Positioning in the build vs buy debate

Unlike most other tech startups, if you’re in the Kubernetes space making a product for highly technical engineers, you will be trying to sell a product to someone who is capable of making that product themselves — or at least thinks they are capable of making the product.

This is a positioning problem that’s not totally unique to the software engineering space but is much, much more common than in other industries. If you made excavators for digging sewer pipeline, you’d still have a B2B product but none of your customers would think they could just build their own. If you sold a payment processing SaaS program for accounting departments, the accountants would not likely think they would rather roll their own solution. But if you sell an endpoint security solution or a container deployment engine, you will face at least some stakeholders who are offended that their company is considering buying this product instead of having an internal team build it.

We all know the reality: Unless we’re talking about Google or Netflix, the homegrown solutions probably suck. In fact, it’s likely that you’re having a conversation with the customer because they already tried to build it themselves and the result sucked. That’s good news for you, but can also mean a tricky positioning act and delicate language to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings.

If you’re reading my blog, you probably know this. Your primary competitive alternative in deals is:

  • Build it inhouse

  • Use an open source project

  • Do nothing and let the status quo win

So how do you position against ‘build it ourselves?’

First of all, remember that the value you highlight should always be relative to the competitive alternative you think is most attractive for customers. If you’ve going against ‘build it ourselves,’ you should not highlight things like:

  • Totally customizable — there’s no way it will be as custom as the thing they build from scratch

  • Cheap — most companies have an illusion of saving money when they build it from scratch, even though it is often more expensive. The costs to them are salary, not software licenses. That might even come from a different budget bucket.

Even without looking at your specific product, I can tell you there are a couple of values it could almost certainly provide over ‘build it outself.’ For example:

  • Time to value. Want to have this functionality tomorrow? That’s not gonna happen if you build it yourself.

  • Support. If something goes wrong with the internal solution, you really don’t have anyone else to call.

That’s already something to consider. If your primary ‘competitor’ tends to be an internal solution, you should make sure you provide both of the above value — if it takes forever to get your solution set up, for example, you’ve just become less attractive compared to your primary competitor.

Emily Omier