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Comment by uticus | Hacker News Reader

> We're using a third-party product that functions, but barely.

> Our business operates in a specific niche and there are no other providers who cater specifically to our industry.

If you decide to do in-house, I’d recommend thinking about competing against existing as a new revenue stream, and spinning it off as a separate business unit as much as possible. I imagine this is implied in your question but it wasn’t specifically mentioned.

> Besides, can we even attract experienced developers to a non-glamorous industry like logistics?

Yes. Are you kidding? Non-glamorous reads as safe in uncertain times. It’s a positive point that will be a marketing multiplier for attracting talent, if coupled with other indications that your business has clear goals and good ideas.

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> If you decide to do in-house, I’d recommend thinking about competing against existing as a new revenue stream, and spinning it off as a separate business unit as much as possible.

That’s taking the second step before the first. If this is going to work at all, first try to build a solution that works for you. Once you have that, then there may be a chance that others will find it useful as well, but it is a whole lot of additional work to turn an in-house solution into a proper product, and your in-house needs are unlikely to translate 1:1 to other companies, and vice versa.

You’re both correct. Absolutely you need to start small and build confidence over time. However, it’s important to know early if you plan to eventually make the product a profit center. You can establish legal and technical foundations that will make your life much easier down the road.

Another option is to consider building in the open. If the technology is not a differentiator in your industry, then maybe you build it open source under GPL. That way you can build a consortium of similar firms to build a genuine alternative to the status quo while preventing lockout.

You don’t have to decide about proprietary vs open source release now… but you should consider taking steps to preserve those options down the line.

+1. Last startup I worked at basically tore itself apart because certain leaders fantasized about spinning of "AWS for X" before we had even met our own needs.

On this point it’s worth noting that internal users are very very different from external users too.

An internal user that can wander over to Bob and say hey, this thing isn’t working quite right, I’ll grab a coffee with you and we can talk through it, is very different from a paying corporate who will not tolerate service falling below a certain standard. I joined a company where they were trying to transition an internal piece of condition monitoring software to be a SaaS app and it went really badly wrong, the sales people seemed to assume it was ready for this but it just wasn’t and needed a huge amount of hardening and security work, not to mention features to make it easier to use.

Same here, C-staff tried to start a cloud service company "but X".

There was no market for it, it was too expensive, too unwieldy and too nonstandard.

AWS could do 90% of what the custom cloud product could and the last 10% was regulatory stuff, not technical.

People often ask me about potentially selling software I’ve built for our company (a similar situation to OP), but one important factor to remember is that part of what makes the software great for us is its focus. As soon as you start selling it, you have to add feature after feature to meet the various customer needs, which then makes it worse for us. This may be a worthwhile trade off if the potential revenue is large enough, but it’s important to consider in advance.

Remember that writing bespoke internal software and general-purpose commercial software are very different things with very different budgets, and you will need support staff. Do your research and talk with someone who understands commercial software before planning any kind of spin off. These are two very different goals, even if one would hypothetically fulfil the other.

Yes. Clear goals is the big one. There is a lot to gain in our industry, in terms of technology. We’ve seen a lot of disruption plays coming from VC backed tech companies but I hope coming at it from the ‘other’ side, the industry side, can create great value too.

Love your username - I had a friend who used to live in one of those :)

Sorry I missed this thread, I think it was meant for me.

I currently work for a small logistics company as a senior engineer. I am pretty happy and not looking for work (like many of the comments here), but I am happy to converse or schedule a call sometime if you're interested to discuss. 0x03e14@protonmail.ch.

Other commenters had I think the correct answer - you just need ONE REALLY GOOD IT co-founder or vice president to help coordinate that, who can both leverage outsourced solutions but also build things on their own, and most importantly who truly understands and cares about the logistics and cost savings.

I see a lot of dysfunctional and large tech teams building out over-complicated solutions with zero industry awareness, instead of lean solutions.

Did you see this article [1] here from a couple months ago about Temu's semi-managed delivery model? I was pleasantly surprised to see logistics on YC. We don't talk about it enough but it's the backbone of global economy.

Best of luck! Let us know what you decide to do and shoot me an email if you want to connect.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40497472 - Temu's semi-managed model could change everything

IMO spinning off comes with it's own complexities in terms of product - If you are writing it for 'in house' you are writing bespoke software to your own requirements, but there are players out there in the logistics software market (across most verticals) that are making products designed to support different configurations / businesses / processes by default (i.e. the business logic isn't as rigid as you would build it for your own in-house software, and you build the software differently if you are designing it to be used as configured software rather than just to support your own requirements).

Would be interested to know the industry and any specific requirements that are very unique!

Definitely could attract talent, not only is stable job but it is green fields with flexibility to choose your own technologies and build something ground up.

Most engineers don't love joining a giant co. and using tech we are not fond of.

Don’t build it to sell - explicitly. Build it to solve your business problem and tell the guy building it “after we’ve separated ourselves from our competitors and we’ll either declare our company a software company that does logistics, or we’ll set an environment for you to pitch the sale of the software to competitors”

A startup mindset is importantly for the first hires, but selling software is an aspiration not a requirement.

That aspiration can be distracting from simpler business problem solving solutions too, so be clear “new codebase” when we are ready to sell…

Shortcuts for us, no shortcuts on the software resell company.

Also logistics sort of famously has interesting computer science problems to solve.

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