I'd recommend against it, but then again, I'm building software products in this exact space with my launching customer being a 200-300M annual revenue logistics company. I don't think they could do it in-house. You don't give a lot of info on the exact niche you are in, but the username tells me that you're doing containers in European context, most likely shortsea or domestic, not deepsea. Me telling you the ISO6436 type code for your username is either LEG1 or LEGB depending on max stacking height should tell you I know my stuff :)
Your biggest pain point is most likely that you know your business very well, but you probably do not know enough about the business context of your partners. If you are running a small-ish container terminal for example, you really should know how the depot department of the major carriers are managing their empty stock so you can decide your stacking strategies in the yard. You should probably also have an understanding of benefits vs drawbacks of tower cranes vs gantry cranes found at bigger quays. That then influences what your TOS should be capable of. Same thing goes for intermodal transport planning, you really should know not only how detention/demurrage works, but also what tricks you can pull to optimize for it, and how shipping lines monitor this internally. If you are building stuff in-house, you're inevitably going to be limited in your understanding of the wider market. Short term that's a huge improvement (more tailored software, better flexibility), long term that might cause huge issues.
I can certainly understand the frustration with third-party products. Your description of 'they are understaffed and the platform is stagnant' could realistically apply to pretty much any software provider in this space. There is a huge opportunity for somebody to swoop in and build something, the bar for this sector is mostly something that doesn't straight up suck. And I'm going to be honest: we're trying to be that somebody.
If you'd like to talk, my contact details are in my profile. I'm happy to show you what we're building, and tell you what that is like behind the scenes. If you go ahead with your plan to in-house it, let's stay in contact, perhaps we can learn from eachother.
It's also worth mentioning that the economics of software may be very painful. Right now, the cost of building all that software is being shared across all the customers of this company. OP is proposing his/her company bears the entirety of it.
Assume you can hire good sr engineers. This project badly needs some scoping to figure out how much eng time and how much risk it will take to replace what exists.
I've worked on software for small-run scientific instruments: think 200 to 400 sold. The cost of software can be 30% of the total cost of the projects. It may well be that, given what customers are willing to pay, there isn't enough money in this to build good software.
And for OP, for core software, if customers interact with it as well, you likely need follow-the-sun ops too.
> Your biggest pain point is most likely that you know your business very well, but you probably do not know enough about the business context of your partners.
I'm not in the market, but FYI, the tone of your post wouldn't make me want to buy your stuff. You sound too eager to lecture your customers instead of being eager to learn from them.
I didn't get that from the tone. I inferred this person was trying to convey the perceived importance of some critical things and gave good examples with clear knowledge of the problem domain in a limited space. IOW, I thought it was very well articulated and helpful, FWIW.
It's fine to convey the importance of these things. It's another thing to do it with an implied assumption that OP doesn't know better themselves, which context doesn't really give a lot of clues about. Obviously in the end it's a personal thing anyways.
Fair enough. To clarify, my point was not necessarily “I know better”, but that it is incredibly difficult to get a broad view of the market from a single perspective. This market is by definition a chain of steps with parties that may be antagonistic. It is atypical in that way, and writing software in-house may be more difficult in this sector than in others because of it.
While writing software in-house gives you software better tailored to your exact situation it is at the cost of losing the overview of the business and the perspective of the parties you interact with. Whether that trade-off is worth it I’m probably pretty biased on, so take my stance with a grain of salt, but imo the business is intrinsically relatively ill suited for in-house dev considering the high degree of collab with other parties.
Apologies if it came off as arrogance, that was not what I was going for.
> Apologies if it came off as arrogance, that was not what I was going for.
No need to apologize, just wanted to make you aware of how it came off to me.
> my point was not necessarily “I know better”, but that it is incredibly difficult to get a broad view of the market from a single perspective. This market is by definition a chain of steps with parties that may be antagonistic. It is atypical in that way
Maybe? That description sounds like it could probably be applied to any highly fragmented vertical though...
> imo the business is intrinsically relatively ill suited for in-house dev considering the high degree of collab with other parties.
I think this hits a reasonable point — if most of the development is related to internal operations, it could be a different calculus than if it is mostly related to interchange with other parties, which implies knowing enough about their business to make sense to them.
Then again, if all you have to interchange with other parties is a choice of third-rate bottom-of-the-barrel software providers anyways, I think it can still be reasonable to switch to in-house dev.
> You sound too eager to lecture your customers instead of being eager to learn from them.
One does not necessarily exclude the other, in my experience. Personally I love being told when I’m wrong, and I think the OP was actually fishing for this kind of feedback.
My cheesy tagline for this is “The customer is always right about their problems, rarely about the solution to it”. They know their business inside and out, and I’m not about to tell them otherwise. Metaphorically: if they need to cross a river, that doesn’t make them bridge engineers. But boy will they tell me if the bridge is in the wrong place.
Your biggest pain point is most likely that you know your business very well, but you probably do not know enough about the business context of your partners. If you are running a small-ish container terminal for example, you really should know how the depot department of the major carriers are managing their empty stock so you can decide your stacking strategies in the yard. You should probably also have an understanding of benefits vs drawbacks of tower cranes vs gantry cranes found at bigger quays. That then influences what your TOS should be capable of. Same thing goes for intermodal transport planning, you really should know not only how detention/demurrage works, but also what tricks you can pull to optimize for it, and how shipping lines monitor this internally. If you are building stuff in-house, you're inevitably going to be limited in your understanding of the wider market. Short term that's a huge improvement (more tailored software, better flexibility), long term that might cause huge issues.
I can certainly understand the frustration with third-party products. Your description of 'they are understaffed and the platform is stagnant' could realistically apply to pretty much any software provider in this space. There is a huge opportunity for somebody to swoop in and build something, the bar for this sector is mostly something that doesn't straight up suck. And I'm going to be honest: we're trying to be that somebody.
If you'd like to talk, my contact details are in my profile. I'm happy to show you what we're building, and tell you what that is like behind the scenes. If you go ahead with your plan to in-house it, let's stay in contact, perhaps we can learn from eachother.