<div><em>Whether you are building or buying, there are some guidelines to follow, says <strong>Karan Kurani</strong></em><br><br>In a startup, there are always has 100 different things that need to be done at any given point of time. There are umpteen ways you can accomplish those tasks. Many of them can be solved by using tools that other companies provide. Some of them clearly require something to be custom built internally in your organisation.</div><div> </div><div>And then there are some, often pesky, things that are in the middle. You can solve the problem by using some third party tool/software, or you can also build a replica of that tool internally with a few tweaks here and there that would be nice to have. It’s these situations which cause a lot of sunk time in wasteful projects that could have easily been solved by just using some existing solution out there.</div><div> </div><div>But how do you decide when it’s good to build something in-house vs just buying your way out of the problem? I would like to walk you through two situations where the build vs buy question typically pops up.</div><div> </div><div>The first one is the problem of “Big data” (or even little data for that matter). The world is awash in data, but data is not the same as information. Data is just a fact, or an observation. It is information which empowers your organisation to make decisions.</div><div> </div><div>There are entire companies built to help you convert your data into actionable information. Whether it is to help you track your funnel for sales conversions, keep track of how many times in a user returns to use your product per day/week/month, at what points are your users getting frustrated and dropping off, and a million other things.</div><div> </div><div><table align="left" border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" style="width: 200px;"><tbody><tr><td><img alt="" src="http://bw-image.s3.amazonaws.com/Karan-Kurani---200.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 200px; float: left;"></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Karan Kurani</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>Building and maintaining such systems in-house is an expensive, time consuming affair. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the people who are well versed in this field are rare, and are super hard to recruit. Therefore, there are a lot of companies out there who promise to provide you the same kind of insight into your data at a fraction of the cost and time of building in-house systems.</div><div> </div><div>Many of the products currently on the market are pretty good at their specific use cases. New Relic, for example, is an excellent way to monitor your infrastructure and the raw performance of your application. Google Analytics is another great free solution to measure the basic metrics of your website / mobile app.</div><div> </div><div>But, it’s not as well defined when it comes to business metrics - especially if you are a startup. A startup by definition is something new and its business model is undefined early in its life. This means that nobody - including the founders themselves - know what the best way to measure the business is. This means there is no one stop shop which will have all the things that your startup needs to measure its health.</div><div> </div><div><strong>DoctorC’s dashboard was customised</strong></div><div>As an example, at my current company - DoctorC, we needed a dashboard which measured all our critical metrics for the current day at a glance. We wanted to know how well each of the city was doing and what was contributing to its progress as well as how far or close we were to our daily goal overall. It should also update in near real-time so we know what’s happening now as opposed to 60 minutes later.</div><div> </div><div>There is simply no solution out there which would provide such functionality out of the box or that can be modified like this without significant tech development. And since it is so critical to our business we built the dashboard from scratch. </div><div> </div><div>Each bar would turn green if the goal of each acquisition channel is hit. The circle for the city would also turn green once its goal passed. The bar on top would similarly green once our overall daily goal was hit. The more green we saw the better our business was doing - we can process everything in a very visual manner. It also acts as motivational tool where the entire company would try together to get as many greens as possible every day.</div><div>This investment has paid off immensely. This is exactly what is right for our organization specifically, not for anyone else. It has helped us move fast in decisions since we have the right data at our fingertips. It was an explicit, conscious choice we made to strengthen our business.</div><div>What we did not do - we did not build our own infrastructure monitoring tool - we use New Relic, we did not build our a/b testing/optimization tool - we use Optimizely, we did not build our own servers - we use Amazon Web Services, we did not build our web analytics software - we use Google Analytics and Heap Analytics.</div><div> </div><div>We use off the shelf software as long as they are saving us time and money and are very well defined in nature. Anything that is specific for our business and which we absolutely must have our way - without any compromises - is built in-house.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Learning from the NYTimes</strong></div><div>The second example of an in house tool that is core to a large business is New York Times’ internal Content Management System (CMS) called “Scoop”. It powers all their workflows for publishing articles on the web, mobile and print. Apart from that, it allows them to render images that are automatically cropped and aspect ratios adjusted so that the writers and editors don’t have to worry about managing how images are displayed. There are several other features which are very specific to NY Times such as “Story Budgeting and Planning”, a tool used to coordinate the publication of articles across multiple news desks across the world in different time zones in a painless way. It’s tightly integrated into their workflow in a way that is not found in a generic CMS.</div><div> </div><div>For NY Times, the entire experience of writing, copy editing, publishing and post publication editing is handled seamlessly with minimal friction with Scoop. They are currently changing “Scoop” so that they became a digital first organization. They have this flexibility because they have built Scoop from the ground up for themselves. It is beholden to no other organization than NY Times itself. The results speak for themselves, nytimes.com and its mobile site are industry leading media websites in the world that improves constantly day after day after day.</div><div> </div><div>Anything that you find unsatisfactory in the market and doesn’t serve your business needs is up for grabs. After that, it’s all a question of prioritizing what you want to build. Another point to note is that the “in-house tool” does not need to be fancy or use heavy technology. It can be as simple as a simple spreadsheet which is filled manually every day - we still do that for some of our internal projects.</div><div> </div><div>In the end, there are 2 simple things that you must ask yourself -</div><div>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Is the thing you want to do critical (and I mean really absolutely “Oh my god, my business will die without this!” critical)?</div><div>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Are there zero off the shelf tools that will allow you to do exactly that critical thing?</div><div>If the answer to both is yes, you should seriously consider building it in-house, even if you just started your startup yesterday. This philosophy is, rightly so, independent of the size of the organization.</div><div> </div><div><em>Karan Kurani, is co-founder of DoctorC, a startup clustering diagnostic centres and consumers with technology</em></div><div> </div>
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