Build Vs. Buy Is Mostly Really Now Vs. Later

Republicat de 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.

Dar, în cele din urmă, este o alegere falsă:

Even if your prospect does build it themselves, they can’t maintain it. Inginerul care l-a construit sau l-a spart împreună pe Slack sau orice altceva, va pleca. Sau trece la alt proiect. Sau ceva. Cine va menține această soluție personalizată în anul 2 și anul 3? Aproape întotdeauna - nimeni.
Chiar dacă o pot menține — nu o pot evolua. Nu cum poți. 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 obicei, nu sunt suficient de pe cârlig. 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.
Nevoile clienților dvs. evoluează aproape întotdeauna mai repede decât o face echipa lor internă. Chiar dacă o pot construi acum... probabil că nu vor putea anul viitor. Sau anul de după.

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.

Așa cum se întâmplă de obicei.

So be cool if you lose a deal to an internal project. Mostly importantly, follow up regularly — and add value when you do. Vezi dacă totul merge conform planului. Și mai ales — nu rupe relația dacă pierzi afacerea inițial. Spune-le că înțelegi și dacă și când au nevoie de un furnizor extern - ești acolo pentru ei. Mereu si intotdeauna.

(notă: o postare SaaStr Classic actualizată)

Publicat în aprilie 20, 2023