Build Vs. Buy Is Mostly Really Now Vs. Later

Publisert av 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.

Men til slutt er det et falskt valg:

Even if your prospect does build it themselves, they can’t maintain it. Ingeniøren som bygde den, eller hacket den sammen på Slack eller hva som helst, vil dra. Eller gå videre til et annet prosjekt. Eller noe. Hvem vil opprettholde denne tilpassede løsningen i år 2 og år 3? Nesten alltid - ingen.
Selv om de kan opprettholde det - kan de ikke utvikle det. Ikke som du kan. 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.
De er vanligvis ikke nok på kroken. 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.
Kundens behov utvikler seg nesten alltid raskere enn det interne teamet gjør. Selv om de kan bygge den nå ... kan de sannsynligvis ikke neste år. Eller året etter.

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.

Som det vanligvis gjør.

So be cool if you lose a deal to an internal project. Mostly importantly, follow up regularly — and add value when you do. Se om det hele går etter planen. Og spesielt - ikke bryt forholdet hvis du først mister avtalen. Fortell dem at du forstår, og hvis og når de trenger en ekstern leverandør - er du der for dem. For evig og alltid.

(merk: et oppdatert SaaStr Classic-innlegg)

Publisert i april 20, 2023