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Welcome to the Ksense Technology Podcast where we discuss the trends in software development, web applications, and how custom software can help businesses scale. Ksense is a full-stack software development company using state-of-the-art technologies to build cutting-edge applications. With over a decade of software development experience, our team is confident we will deliver results for your organization.
[David Guthrie] (0:00 - 0:07)
You know, it's like renting versus owning, but it's with software. This is how you really start to see your business grow efficiently.
[Kelson Erwin] (0:07 - 0:13)
There's a whole bunch of hidden opportunities when it comes to building out custom software. We can lock it up like Fort Knox.
[David Guthrie] (0:17 - 0:55)
All right, welcome to the podcast. I'm here today with Kelson, the CEO at Ksense, and we're going to be diving into a topic that's relevant to any business that's using off-the-shelf software, which is pretty much everybody. We're going to be talking about what the hidden costs are with off-the-shelf solutions.
So, you know, we're going to dive into how off-the-shelf solutions could be right for you, especially depending on the size of your team. And then we're going to look at some of the challenges that can come along down the line, especially as the business scales and what that process looks like and how to address those challenges. So thanks so much for joining me, Kelson.
[Kelson Erwin] (0:55 - 0:57)
Yeah, sweet. This is a great topic.
[David Guthrie] (0:58 - 1:21)
Awesome. So I would love to just dive in talking about the initial affordability. What's kind of the draw towards these solutions?
Obviously, they're very popular, right? Most of the time when you're setting up a business process, you're not going to build a custom app or a custom software solution. You're going to go with an off-the-shelf solution.
So let's talk about why that is and what some of the benefits are.
[Kelson Erwin] (1:21 - 2:19)
Yeah, for sure. I think the biggest benefit is a lot of the off-the-shelf software solves problems that your business has immediately. There's really not a need to reinvent the wheel if you can find an off-the-shelf software that works really good for your business.
Generally speaking, it's better to explore the off-the-shelf software options prior to looking at custom solutions, with the exception of a few different caveats, which we'll dive into later in the podcast. There's a lot of benefits to using off-the-shelf software. And as an agency that builds custom software, you might think that we're more inclined to say, hey, don't use off-the-shelf software.
Just don't even use it. Go all custom. But that's really not the case.
Most people should be using off-the-shelf software in their business operations way before they start even thinking custom is what I would prescribe.
[David Guthrie] (2:19 - 3:00)
Yeah, especially if you're a small team, right? There's no need to, like you said, reinvent the wheel, try to engineer a solution when there's already a solution available to you that's going to be more affordable. So yeah, at that small scale, it makes a lot of sense, right?
It's quick implementation. You can sort of prototype and see how the process will work without having to hire developers and then try it out and then see what's wrong with it. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
What about past that point? At what point does it start to get difficult for these teams using these tools and why? What are some of the reasons that they run into challenges?
[Kelson Erwin] (3:01 - 4:21)
Yeah, I think that every business, when they pick these off-the-shelf software solutions, they're going to find themselves in a situation where maybe they wish that the software did a little bit more for them. And David, I'm sure you can agree that you kind of feel like you're shoving your business use case into the shoe of the off-the-shelf software in a way that's just like it fits. Yeah, but it's not comfortable.
You're doing different workarounds or maybe you're having to use a lot of different software options. So next thing you know, your browser has 15 tabs in order to do one task, right? So that's one of the pretty big hidden costs is it causes a lot of business inefficiency and a lot of workarounds with the off-the-shelf solutions.
And that's something that when it becomes too big of an issue, it starts to make more and more sense to go down the custom road. Most businesses, I think, especially ones that they're not focused on software, they don't have a really strong technical lead on their team. I'm sure that it resonates with them, the idea of feeling like it works, but it's kind of icky.
You know what I mean? Have you been in that situation before? Oh yeah, yeah.
[David Guthrie] (4:21 - 5:52)
And I'd say that's kind of like, that's like the first step into custom software, right? Is like what you're talking about, bridging the gaps between all of the off-the-shelf solutions, what we call middleware, where it's like, you know, we almost have a custom solution here. But it's with, you know, patches in between the systems that allow them to communicate with each other the right way, allow it to maybe complete a step in between systems that neither of the systems can do properly, right?
And so that can be a really good thing to do. Businesses need to do that. But I've definitely seen that become sort of a Frankenstein's monster of technology, where after a few years, especially if the business gets too big and you just keep doing that, you have all of these different solutions kind of cobbled together in this weird, multi-layered mess of technology.
So yeah, I've definitely seen that happen, where you're trying to just kind of shoehorn into, you know what, this is the tool we've got. We've already paid for it. We're in this contract.
We need to figure out how to make it work now with this new process, or, you know, as we're trying to make our processes more efficient, we just kind of have to figure out a way to make it work. And that's okay, right? But you definitely want to be aware of where those challenges are so that you're making the right choices on what to prioritize, where you really should be customizing some things to a deeper level.
[Kelson Erwin] (5:53 - 7:25)
Yeah, and I think it's difficult for people to understand where the line is between creating a zombie and like, I guess, and then just having two systems talk to each other, right? Like at what point you have all these tools and we build a bunch of software that connects them and makes them all communicate with each other. At what point is that no longer a good idea?
That's a pretty hard question for a lot of business owners to answer. And really the answer depends, like there's so many variables at play. But a lot of times it's a good idea to kind of take that mid-stop approach where we say, all right, we're not gonna reinvent Google Calendar that your business relies on.
You know how many features that has, how long it would take to build that from the ground up. But instead, we're gonna make your ERP talk to Google Calendar so that you don't have to have somebody go in there and manually input it. Like that's a good first step.
But once it gets to the point where it is for whatever reason, it's not working anymore, or there's too many systems, or it's unreliable for whatever reason, then it's, you know, maybe it is time to build our own calendar. Or maybe Google Calendar is still not working. The gradual migration and implementation is always my preferred approach, but it's definitely interesting to think about how you can kind of wean off the off the shelf solution into more of a custom approach.
And I think that's a good way to think about it.
[David Guthrie] (7:26 - 8:52)
Another issue here that I've run into is just the cost. I was working at a company where even small tools that we were looking at implementing, the cost would be enormous, right? Because you've got a pricing per seat with pretty much every off the shelf solution out there.
Every SAS product out there, almost, right? Sometimes they have these plans with unlimited users, but most of the time, a solution that worked really great and solved the problems you needed it to at a small scale is no longer the right solution at a big scale as you add, you know, 50 team members, 500 team members, 5,000 maybe, right? It's going to become really expensive to maintain your seats in that software.
So yeah, that's another thing. Just as you scale up, sometimes you have to rethink solutions you've already implemented, problems you've already solved, and just go back, revisit them and say, is this still the right solution? Is it still cost-effective?
It might've been the best, most cost-effective at the time, but that's what's so interesting about this, you know, the economies of scale is that it's not easy to just give one answer about, you know, the right budget or the right financial decisions. You really got to take a look at where you're at and what your business needs and what the scale is and then weigh those pros and cons, right?
[Kelson Erwin] (8:52 - 9:54)
Exactly. Yeah, for example, you might find an off-the-shelf solution that solves literally all of your problems, but it might still be more affordable to build it from scratch if you have enough users, right? And the interesting thing is a lot of times, I don't think the executive team really understands the costs, the real costs, until it's mostly or fully implemented.
When they suddenly realize that $50 per seat with 100 users is $60,000 a year and the idea of the off-the-shelf, whatever off-the-shelf solution this is, starts to look pretty poor as opposed to custom software, which has all these other benefits, such as the ability to integrate more easily, the ability to make changes, the fact that it's a business asset for your business, the custom route starts to look a lot more attractive when we're talking about these levels of scale.
[David Guthrie] (9:54 - 10:45)
Yeah, what you just said, you know, it's an asset long-term for your business rather than, you know, it's like renting versus owning, but it's with software. So you might spend, you know, especially at the scales we were talking about, I have in the past signed contracts for corporations to use software that were hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And at that point, you know, it's like, well, you know, maybe you'll spend a year's budget for this software to build the thing, but then you have it, right?
Then it's yours, it's a long-term asset for the business. And the only ongoing cost at that point is just maintenance, you know, the hosting. If you need to maybe integrate with a new system and those are things you would have had to do anyway.
Even with off-the-shelf solutions, you would have had to figure out how to integrate it with any new stuff that you're coming up with. So yeah, that's super true.
[Kelson Erwin] (10:45 - 11:26)
I feel like a lot of business owners, it really makes sense to them, the difference between like an asset and a rental when we're talking about different types of assets. No construction company in their right mind is going to rent all of the tractors, right? That's just silly.
They know that the tractor's gonna run for 10, 15 years. These are gonna be the maintenance costs. It makes more sense to buy them.
And then they'll rent only to kind of fill the gaps, right? But I feel like there's almost a different mindset when it comes to software. Like renting is the default option and it doesn't have to be that way.
It really doesn't.
[David Guthrie] (11:26 - 11:29)
Why do you think that is? Have you come up with any theories?
[Kelson Erwin] (11:30 - 12:40)
I think it's because people overestimate the cost of creating software. And I think there's a failure for people to think of software as an asset because it's not material. You can't like hold it in your hands.
Yeah. And so I think that might be why it is. And then also we have how many massive corporations that are trying to push these pay per month models down our throats, right?
Even Photoshop, which used to be pay for a license one time, you pick up the CD, right? And so it's kind of changed to where now everything is like that. And that's just the way it is.
And we need to sit down and just accept it. But it really isn't. That's not the way that it needs to be.
And I think that if more people realize that they can own something rather than rent it and they thought of that, and that was the default mindset, then there'd be a lot more need for custom solutions. And I think that businesses overall would be happier because their solutions would be better and they'd end up paying less over the long term.
[David Guthrie] (12:40 - 13:26)
I think there's also a little bit of, maybe fear is too strong a word, but I think people just don't want to deal with it. The idea of having a project going and what if there's bugs and what if the feature doesn't work the way I want? And it just feels safer to go with an established solution where you know that these are the features, this is how it works.
And I get that. Problem solving that has to happen through that process, but that's everything you do in a business, right? You're always solving problems.
You're coming up with solutions and developing a better path forward, right? So yeah, I think sometimes it's just the fear of the headache. They're just like, I'm not a developer, so I don't want to deal with an ongoing development project.
[Kelson Erwin] (13:27 - 14:03)
But all they're really doing is they're offloading the headache to somebody else and hoping for the best. Right. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Because what if that off-the-shelf solution, what if they don't manage their infrastructure very well? Then instead of you having control and being able to say, all right, we're going to get this fixed.
I know exactly what's going wrong. Here's how we're going to fix it. Instead, you're just going to hope that they're going to fix it in a timely manner, right?
You have no control. You're letting go of control and paying more money for it.
[David Guthrie] (14:03 - 15:02)
I've seen that for sure. There's so many bad products out there that are popular, or good ones that have bugs. It's something that happens.
And the best way to prevent it is what you're talking about, where you have some sense of control over the issues that are priorities. And you can say, okay, that's the thing we're going to fix. Whereas if it's a third-party company, they might not care, right?
Maybe that feature is really important to you and your team, but they have all these other customers that are perfectly happy because they don't really need that feature the way that you do. So yeah, that freedom to just make sure that it's the right fit for your business and put the development spend where you need it, not where maybe 50% of the customer base needs it. That's really important.
That's the kind of control and flexibility that you get as you scale up as a business and you have the freedom to work on these kinds of projects and really set yourself up for success.
[Kelson Erwin] (15:03 - 16:05)
Yeah, exactly. And I've heard countless stories of a business choosing an off-the-shelf solution. It works good.
Then there's some outages. They didn't tell anybody about the outages. Now it's just out because it's unplanned or unexpected.
Now they have to explain to all their customers that they don't know what's going on either and they don't know when it's going to be back up. That's one of the horror stories that I've heard. And then there's the other horror story, which is kind of aligned with what you were saying, where they've implemented some sort of functionality into their day-to-day workflow and the software company decides that they're going to change how that fundamentally works or deprecate it altogether.
Even though you're paying $100,000 a year, the people who are paying $500,000 a year are the one making the decisions on where these functionalities go, not you. And so you look back and you've spent $500,000 over the last five years and now you have nothing to show for it.
[David Guthrie] (16:05 - 17:41)
I mean, just recently I experienced that working on email campaigns and the system I was using. They released some new features and it's like, okay, awesome, but turns out they broke some stuff. And so then we have to adjust.
We have to make sure that we take the time in the week to adjust the process so that we can still get the parts done that we need to. Integrations in general also are a way that I've seen people run into these challenges too, where it's like the way that the software provider decides that it can integrate with other tools, you're stuck with that. Maybe they decide to have a really nicely developed API that you can customize your own integrations and how you want them to work.
Sometimes the API is really limited or maybe they don't have an API. They just have prebuilt integrations that you can use the tools that they've decided you're gonna want to use with their tool. So yeah, the freedom to be able to build out your own integrations with any other tool that you need to implement into that workflow is huge.
To be able to maintain that and not, like we were saying, they might change things and then your integration doesn't work anymore or the API calls have to be updated the way that they're written, right? All sorts of things like that, where somebody somewhere else made a decision and it's affecting people everywhere in different ways and you just have to roll with those punches and you never know, sometimes you don't know that it's gonna happen and then you just have to totally readjust what you're prioritizing and what you're working on.
[Kelson Erwin] (17:41 - 18:19)
Yeah, we had that happen to us actually last year where we implemented with this online signature kind of like DocuSign. We built it all out on the API, everything. And as soon as we released it, it was good for like one or two weeks and then we found out that that company was being sold to a bigger document signing like e-signature company and their plans were to completely just scrap the whole app.
You know, within one or two months, not only did the client lose everything they had, all the templates, they also had to find a new service provider and rebuild the entire integration.
[David Guthrie] (18:19 - 18:54)
And it's like, how would you avoid that? It's like, you wanna get mad at somebody, but that's the risk that you're accepting when you say, I'm just gonna plug in somebody else's tool that they've already built their solution into my business, my processes. And you wanna make sure that you've got some sort of redundancy, some sort of backup plan or if the system just goes down, if they have a server error on their end, then what do you do, right?
So you gotta plan ahead and think about how you'll get around those things with each of the solutions that you're putting into your business.
[Kelson Erwin] (18:55 - 19:30)
And I think you have to understand that it's just a reality, no matter what you do. We're building on a moving floor, right? Yeah.
The foundation is moving underneath us and it's just something that we have to deal with. I mean, you're not really, there's definitely risk mitigation strategies that we can implement that should be implemented, but it's not something that you're ever gonna fully get out of not all of these issues. So anyhow, I think we should move past the nightmare stories.
I think it's, I think we've driven it home.
[David Guthrie] (19:31 - 19:54)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, these are the challenges. So you gotta be aware of them and just keep an eye out and adjust the priorities as needed as you go.
What are some of the other things that people need to keep in mind as far as when they're making the decision on custom or off the shelf? You know, maybe other challenges, but just what are some tips? What are some things that people need to keep in mind?
[Kelson Erwin] (19:55 - 22:51)
There's a lot of stop gap solutions that people may not consider. There's low code builders, like application builders, think Squarespace, except you can kind of drag and drop and build an application. And you might not need anybody to do any development work.
No coding needed. And so I think there's a misconception or just a general lack of awareness that these tools exist. And they're pretty powerful.
They can do a lot of things. So I think that's really one thing that should be considered is that a lot of this, a lot of the integrations, a lot of the user interface can be done with low technical skill. You can build out full apps in Bubble or NAC.
You know, there's a hundred different of these types of tools. Just type in like NAC alternative or Bubble alternative, and you can see a huge list of them. And then you have the different low code tools for automation, like Make, which was previously IntegraMAT, Zapier.
And these let different tools talk to each other. So Google Sheets talks to QuickBooks and QuickBooks talks to whatever, right? You know, it sends you a text message when something happens.
And this allows you to do automation and some like lower level integration, again, at a very cost-effective and low technical skill needed. When I say low technical skill, you're probably gonna need some technical skill. My low technical skill, what I mean by that is you're not gonna need to be a software engineer, right?
You're still gonna need to know your way around a computer and some of these systems. You'll need to know what an API is, but generally low compared to a full custom route. Some other things is that when you do decide that you need a custom approach, there are a massive number of benefits that aren't a lot of times considered, like the fact that we can seamlessly integrate with other existing systems.
And we can, you know, there's a lot of these systems that have pre-built components is what we call them. So not everything has to be built from scratch. So if the low code option's not going to work for you and you need a fully custom for whatever reason, there's a lot of reasons you might need a fully custom solution.
But if you are gonna do something that is fully custom, there's still a lot of like reusable components that save a lot of money. And you're just not gonna get that with the, if you're using it off the shelf, you're gonna have significant challenges when it comes to integrating, when it comes to scaling, and when it comes to truly customizing it to your business.
[David Guthrie] (22:52 - 24:01)
Yeah, that's very true. I mean, most of the time you can assume that if there's an off the shelf solution, they've got some sort of documentation or some sort of training that you can kind of lean on. But then just like we were talking about before, it's generic training, right?
So if you're trying to shoehorn your process into this software, that training is only going so far. You've got to come up with your own custom training to make sure that your team knows the specific steps to take within that tool to accomplish a specific thing and why, right? Why is that important for your business?
What are you trying to accomplish with this tool? And that's super important. I mean, whether you're building a custom solution or you're getting something off the shelf, you have to invest in training either way, right?
But you have to make sure that with these off the shelf solutions, that you get really specific because they might have features that you don't want your team to use. There could be more than one way to do something and you want them to do it a more efficient way, right? So you just got to make sure that before you let everybody loose into the system, that they have a clear picture of what they're doing in there.
[Kelson Erwin] (24:02 - 25:58)
Yeah, and we see all the time where people are like, hey, I wish that we could lock down the system. They come to us and say, hey, is there any way we could like lock down the system? Can we create like a UI on top of the system?
And those are pretty good indicators that what they're trying to do is they're trying to shoehorn a system that maybe shouldn't be shoehorned because they realize the flaws of the system. And instead of discussing getting rid of it, or looking for a different solution, they just want to make it work. There's a tendency that, yeah, look how far we've come.
Let's just figure out a way to make it work. The loss cause fallacy or whatever. There's a number of things to think about when it comes to training and adoption of an off the shelf system.
Usually you're using multiple. So you need to teach people what they can do in these systems, how these systems are supposed to work together in a manual way. You know, they got to switch tabs.
They got to do, this is what they got to do. This feature can't be used over here. This feature can be used.
This is, you know, these are all the different passwords to all of these different systems. And when it comes to like a custom piece of software, we can much more tightly control the permissions. And we can also have the training process be a lot more intuitive.
They don't have to learn 15 different systems. They only need to learn one system. The amount of time and productivity that's lost to like an inefficient training is insane.
And I think it's highly underestimated, which makes something that some sort of custom solution a lot more attractive as an option. When you figure out how long is it taking to fully onboard your team into the solution, then you convert that to dollars. And, you know, that's another thing that could make a custom solution look a lot more appealing.
Absolutely.
[David Guthrie] (26:00 - 26:28)
So beyond that, you know, as you get past training, let's say your team is doing great as far as knowing how to use the software. Back to the cost conversation. What are the considerations between the two for ongoing costs?
Obviously we talked about seats, right? The number of users that you have in the software. What else, as far as the comparison there with custom, you've got some kind of maintenance going on, how do those costs compare?
[Kelson Erwin] (26:28 - 27:21)
Generally, they are a 10th of the cost or less. It depends on what your application needs to do and how many resources it needs to have. But generally speaking, we're talking for the biggest of apps, less than a thousand dollars a month for the hosting costs.
And there's probably gonna be some like bug fixes and patches and security updates that need to be implemented. When we compare the ongoing costs of a custom solution versus an off-the-shelf, it's not comparing apples to apples really because one is so much cheaper than the other and that's the custom software. It's so much cheaper.
Unless you're barely using the off-the-shelf software, you have like five users on it. The general exception to a lot of the things we're saying is if you're in a very small team.
[David Guthrie] (27:22 - 28:28)
Makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of those steps we sort of talked about, right? It's like if you're real small, you probably don't want anything custom yet, right?
And then as you're growing, you wanna just kind of start to customize and automate the flow of data between these systems. So you haven't really gotten rid of any of these systems yet. You're kind of just adding to your little Frankenstein's monster.
And then step three is, okay, let's identify which things to replace. And that's where you really get the big impact to the efficiency of your operation, right? Is when you can now say, we're gonna build a platform that does what these three systems do and we're gonna consolidate it all into one spot and it's gonna be connected to these other systems so that we get the right analytics that we need over here, the right notifications sent to the right people, right?
So yeah, that's kind of the steps in business growth where you want to adjust your strategy when it comes to technology, right?
[Kelson Erwin] (28:29 - 33:37)
Yeah, that's right. Generally, when I'm speaking about this topic and I'm making the case for custom software, it's because I'm excluding the fact that there's many small teams that greatly benefit from the off the shelf solutions. But as soon as you need to scale, to integrate or to make something like more customizable, then that drives the need for custom up and up and up.
One thing a lot of businesses don't consider is that there's really no regulation around how secure the off the shelf software really needs to be. Like, did you hear about the big windows vulnerability or not vulnerability, but the big outage that we had the other day? Oh yeah.
Yeah, it was CrowdStrike. They had a massive outage that literally took down like 8 million windows machines and everybody that it wouldn't even boot into windows. So they couldn't do like over the air updates and every single windows machine that had that software had to have somebody literally go with a cart and plug in a laptop to each and every single machine that was running that software.
And people paid them millions, if not billions of dollars. I'm not sure exactly how large CrowdStrike is. But the point is that there are no laws that say the software has to run this much or that it needs to be this secure.
Like security vulnerabilities and exploits happen all the time. And there's really nothing that we can do to stop them. And what I found really interesting from my position and my technical knowledge on how web applications work is that generally speaking, web applications are a lot less secure than you think they are.
And I've had a number of situations where I'm evaluating different off-the-shelf software myself or for a client. And I find a vulnerability just like out in the open. I'm really not even looking for it.
But I'm like, hey, that's a little bit weird. Why does the URL end in a number? What happens if I increase that by one number?
Boom, I'm seeing somebody else's data. I saw that with COVID tests during COVID. Oh, wow.
I went to download one, and I saw the URL had just an integer. I bumped it up one, and it gave me somebody else's COVID test. Yeah, that one could be there.
I know there is some legislation to backtrack a little bit. If you're in a country that has the GDPR or if it's HIPAA data, then there is some level of security that you need to have. But it's still not good.
And so, I mean, that should be a concern as well when trying to make the decision. When I'm looking at different off-the-shelf solutions, I just understand that by putting my data into this solution, I'm giving the people who own it that data. There's nothing that says that they can't look at it.
And I'm also accepting the fact that it could be leaked at some point. So if you're not okay with that, if that's not something that your business can handle, it's not a risk that you could take, then it really makes sense to build something yourself because we can lock it up like Fort Knox. We can make it incredibly secure and reduce every risk of somebody exploiting your data.
Yeah, that's a thing to consider. And then there are different regulations for software. There's like one called the SOC2.
And you can see, have they been, do they have these cybersecurity compliance frameworks in place? If they do, that's a good indicator that this off-the-shelf solution is good. Generally, what we do when we're trying to make very secure software is we follow one of these cybersecurity frameworks like SOC2 or like there's another, it's ISO 27001 is what I think it's called.
And these frameworks are put in place to help auditors understand how secure a business is from a cybersecurity compliance perspective. So it's just a kind of a good little pointer, like, hey, if you're gonna use off-the-shelf software, find one that has that done. Like I said, even with these systems in place, they're very generic.
When you build custom software, you can get very specific about how the data is handled. Again, circling back to the, do you want your risk something that you have control over or something you don't have control over? What is the cost benefit analysis on that for your business?
That's something that you need to decide. So yeah, that's a kind of a long-winded way to say a lot of off-the-shelf software is very insecure. And if you're gonna put your data in there, be really careful and to look for good certified software solutions.
And if you can't handle that risk, don't do it.
[David Guthrie] (33:38 - 34:03)
Yeah. And that applies to what you were talking about earlier too with like low-code builders where people are using these drag and drop builders. I know you've told me in the past some of the things that you've seen with people's NAC applications where their API key was totally visible, for example.
So you could just use their key and do whatever you want basically with their system.
[Kelson Erwin] (34:04 - 34:31)
Yeah, but that's generally the consequence of somebody that really doesn't know what they're doing, doing something they shouldn't. I don't think that there's a lot of security vulnerabilities from NAC. I think that that was a situation of somebody copying some custom code that they saw in some forums and pasting it into their app.
You're right, you can make mistakes and these drag and drop tools, it's hard to know how secure they really are. So it's good to ask about that at least.
[David Guthrie] (34:32 - 35:03)
And that's exactly what I mean is if you're not an experienced engineer and you're going to take on a project to develop an application, even if you're using a drag and drop builder and you're using very little code, you're opening yourself up to some risks because you're going to be building something and you might not know if you're not following best practice. So that's where it's really important to have somebody who's an expert tell you at least what you should be doing if not handling the project for you.
[Kelson Erwin] (35:03 - 38:41)
Yeah, I've seen a lot of people go into these low-code builders and they are able to build out a lot of what they need. However, I'd say generally speaking, a lot of times they realize that, hey, this could be done better. We could have somebody build this for us because it might not be exactly right.
So they end up having us rebuild or fix some of the problems with their low-code implementation just so that they know that we're following all of the best practices and building it in the way that's most scalable and flexible for their needs. But yeah, I mean, these off-the-shelf solutions are not a silver bullet. They're really not.
It's just an option in the millions of different options that a business has. And they have their own costs as well, right? You gotta get your data in there, which is pretty costly and expensive or can be if you have a lot of data.
You have the security considerations that we talked about, all the training and adoption, how long is it gonna take to train people? But you're still not actually solving the root problem a lot of times. You're just getting one step closer where the root problem is that it's just not something that is working terribly good for your business.
You're still shoehorning yourself into something that's not optimal because these low-code builders, they're not made for your business. They're just a little less generic, a little more specific than an off-the-shelf product. So at the end of the day, you end up having the same problems, right?
You have the licensing fees. A lot of times they're for users. You have the cost of customization, of integrating, and of scaling that custom software doesn't have.
But they can be a little better and they're especially good if you are prototyping an idea. If you're not sure if something's gonna work and you're just trying to see, you're trying to explore some different options. It's also really good for when you have a low number of users using it.
Like if you're trying to decide, oh, do we wanna create an Excel sheet and share that back and forth? Or should we have a low-code tool handle this? Like not low risk, not your key operational workflows going through these systems can be pretty advantageous.
They're really fast to build. So, and we use them. We don't build everything custom, right?
We use off-the-shelf software. We use QuickBooks for our billing. I'm not gonna build my own solution for QuickBooks.
But then again, I'm the only user, and with my accounting team, there's only a couple of users. So we don't pay a lot for the users. With their billing model, if you make enough money, then it might be worth it for you to switch.
But I wouldn't switch to a custom billing solution. That just doesn't make sense. We're also using ChatGPT and Anthropic Cloud.
Well, why are we using that? Why don't we just build one? That's funny, right?
Of course, we can't build that. They spent millions and millions and millions of dollars training these models. So you kind of have to use it if the technology is really advanced.
And then as far as the low code goes, if you have something that you're doing in spreadsheets and you just wish it was a little bit better, then you can use Notion. You could use NAC, Bubble. And those are good step-ups from there that might meet your needs.
But when it comes to key parts of your business's operation, things that if they go down, you lose money, you probably shouldn't be building them in low code tools.
[David Guthrie] (38:41 - 39:27)
Awesome. Well, thank you. I think that's a pretty clear picture of the pros and cons between the two when it does make sense to go with off the shelf and when it makes sense to start to customize.
And whether that's middleware or building out your own platform, taking those steps are high impact projects, right? These are the things, if you do it right, if you plan and you prioritize the right things, this is how you really start to see your business grow efficiently and not be spending too much on every task that you're completing, every process that you have, every sale you're making, right? You start to really build the efficiency across your whole operation by tackling these custom projects.
[Kelson Erwin] (39:28 - 40:45)
Yeah, and it really, if you don't do it, if you're using an inefficient system to run your business, then your competitors are going to, and you're going to fall behind. So there's also the opportunity cost of gaining a competitive advantage through having systems that are really tailor fit to your business, increase your business efficiency, increase your customer satisfaction, make your customers feel really special. There's a whole bunch of hidden opportunities when it comes to building out custom software that need to be considered when you do the cost benefit analysis.
What is it worth to the customers? How much longer will your customers stay around if you have a process that's really specific to them, something that makes it really easy for them? And you need to think about these long-term implications when you're choosing between the systems.
And remember that it gives you a huge edge in the market. People want custom software, they want fast systems. Customers want to have their experience very individualized and look around at the world around us.
The people who innovate are the people who grow the fastest. So if you're not doing that, then you're kind of handicapping yourself.
[David Guthrie] (40:45 - 41:19)
Yeah, absolutely. So if you're at a spot where you're scaling, your business is growing, or you're not even sure if it's time to have custom code yet or not, reach out to us. You can find us at ksensetech.com and schedule a free consultation with an expert. And we'll do some workflow analysis. We'll take a look at exactly what your systems are, what your process is, and be able to make recommendations on pros and cons of how you can go about really making your business efficient and making sure you can scale up. So thank you so much for joining me today, Kelson.
Thanks, David.