets to buy SaaS exploded. But the pushback is back in force again:

“Oh, our IT team could build it.” Or
“We’ll try to hack the functionality using a product we already have.”
“We’ll see if we can do it ourselves first.”

You’ll hear somewhere between a little and a lot of this until (x) you have a very well-established brand and (y) an extremely feature-rich product.

No doubt, in the early days it’s often sort of true. If your three engineers spent 6 months building a hack — of course, another 3 great engineers could do the same. In fact, they can do it faster and better than you did. Because you’ve already built a roadmap to get started in your app.

Mutta viime kädessä se on väärä valinta:

Even if your prospect does build it themselves, they can’t maintain it. Insinööri, joka rakensi sen tai hakkasi sen yhdessä Slackiin tai mihin tahansa, lähtee. Tai siirry toiseen projektiin. Tai jotain. Kuka ylläpitää tätä mukautettua ratkaisua vuosina 2 ja 3? Lähes aina - kukaan.
Vaikka he pystyvät ylläpitämään sitä - he eivät voi kehittää sitä. Ei niin kuin voit. Your 5 engineers will grow to 10 and then 50, and they will be doing nothing but making your product better. An in-house solution can never replicate that richness of feature set and experience. Those go stale in a few years, at least, almost always.
He eivät yleensä ole tarpeeksi koukussa. Even if your customer can build it, who will wake up at 2 am to solve the issues? Who will go the extra yard to make sure the app is tuned to do what the customer really needs? Only you. Your customer’s internal team goes home at 5 pm and for the weekend.
Asiakkaan tarpeet kehittyvät melkein aina nopeammin kuin heidän sisäinen tiiminsä. Vaikka he pystyvätkin rakentamaan sen nyt, he eivät todennäköisesti pysty ensi vuonna. Tai vuosi sen jälkeen.

So net net — consider a lost “build vs buy” decision just an opportunity with a longer sales cycle. You’ll get them in a year or two. Or even more likely, in 3-6 months when the internal project stalls out.

Kuten yleensä.

So be cool if you lose a deal to an internal project. Mostly importantly, follow up regularly — and add value when you do. Katso, sujuuko kaikki suunnitellusti. Ja varsinkin - älä riko suhdetta, jos menetät sopimuksen alun perin. Kerro heille, että ymmärrät, ja tarvitsevatko he ulkopuolisen myyjän ja milloin - olet heidän puolestaan. Aina ja ikuisesti.

(Huomaa: päivitetty SaaStr Classic -viesti)

Julkaistu huhtikuussa 20, 2023