If you want to stand out, you need to have your own identity. This is true whether you’re talking about you, the person, individually, or your business. You can’t really have your own distinct identity if everything about you is just vanilla, off-the-shelf stuff that anyone else could easily do if they chose to do so. I’m mainly focusing on businesses and their branding and positioning here, but you’ll see parallels that apply to personal brands as well.
The TL;DR here is this:
Own what makes you, you.
What that means:
Build what is core to your identity; outsource or buy the rest.
Build vs. Buy
One of the age old questions in software is, should we build this (thing we need), or buy it?
This question has a few implications:
- An off-the-shelf solution (product, library, component, etc) exists and can solve our problem
- The value of solving the problem exceeds the cost of the solution
- We factor in the time it takes to learn and integrate the solution for the above cost
Assuming there is a solution we could buy that would solve our problem with positive ROI, why wouldn’t we just do that?
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If our problem is one we are trying to solve for our customers:
- What value are we adding (over them just using the solution directly)?
- How are we preventing any competitor from doing the same thing?
- How will integrating this solution now impact our ability to iterate and evolve in the future?
When we talk about identity of a business, it’s in the eyes of our customers. If our customers see us as a “value” option, then it may be fine for us to find the cheapest solution, make it easy for our customers to use, and ship it. But if we’re trying to compete anywhere further up the value chain, it’s likely we’ll want to offer a user experience that is tailored to our specific users and what they expect from their interactions with us and our products.
Apple has a very different brand identity than Walmart. Apple is the high-end experience brand; Walmart is the cheap value brand. Even if Apple can solve a problem they have in their hardware with a commodity part, they’ll probably design a custom one. The same for their software. They understand they need to own that experience, in order to own (and retain) their identity in their customers’ eyes. Other brands may need to compete more on price, and it will make sense to leverage commodity solutions in many cases.
Remember you have limited resources. Just because you can build something, doesn’t mean you should. And just because you can build it today, doesn’t mean you want to be saddled with maintaining it forever (or until you spend the effort to migrate to something else). The cost isn’t just the cost to build version 1; the lifetime cost is often much, much higher.
What Is “Own What Makes You You”?
Your brand is how your customers see you. Every interaction you have with your customers helps communicate your identity to them. For your software applications and solutions, your customers and users are going to quickly get a “feel” for how they like using it. The user experience. It’s the identity of the app, and it ties into the identity of the brand.
Things users will notice, even subconsciously:
- Is it pleasant or frustrating to work with?
- Is it intuitive or confusing?
- Is it clunky or polished?
- Is it fast or slow?
- Is it reliable or flaky?
- Is it fun and quirky or conservative and professional?
Notice that none of these things are typically mapped to individual features or user stories. These are all “non-functional requirements” of systems. “-ilities”. Architectural attributes. And often they are heavily impacted by decisions that were made long ago which have very long-lasting impacts.
Obviously all things being equal, we’d like our apps to be reliable, fast, pleasant, etc. And some more stylistic things like fun vs. professional don’t have a clear winner for any given application.
But in any case there are limits to how much effort is warranted for things like design when the number of users is quite small. The ROI for a small design change to Spotify’s music app is going to vary drastically from the UI design tweaks made to accommodate a lone office admin who needs to run a report once a quarter.
In the former case, it’s very important that Spotify own their whole app experience, as that’s a key part of their brand identity and how their customers interact directly with them. In the latter case, while internal users and the tasks they perform are no doubt important for the company, they don’t has such a direct impact on the company’s brand identity. Whether that application is a bespoke one-of-a-kind snowflake of perfect code and UX design or an Excel sheet with some macros doesn’t make much of a difference as long as it gets the task done (and doesn’t make the user quit over how awful it is to use).
“Own what makes you, you” means owning the experience and the key differentiators your customers see. What is it you do uniquely well? Why do customers stick with you instead of jumping to your competitors? That’s what makes you, you, in the eyes of your customers.
The Build vs. Buy Principle
There are many factors involved in the classic build versus buy decision. I’ll talk more about this elsewhere. But in many cases it should be very simple:
If it’s not core to your brand identity, outsource it; if it is, own (build) it.
Everything else is nuance.
Summary
As a business, you need to have a unique identity. It’s your brand. It’s what your customers think when they think of you or your brand. You have control over it, but not complete control since it lives in the minds of others. You influence it with your choices.
One common choice is whether to invest in custom work that you then own, or to leverage an off-the-shelf commodity solution. The classic build vs buy choice. For things that relate to your identity, you should own those things, not rent them from others. Own the things that make you, you. Otherwise, you will be trivial to copy or simply indistinguishable from your competition, neither of which is a good way to build a strong brand that differentiates itself from its competitors.