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Aqfer Insights
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For the last five years, I’ve talked to countless business and technical decision makers at well over a thousand marketing solution providers and agencies. I’ve learned a lot. The passion and enthusiasm people have to move the industry forward continues to be inspiring. But one avoidable mistake I see a lot of companies make is to think that the complete internal soup-to-nuts execution and maintenance of their product roadmap, forever, is the only ticket to success. These companies don’t realize that there is a way to accelerate the roadmap and get to market faster, by separating valuable effort on unique IP from much of the table stakes data infrastructure work that’s already been solved by many other companies.
They use what I call the “Not Invented Here” objection. Understandable, but occasionally misguided.
In my line of work, I also talk to many investors, private equity folks, or M&A-minded executives, and I’ve had a front row seat to understanding what does – and might not – go into an investment or acquisition-of-IP decision. For the vast majority of MADTech companies, to ideate, develop and launch new products and capabilities requires a substantial investment of time and resources on recognized and repeated data infrastructure challenges. These are the challenges – ingesting, unifying and activating customer data – that are difficult AND important, but really don’t add much value to your business.
The end result is significant cost, time and risk to deliver products to market. Companies tend to prefer to take a DIY approach to building their businesses, yet don’t always take into account the ways in which that approach may slow success, not to mention being on the hook to manage, operate, and update all the components they built on their own.
These decisions have real-world implications. Three I know about personally that come to mind:
Broadly speaking, a DIY vs DIT comparison exercise should factor in the upfront costs, namely:
Then you get into indirect costs:
Lastly, you should look at opportunity costs. What is the cost to your organization to:
For MADTech providers, once you’ve made the decision on DIT, you’ll look for a partner that can help you across three important dimensions:
Gaining access to a virtual ‘answer key’ of documentation around processes that have already been solved for : accelerating development time on things that aren’t that interesting to work on, don’t create enterprise value, and won’t excite your talented engineers. All of which ultimately keeps you from getting to other roadmap items in less time.
Ability to move quickly in a low-code environment: you’ll gain speed with your engineers being able to do the work more efficiently. You’ll create much more repeatability; so much so that it becomes a new accelerator for your business. A low code foundation allows you to plug your IP right in, ingest data and get going. A low code foundation also eliminates having to build things from scratch, and it means you can now better meet the aggressive timeframes your sales team promises to new customers.
A wide variety of pre-built integrations with data and activation partners: these are in most cases completely table stakes efforts requiring staff to monitor / operate and yet starting from scratch here can add needless cycles to development efforts. Not to mention the trouble and struggles some data partners and activation partners inevitably throw your way.
By working with partners to deliver on the table stakes efforts around your marketing data product roadmap, you can get to market faster, with less cost, time and challenges. That’s a winning formula. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences. Send me a message here to get the conversation going.