Why don’t we just build it
A boat, a flask, and a question nobody had a good answer to.
I was a HubSpot homer. I used it, recommended it, defended it and built around it for years, and for a long time I thought it was one of the better pieces of software a growing company could buy. The operative word is was.
There may or may not have been a flask involved. Single malt variety. Maybe.
THE BOAT
Software that fit the business, instead of the other way round
Hunter and I were fishing in Canada, sitting in the boat, talking about Simpli Soda and whatever else and stuff. He had just finished building a bespoke ERP for Simpli Soda, and the thing worth saying about it is not that it was good. It is that it fit our business exactly — the way we buy, the way we fill, the way we ship, the way inventory actually moves, all the weird little things specific to Simpli Soda that would make no sense to somebody designing generic ERP software for ten thousand different companies. We did not change the business to fit the software. We built the software to fit the business.
THE QUESTIONS
Households, machines and cylinders
That got us talking about the other side of the company. If we could build something that fit operations that well, why were we still cramming demand into software somebody else designed? Why were we paying a marketing contact tax — a bill that climbs every time the list grows, whether those people ever open a thing or not, so you get better at acquisition and get punished on the invoice? Why was the feature we actually needed always one tier up? Why were we buying bolt-ons to make the platform do the things the platform was supposed to do, and then paying somebody else to make the bolt-ons talk to each other? And why was our business getting flattened into contacts and companies, when what we actually have is households, machines and cylinders — three things that software had never heard of and was never going to learn?
THE ONE THAT DECIDED IT
Paying rent on a copy of our own data
Why was everything in there stale by the time we opened it? We were paying rent on a copy of our own data and calling it a system of record. And why were we adapting the business to the software instead of the other way around? At some point the obvious question came up. Why don’t we just build it? So I came home and started.