While running Heysan (YC W-07) we were having a hard time hiring; startups were a hard sell back then, and given we were building a product aimed at feature pho

While running Heysan (YC W-07) we were having a hard time hiring; startups were a hard sell back then, and given we were building a product aimed at feature phones it was harder still to convince folks to join. We faced a meaningful decision: whether to buy a subscription to a product or build it ourselves. The notion of SaaS clearly existed back then, but it had not yet developed into what it is now; it was more akin to buying software licenses per CPU than the sort of products and pricing that we have now. Also, pertinently, I was a young and inexperienced CTO who had no real framework for how to approach this problem, so I took it to the board, the answer was resounding: pay for it. In 2011, while deeply ingrained in converting justin.tv -> twitch.tv, the same sort of decision came up: should we build our analytics or should we buy it (mixpanel in this case). This time it was obvious: buy it. In the time from that first decision and the later decision at Twitch I was able to fully appreciate why you buy, and Patrick nails it in the first few sentences: > Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs discover this body of practice the hard way, by making mistakes that have been made before, rather than by spending their mistake budget on newer, better mistakes. also: > Customers love SaaS because it “just works.” There is typically nothing to install to access it. Hardware failures and operational errors, which are extraordinarily common among machines which are not maintained by professionals, do not result in meaningful data loss. I've often retaught these points to folks: "Our job is to deliver a product to our users, they don't care about the ancillary product we use to deliver them our primary product. Buying Saas is like hiring pro's to do a job at the fraction of the cost of hiring pro's to do that job". Or as Matt Brezina (Xobni & Sincerely) likes to say: Hire via API ( http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog/2011/08/hiring-via-api/ http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog/2011/08/hiring-via-api/ )