Question 1

Should you build or buy software for your business?

Accepted Answer

**Buy, unless the software is the thing that makes you different** — which is the general rule, and the interesting part is why businesses so consistently talk themselves out of it.

**The case for buying:**

**Cost.** The purchase price is visible and the build cost is not. Building means specification, development, testing, deployment, documentation, training and — **the part always underestimated — maintenance forever.** Ongoing maintenance typically exceeds initial build cost over a system's life.

**Speed**, since you are operating in weeks rather than quarters.

**Someone else fixes it**, including security patches, browser changes and regulatory updates.

**It improves without you**, as the vendor builds features you did not think of.

**It is tested by thousands of other users**, finding bugs you never will.

**Why businesses build anyway, and the reasons that are usually wrong:**

**"Our process is unique."** Usually it is not — it is unexamined. **Adapting your process to good software is frequently cheaper than encoding your idiosyncrasies in code**, and sometimes improves the process.

**"It will be cheaper."** Almost never, once maintenance is counted.

**"We have developers."** Their time has an opportunity cost, and building internal tools displaces work only you can do.

**"No product does exactly what we want."** The question is whether the gap is worth the total cost of ownership, and 80% fit is usually enough.

**When building is genuinely right:**

**It is your competitive advantage.** If the software *is* the differentiator, buying it means buying what competitors have.

**No adequate product exists**, having genuinely looked.

**Integration is the value**, and a thin layer connecting bought systems is a good build.

**Scale changes the economics**, where per-seat licensing at your size exceeds a build.

**Regulatory or data constraints** prevent using a vendor.

**The middle options**, which are underused: configure rather than customise; extend a platform through its API; and **buy for undifferentiated functions and build only the thin slice that is genuinely yours.**

**Whatever you choose, plan the exit**: data export, lock-in and what happens if the vendor fails.

Question 2

What should a small business actually prepare for, and what is business continuity planning?

Accepted Answer

Planning for how you would keep operating, or resume quickly, when something disrupts you — and for a small business the useful version is short, specific and focused on the handful of things that

Question 3

What is value-based pricing?

Accepted Answer

Setting a price based on what the outcome is worth to the customer, rather than on what it costs you to produce or what competitors charge. It is widely recommended, rarely implemented, and it

Question 4

What are the common mistakes to avoid when starting a business?

Accepted Answer

Common mistakes to avoid when starting a business include lack of a business plan, underestimating costs, ignoring market research, and neglecting marketing.

Question 5

How does business-to-business selling actually work?

Accepted Answer

Through a long, multi-person process in which the decision is rarely made by the person you are talking to — which is why techniques borrowed from consumer selling fail so consistently. What makes it

Question 6

What is founder-market fit?

Accepted Answer

The match between the founders and the particular problem they have chosen — and investors weigh it heavily because at the earliest stage, when there is little product and no traction, it is close to

Question 7

What is product-market fit, and how do you know you have it?

Accepted Answer

The point at which a product satisfies a real, strongly felt need in a market large enough to build a business on — and the honest answer to how you know is that it is unmistakable when you have it

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