Why we’re building our own app

“Build vs. buy” is one of the basic strategic decisions that every business has to make at some point. Building software isn’t usually a good idea for a small, bootstrapped business like Superpath, unless that business is selling software.

Historically, Superpath is a community-driven business relying on a few tools to keep things (sort of) connected: Slack, Stripe, Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, etc. We’re flush with great SaaS tools to send email, do accounting and send invoices and so our basic needs are met. We don’t really need to build software and besides, it’s been cost-prohibitive which has prevented me from getting too distracted by the idea.

Software drives better customer experiences

But a new need emerged over the last year: a better customer experience. Our “tech stack” (strong wording there) was limiting our customer experience in a few ways:

• Multiple logins. Some customers had as many as four logins (Slack, Superpath Pro, job board and Stripe). Related to this, we manage customers in those four places, plus our marketing automation tools.
• Generic communication. The lack of integration between the tools we use makes it difficult to understand the customer journey and provide guidance. We end up sending a few email sequences to just about everyone.
• Hard to innovate. We have all kinds of ideas for products, services, events, etc. and sometimes get lost in the weeds of how we’d actually make them happen. For example, we have a list of content examples that has lived in an Airtable base for years, and that link gets sent out in emails occasionally. It’s quite useful, but it’s not part of any cohesive experience and we don’t have an easy way to make it part of the experience we want to create.
• Feels janky. There’s no other word for it. Our customers can tell when things are duct-taped together and while our awesome customers are supportive of Superpath, we want the money you spend here to be the best money you’ve ever spent in your life. And to do that, we need to create a way better experience.

None of this was clear all at once, but it became gradually obvious as our list of ideas got longer and the list of things we could realistically implement stayed pretty darn short.

A.I. is driving down the cost of software

At the same time, something else has been happening that I didn’t really expect. The cost of developing software is going way down because generative A.I. is really good at writing code.

My friend Andrew Tate (not that Andrew Tate) chatted about this recently. I explained that I wanted to build software but didn’t really understand where to start, or how to budget for it, or how quickly things could be built. He gave me a quick tutorial on how a technical person can use A.I. to write code as quickly as us marketers can spin up an email draft. You still need a technical person to manage it because a block of code does you no good if you don’t know what to do with it. But this opened my eyes. We got into deeper talks and he agreed to come on as our CTO.

Within a few weeks, we had a simple but functioning app. I was honestly stunned because this cost a fraction of what I was quoted by a few devs, and it was going to improve the customer experience almost immediately.

It did take some time to get the bones of our simple app together. At first, it just felt like we were rebuilding some of the things we already have (we were), but all of this had to be done to begin the process of consolidating the customer experience.

This recently went live, and while it’s basic, it represents a cool milestone for Superpath and our customers. This is now possible, which has opened my eyes to all kinds of cool ways we can help our customers.

All our planning is now going into this, and now that we’ve built the bones of it, we can finally take advantage of all the advantages that building your own software comes with. Namely, building really valuable features that will make our customers’ lives and work better.

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