The ROI of Due Diligence
One of my friends owns a small business. New to marketing, he purchased a simple solution to collect emails and distribute his newsletter.
It all led to a crazy story he told me last week.
“My sister-in-law found out that you can track who did what on my newsletter. For example, if I have an article about my latest product, once someone clicks the link to learn more, I can get an alert that she took a look. That way I can strike while the iron is hot and reach out to her with a discount.”
“Sounds good. Which technology are you using for that?”
“Don’t ask me Oren. We looked at about 15 solutions, all costing 5 times more then we were spending on emails already. We choose the one we wanted, and committed to the first three months. When we canceled our current email service, they asked us why. When we told them what we were doing, they said that they offer the same feature as part of the service we are already paying for.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. We have to spend 5 times more money for the next three months to use a feature we already have.”
I cannot tell you how many times I get clients asking me if RavenDB could help them out with a feature they are working on. It’s inspiring to know they are the smartest in the industry. They ask for a demo of their own database to see if it can support something new.
Most of the time they don’t have to invest as much in extra addons or applications because they discover how much work RavenDB can do. Some of the time they don’t have to invest in anything new. Their database covers everything.
Pleasant Surprises Abound
As a developer, I have to read the fine print of everything.
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If I use the proper code syntax and something doesn’t work, I morph into diligence man.
I go into the documentation of the language itself and pour over pages of code snippets and deep level instructions to discover exactly what is going on.
It forces me to read the fine print on everything. It also encourages me to know exactly what a piece of software can do. This helps me get the most of what I am paying for before I have to pay for other things.
Over the past couple of years, we have been giving free demos of our database to anyone who asks. The feedback is interesting. Quite often we hear, “You have full text search? I guess I won’t be needing Elasticsearch.”
We also get, “You offer a native GUI? That will save us some money.”
As an entrepreneur, whatever anyone the company spends comes right out of my pocket.
When one of my developers tells me how he discovered that something we already paid for can do something we are thinking about investing in, my first thought is - Call the barista! The next round of lattes is on me.
It’s a good business practice to keep track of what’s inside the things we already paid for. You never know what’s at the bottom of their crackerjack box.
Oren Eini is the CEO of RavenDB , a NoSQL Distributed Database, and RavenDB Cloud, its Managed Cloud Service (DBaaS). Oren is a Microsoft MVP and a DZone Hall of Famer with over 3.5 million views over ten years writing about NoSQL Database Technology, the .NET Ecosystem, and Software Development. He has been blogging for more than 15 years using his alias Ayende Rahien .