Jason Lemkin and Amelia argue against building custom replacements for enterprise platforms like Salesforce or Workday. The maintenance burden would drain founder time far better spent elsewhere, and even established vendors experience outages. A $5-$100 monthly SaaS subscription beats the hidden costs of building and maintaining your own.
I want to, and I want Emilio to talk about a few of the things we had, but I think this is the meta answer to the meme on social media of, oh, we're going to kill Salesforce because I can Vibe It. Okay. Even if you could, like, which you can't, you can't do a Salesforce or a Workday today, but even if you could, who the hell's going to maintain it? You? You? But you can buy a lot of these apps for like $5 to $100 a month. You're so— Emilio and I are worth a lot more than $5 to $100 an hour, so This is, so we're gonna share our bumps maintaining it just so you can think about how you will, if you choose to build it versus buy it, how you're gonna maintain it. So first one, just to talk about, and this happens, but just today on several of our apps, the preview instance had database issues. They didn't connect, they didn't connect. It's going to get fixed. Bugs happen, issues happen. It happens with lots of vendors. But just from an end user perspective, Amelia, just, just describe in general kind of the issue and what ran through your mind.
I mean, I, you know, I literally was exasperated at the agent. I think it's tough, you know, when, when one thing goes down, your site goes down, it's frustrating. And of course, if you haven't built it yourself, you automatically go to the person, right? Like, oh, my Salesforce isn't working. I'm going to go to Salesforce. Is my website down? If did I— if maybe you have Squarespace or WordPress, like you're going to go to those folks first when one of those things goes down.
