<story><title>SaaS services behind a startup</title><url>https://www.bytebase.com/blog/30saas-services-behind-startup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danwee</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just because I&amp;#x27;m getting old, but this whole &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t build it yourself, buy it. Focus on your own business, and whenever you need something extra, use a Saas&amp;quot; seems to me like an anti-pattern. I cannot back it up, it&amp;#x27;s a gut feeling.&lt;p&gt;Now, if somehow your people need Figma, you are not going to build it yourself (that would be crazy). But perhaps the question to ask is &amp;quot;Do you actually need Figma?&amp;quot;. If your business absolutely depends on how your UI&amp;#x2F;UX looks and feels, then sure, designers in your company have a powerful voice and, indeed, Figma may be a very valuable tool. But I don&amp;#x27;t think Bytebase needs Figma. Sure, their designers will probably need to work with prototypes and designs, but the whole thing is not essential to the business imho.&lt;p&gt;Same goes for Linear, Neat, Sourcegraph, and a few others. And my argument is not, the money ($1K&amp;#x2F;month should be something any SaaS with decent revenue can easily afford), my argument is dependencies: why on Earth would I want to build a product with some many dependencies?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know. Building a product with so many dependencies feels very amateur, error prone, and prone to instability. Again, it&amp;#x27;s just a gut feeling from some old dude that has been doing software since the late 90s. Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just the way things are done nowadays.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>naet</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a big trend of HN voices where people claim design somehow isn&amp;#x27;t important when in fact design demonstrably drives sales, user acquisition and user satisfaction.  IMO design is often the #1 most important thing outside of the product itself, and great design can elevate a mediocre product into something great.&lt;p&gt;Their monthly Figma bill is $15.  If you saw how gutted people were by the adobe figma acquisition, you might be able to infer how great of a tool it is and how much productivity people get from it.  There&amp;#x27;s no way not paying for it is a good idea.</text></comment>
<story><title>SaaS services behind a startup</title><url>https://www.bytebase.com/blog/30saas-services-behind-startup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danwee</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just because I&amp;#x27;m getting old, but this whole &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t build it yourself, buy it. Focus on your own business, and whenever you need something extra, use a Saas&amp;quot; seems to me like an anti-pattern. I cannot back it up, it&amp;#x27;s a gut feeling.&lt;p&gt;Now, if somehow your people need Figma, you are not going to build it yourself (that would be crazy). But perhaps the question to ask is &amp;quot;Do you actually need Figma?&amp;quot;. If your business absolutely depends on how your UI&amp;#x2F;UX looks and feels, then sure, designers in your company have a powerful voice and, indeed, Figma may be a very valuable tool. But I don&amp;#x27;t think Bytebase needs Figma. Sure, their designers will probably need to work with prototypes and designs, but the whole thing is not essential to the business imho.&lt;p&gt;Same goes for Linear, Neat, Sourcegraph, and a few others. And my argument is not, the money ($1K&amp;#x2F;month should be something any SaaS with decent revenue can easily afford), my argument is dependencies: why on Earth would I want to build a product with some many dependencies?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know. Building a product with so many dependencies feels very amateur, error prone, and prone to instability. Again, it&amp;#x27;s just a gut feeling from some old dude that has been doing software since the late 90s. Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just the way things are done nowadays.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unity1001</author><text>&amp;gt; Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just because I&amp;#x27;m getting old, but this whole &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t build it yourself, buy it. Focus on your own business, and whenever you need something extra, use a Saas&amp;quot; seems to me like an anti-pattern. I cannot back it up, it&amp;#x27;s a gut feeling.&lt;p&gt;Nope, its legit: Majority of startups don&amp;#x27;t have the resources building themselves. They can, but every dollar spent on that and not the product ends up being a risk.\&lt;p&gt;The objective of a startup is to get to a stable and strong position as fast as possible. And this can only happen with its product&amp;#x2F;business. The &amp;#x27;great infra&amp;#x27; that it may have behind is totally transparent and, honestly, irrelevant as far as the end users and customers are concerned. We, as technical people, love to think that if the infra or the software breaks, it will affect the business too. But it will rarely break, with any competent people handling it behind the scenes. Be it in-house, be it SaaS.&lt;p&gt;Its MUCH better to get to a point where the product&amp;#x2F;business is actually making money and the company has the funds and deal with everything later. Because without a viable business, it won&amp;#x27;t matter how great your infra or software stack is.</text></comment>