Which of the following would you build yourself vs using a SaaS? Ecommerce platform, User management, Inventory, Delivery management/tracking, Payment processing
- Local delivery: There is quite a bit of offline work involved in partnering with the companies etc to deliver for them (i m guessing, not an expert in local delivery). So just wanted to throw this out first.
- Delivery logistics using software: This is probably the core of your business in my opinion. So you may want to build this in house. For example, the entire UI/UX that a user will face to get local delivery via your app/website.
- Other things like payments etc, use existing tools of course like stripe etc.
Think of it this way. If the "SAAS" that you use instead of building in house goes out of business, will your business completely collapse or will you be able to move on to something else (yes it will still be painful i m sure) ?
If you don't know, then use as many pre-built parts as possible; that will allow you to get out and interact with customers ASAP. Then, use their feedback to guide what you need to do better.
Once you know what your customers aren't getting, but they want, from your service or your competitors, solve those problems.
It often makes sense to use a "good enough for now" SASS solution while you focus on more critical pieces of the company. As you grow, you can migrate off of it.
For example, you might want to consider using Trakin [1] to jumpstart your delivery logistics codebase while you focus on the human side of deliveries and acquiring customers to deliver from / to.
Then, as you grow, if Trakin doesn't meet your needs you can replace it with an in house solution. Or you can pay for enterprise support and functionality. Or you can switch to another system. Whatever solves the current problem and helps you grow fastest!
[1]: http://trackin.co
Payment processing/other existing website tech - buy instead of build
What I can say is that 70% of the basics regarding E-commerce/local delivery is the same whatever your market is (tour optimization, tracking, driver performances, dispatch, send orders to vendors...). Then there's often specs, based on what your business is exactly doing. That's why we decided to have a focus on food delivery at first, because we can answer every need you may have, from online ordering (adding pickup and catering) to customer relationship and promotion(adding yelp or G+ reviews) to what the drivers need to know regarding their delivery for that specific.
Meanwhile we've built our solution in a flexible way, and with an API, because a lot of things that we've built take a lot of time and expertise and we know other delivery businesses need it too. (And it's often hard to realize it before you actually start building it in house...)
So objectively if I had to start a food delivery business, I would use Trackin (obviously), and if it was a different service, I'd still use a (good) E-commerce solution + an API from a trustable 3rd party to help me manage the deliveries. That could be Trackin on something different based on your needs. A company with a product that will evolve faster that my own product and would save me 2-3+ full time engineers and 6month at least.
You can still do it yourself but in the end you'll be building a dashboard, with a catalog, inventory, delivery management, dispatch, driver app then a customer facing app VS only build a customer facing app, and get the rest from a Saas, customize it so that you can focus on your business. What I like to consider is the following: Why would I spend $$ and time on something for my business if I can have a competitor doing the same thing as me in just a couple of days/weeks thanks to SaaS solutions? Where will be the value added of your business?
Hope that helps and happy to discuss more if needed!
If the thing youre depending on is unique and essential to your business, you're taking a risk because your success depends on their continued success and if that service goes down you go down with it because it cant be easily replaced.
TL;DR You dont have to reinvent the wheel, but for all of the off-the-shelf products you use make sure there are plenty you can replace it with at any time.
You definitely need to find out what is the essential part of your business (that makes you unique) and what's not, to let someone "better" do the job for you or do it yourself.
I'm curious to know what the threads were saying at the launch of AWS though :)
Here's an example, $9.00 isn't much for Photoshop. For it's $120.00 a year. That $30.00 server that barely dents your budget? $360.
If you have a programmer that has devops chops in chef/puppet/salt/ansible, get on his back and have him automate everything on cheap cloud instances.
Chef recipes and such as genius because you consolidate your work in declarative recipes.
However, to answer to your question in more detail I would say:
User management & Delivery management/tracking.
Those two are very crucial parts of any SaaS and can be tweaked in many ways towards the business.
The tracking can be either cheaper or more accurate etc.
And the user manipulation have to be dealt with inside, regardless some generic stuff, there are always industry specific user management stuff.
Local delivery? Seems like a saturated market. How are you going to compete with Amazon?