One of my company’s business models includes, or is hinged on, custom work. We do custom websites, custom web applications, custom mobile applications, custom web design, custom hosting solutions, custom etc. Our real competitive advantage is for a price you can get exactly what you want. But therein is the problem: for a price.
The individuals, small and medium sized businesses, or non-nationally-targeted companies can’t afford a $50,000 internet marketing budget. (Even if there was some assurance of making that back within a quarter, money’s tight. As we’ve seen in previous difficult years marketing budgets are among first to be cut to save cash.) So do we need to lower our prices? Become faster? Ignore the aforementioned markets? One way or another, it seems like I’m forced to discount the value of the work we do to accommodate the spending ability of a prospect.
What if we didn’t re-invent the wheel every time we had a new project? As with any company it turns out things we’re best at, we’ve created with multiple clients or future deployments in mind. We’d said a year ago we wanted to start trying to leverage existing code and applications and I’d say, considering we have around a dozen SaaS deployments, estimation/quoting tools, enterprise level custom content management systems, tons of custom WordPress deployments, (you get the idea) – I’d say we’re there.
Wild Apricot is a membership-based software. Piryx is donation and fundraising software. OpenSocial is a networking platform. (More fun can be found at Programmable Web.)
If we’re planning on doing custom work or if a client needs a feature, why not leverage something that exists already that we didn’t author ourselves? Talk to me about advantages, disadvantages and really what your preference would be: all custom work, leveraging existing software and plug-ins or only using plug and play software to power online campaigns.
I understand there’s pride in making our own applications and plug-ins for third party open source software, but other competitors are making bank off of reusing and customizing open source platforms – and even if there are fees associated (which would get passed on to a client or covered in any of estimates anyway) it’s still good to take advantage of tools already in existence. Regardless, taking advantage of customizing standard open-source work (WordPress, RoR packages, etc) should allow anyone to still offer custom solutions at high value for a little-less cost. It’s a win for everyone right?