Startup Ops Platforms: Best of Breed vs All in One
I heard from a few of you on the heels of last week’s post on No Code Ops. A couple of you are playing that role at your company. One person is doing no code ops on the side with the day job being CEO - he’s now in the process of hiring an Automation engineer.
This is all timely as, at my startup, we are in the process of figuring out our ops stack. We ship hardware and have subscription products as well. The current setup is Quickbooks + spreadsheets/Notion tables + Shopify, which of course won’t scale. So we’re looking at migrating to a general purpose ERP like NetSuite and actively exploring that path.
But general purpose platforms are just that. Many modern systems today are built for garden variety SaaS or e-commerce businesses and may not be well suited to yours if it doesn’t fit that mold. They weren’t necessarily built to support one-time hardware + recurring software/data subscriptions. So if we were to adopt NetSuite, it would likely require some customization (not to mention a 4-6 month implementation).
At the same time, a couple of you have taken or are considering a different path:
One IoT company is currently on a (shoddy) Netsuite implementation but considering migrating off it. The CEO is a believer in best of breed platforms, especially for new technologies and business models.
Another, later stage with a hardware/ecommerce business has developed their own software for parts database, inventory, pick and pack, order management and the like. They have Netsuite but just for accounting but also have a staff of 4 engineers (out of 150+ FTEs) to cover their back end systems.
My reflection here is that nothing comes for free. You have to pay one way or another whether it’s a) enduring kludgey, manual processes rife with errors and duplicate work, or else b) forcing a general purpose platform to work for your business, or c) investing in talent to connect best of breed platforms or build and maintain your own. The question then becomes where you can get the most leverage from the capital, whether $ or time, you spend.
It also seems that the more mature your space, the more likely all in one platforms will do the trick. Platform decisions like these are tricky even if they are two-way doors as inertia kicks in and any future migration will be painful. I’d love to hear from you if you have any lessons to share from the platform decisions you’ve made.