You Should Be A Software Company

Chris Davis 0:10
And we’re back. Welcome to another episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Listen. I want to, want to take more of an encouraging tone.

Chris Davis 0:22
I feel like it’s been a little heavy the last few in my passionate pursuit of getting you all to understand the power of personal software, internal applications, whatever you want to call them, and some of the trends that I’m seeing in the market that are going against the evolution to your benefit to grow and scale your company. And this is something today. I want to kind of take a little bit of a different approach with this episode and, and really encourage you that you, you may be closer than you think you are to being something you never realized you could be and that’s more valuable than what you thought you wielding. That’s quite a statement, right?

Chris Davis 1:21
And let, let me, let me, I don’t know how I’m gonna, I’ve got, I got my outline, but I think I just need to flow with this one. Here’s the reality. When, when I started to learn how to author apps with AI, my initial fear was building something that required a ton of maintenance on the back end and would require me to build out a team of developers. And that thought kept me from doing anything code based with AI because I just thought that that was the only way that was the final destination.

Chris Davis 2:08
Again, building a SaaS company with AI and building software with AI are not synonymous. They are not the same. Just because I say I’m using AI to build software does not immediately mean I’m building a SaaS. It does not immediately mean I’m building software for the masses to consume.

Chris Davis 2:29
And that’s the biggest thing that people have to understand. And once you’re able to not think in those extremities, a world of possibilities open up, opens up for you. And those possibilities are positioning your company stronger than you may have realized. And I come from the land of clients, client tales and what I’ve been seeing and what I’ve been doing, that’s been working really well.

Chris Davis 2:55
And it just jumped out to me that wait a minute, your, your best advantage nowadays is software. Software is your advantage. Engineering is no longer reserved for high earning companies that can buy or pay for a team of engineers. You can now engineer with very low cost to no cost resources.

Chris Davis 3:27
And I mean, I say no cost. Everything has a cost, very low cost resources, right? Relatively speaking, not low cost, like $1, but low cost. Relatively speaking of what you would, what you would pay for a full engineering team.

Chris Davis 3:40
And let me put it like this. The companies that I’ve consulted with, there’s always a team that can author AI code solutions, AI coded solutions. And in that authorship, of course, I’m leading these teams. So I’m very, very descriptive of, hey, what process do we need to replace, improve?

Chris Davis 4:07
What, what does the data need to show us? Where, how does it need to enter, integrate with the data lake or your tech stack? There’s a lot of decisions to make to make sure that the integration of software in your business backend is done effectively there. There’s a lot that goes into that and I love it.

Chris Davis 4:28
I love it, by the way. It’s just a fun challenge. It’s like a puzzle. I love puzzles.

Chris Davis 4:32
It’s just another one to figure out. So with that being said, as you do it successfully, you realize, wait a minute. And I do this for a lot of e comm companies. And I made this statement.

Chris Davis 4:43
Everybody, I said this, I was talking to a founder as we were just talking through how to level up and some of the solutions we’re doing with AI. And I made this statement. I said, externally you’re an E commerce company, internally you’re a software company and that’s your advantage. And right when I said that, we both kind of paused on the call, on the zoom call.

Chris Davis 5:06
And you know, when you say something heavy, you don’t realize how heavy it was. It hits you just as heavy as it hits them. And that’s where the title of this episode came from. You may already be a software company.

Chris Davis 5:16
I want to talk to those of you who are not behind, those of you that are on the cutting edge, those of you who are proactively deploying software solutions internal to your business to make your processes that much more efficient. Those are the ones who I want to talk to or those of you who desire to be that or desire for your client to be that. And it is the most powerful position that you can have is the position that you are already a software company internally. If you embrace that intentionally, it will unlock exponential growth for you.

Chris Davis 5:57
The advantage is not pouring more money into ads. The advantage is not outspending the competition. The advantage is not going viral. Your advantage today is the fact that you have software that powers your business backend written specifically for you, used only by you.

Chris Davis 6:20
That is the power, right? And in order to unleash this power, there are some things that you have to have, there’s some skill sets that you have to have and some considerations I want to Talk about them so you all can get into the future, the next level, the next stage, get to the cutting edge faster and stay there safely. Right? The first thing is that you have to have an understanding of the process of software development.

Chris Davis 6:50
You really do. And I, and I’ve learned, I learned this, remember everybody, when I don’t know if I told you all, but I, in my company, people hired me to be a fractional cto. Okay, that that is the primary mode of operations. And in fact I don’t think I’ve ever said that on a podcast.

Chris Davis 7:08
So I’ll record a episode later on what exactly I do as a cto, because it’s not your traditional cto. But I’m saying that to say that I don’t have familiarity with the software development process from being on a software team, the startups, the SaaS companies that I’ve worked for, I’ve always been curious, so I’ve inquired. But you can’t not be exposed to the software development process. Working for a SaaS company in itself is the development of software, right?

Chris Davis 7:46
But in my learning of AI authorship and coding, I started to learn more. I learned more about pull requests and multi developer environments where you want to make sure that changes are merged effectively. I learned about GitHub. I didn’t really know what GitHub was.

Chris Davis 8:08
I mean I’ve learned so much. And in learning I realized how critical of a skill that is needed for your company internally. So that’s the first thing you need to have expertise in understanding the software development process. That’s your first step.

Chris Davis 8:29
And once you have that, that usually by the way, the easiest way to do that is to find a software developer who’s AI adjacent, right? They’ve got software development skills, but they also leverage AI. Those are the best builders because they give you the best of both worlds. You don’t want the software developer that’s just like, oh, you don’t want AI doing that.

Chris Davis 8:52
Only a person should be writing that and da, da, da, that’s gonna, they’re static, they’re stuck, they’re stuck in a outdated way of thinking, in an approach that’s not gonna serve your business, your company of getting to the cutting edge and staying there safely. You need somebody that is a seasoned software developer that leverages AI because they know how to put guardrails around that thing. They know how to keep that agent in check. They know when to say, hey, you know what, I can get this deployed overnight.

Chris Davis 9:23
We don’t need to go through a full dev cycle for this, this is a simple implementation or hey, I built this Chrome plugin for the team. Now when they click this, it’ll just do XYZ for them. That’s what you need. Okay, if you, if you can find that, that’s half the battle.

Chris Davis 9:39
By the way, maybe that’s even more than half the battle, right? No, that’s half because the other half is you need somebody to lead them, right? And the team. Listen, man, oh my goodness, the teams that I’ve been on have been so small.

Chris Davis 9:52
Sometimes it’s just me as the fractional CTO and a good software developer and we can make magic happen. You all, I mean, it becomes, it’s, it’s something, it’s just something to witness. So that’s your first step. Many of you don’t have that.

Chris Davis 10:11
So you’re, you’re not, I’m not saying don’t build where you are, but just know that’s your, that’s your, that’s your goal. Right? Next is some things to consider, right? So we’ve got that core component.

Chris Davis 10:23
Here’s some things to consider. And this is all. It all falls under the software development process. But qa, QA and testing is one of the biggest things.

Chris Davis 10:34
This is what I’m saying, actually I’m simplifying this. These are the three main levers to become an internal software company. These, these are the three. Have expertise in software development, right?

Chris Davis 10:48
AI friendly software development. Understand the value of quality assurance. I’m about to get into that. And then testing and bug reporting.

Chris Davis 10:56
If you can do those three really well, you’ve got it. You’re going to crush it, right? So quality assurance is what this is. A quality assurance and testing go hand in hand, right?

Chris Davis 11:14
You’re ensuring that the quality of what you created is, it matches the need for your company. And I’m thinking more so in terms of security, access and protections. That’s really, when I think of quality assurance, that’s really, maybe I should say security and move quality assurance under, under testing and reporting. Because you really need to make sure this goes into the understanding software development environment that, that you’re doing things in a way that are secure.

Chris Davis 11:48
There are times, there was a time where I was working with a client that there was an exploit on Meta’s API or something like that. I can’t remember what it was, but if you had a connection to their API, there was like a backdoor that people could get into your database and they were saying, hey, disconnect. It was for a few days and then it went away or whatnot. But the only reason I knew about that is because my software developer was like, hey Chris, we’re gonna have to find another way to integrate with Meta.

Chris Davis 12:17
Right now we’ve got this security issue, this, this and that. So you need to make sure you’re doing things in a secure way. Another thing, remember the E Comm companies that I work with are very large. These are multimillion dollar companies.

Chris Davis 12:33
So they’ve got a vast database structure. And when you start to enable people to have access via MCP or built interfaces and all of that, there becomes a layer of security that makes sure that certain people don’t have access to everything in the system. Right. You don’t want somebody who just started being able to query your financials just because you don’t have a guardrail around very sensitive information and very internally public information.

Chris Davis 13:06
Right. And I, I believe the term, the term for these are service workers. But your software person knows that because they know software development and they know it needs to be implemented and they’ll use AI to deploy it quickly. Right?

Chris Davis 13:23
So there’s all kind of security measures that you need to have in place before you can really start to leverage on the benefits of software development. Even to the point of how you structure your CLOTH or chatgpt environment using projects, what people have access to in projects. If you’re running mcps, who has access to which queries? I mean, security is a big thing.

Chris Davis 13:50
Everyone. And that’s what I’m saying. It’s a collective effort in you making sure that you have somebody that understands software development and then somebody leading them that understands the importance of security in technology and how technologies integrate. There are certain ways that you can do API and, or webhook to make it more secure, API rate limiting, to make sure that IP addresses or unknown URLs or bots can’t keep hammering your API and running up your bandwidth and usage.

Chris Davis 14:33
These are things I learned by leading these teams that you just ensure is in place. Because now you’ve got the software skills and you’ve got this, the security in place. The last thing that you need is a firm and solid testing process. Because even though the technology, the software, is only being used by people internal to your business, doesn’t mean you get to bypass that process.

Chris Davis 15:01
Right. It just makes the process easier because their day to day is doing the process. So if they just keep doing what they’ve always done, testing and QA is built in. Right, but, but the thing that I want to highlight is how do you Report bugs.

Chris Davis 15:23
How do you report when things are broken? One method very sloppy is slack. You can have a slack channel that everybody just posts there when something’s broken. You do not want that by the way.

Chris Davis 15:34
It’s too hard to track. Keep update and all of you want a formal process. A lot of times what we do is we have just a little help. Bubbles right come up.

Chris Davis 15:44
You can report a bug that is relative to the page or the app that they’re using and that way they just click that thing. They say hey, this happened, this is what was supposed to happen. And then when they hit enter on the back end, it’s looking at what page, what app and all of that. It’s doing all of that sorting of course automation throughout via AI via automation.

Chris Davis 16:07
It’s doing all the sorting for you so that you can have a back end. Whether it’s Jira, Confluence, whatever. Your own project management tracking software where you can track what needs to be done update and then push those updates to the, to. To.

Chris Davis 16:24
To the main branch of your, of your Software. In, in GitHub you, you do those things and again this is over time you get good at those things. Now you have everything you need to build software for the processes internal to your business. And not just the processes, but you also build software to visualize the performance, right?

Chris Davis 16:51
You get to see the metrics you want to look at how you want to look at them. And every company though we all they, the E Comm, they all have the same ALV add to cart lifetime customer value upsell purchase rate and decline rate. There’s some global metrics. Every company measures things differently though they have different meanings behind all of those metrics.

Chris Davis 17:22
So you can’t be stuck to a static dashboard solution. You’ve got to be able to build your own, right? Plus you have to be able to execute your processes more efficiently with software. And I’m speaking just even from my business, there are so many processes that I thought I would have to hire somebody and pay them $500 which I have done that in the past, gladly.

Chris Davis 17:47
I got my money’s worth. But now you. Everything is just so doable with a little API and webhook action and just knowing, knowing, knowing what to do. You can get, you can remove the spreadsheets and I think that’s the biggest power is replacing spreadsheets with software is how you start to move your business along faster.

Chris Davis 18:12
My premise is this. Everybody and I have nothing against Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet based software. I just believe the majority of what’s in a spreadsheet shouldn’t be in a spreadsheet. That’s just my belief, everyone.

Chris Davis 18:28
And you’re using a spreadsheet because you didn’t have the ability to create apps the way that we have the ability to do it now. But I have seen some of the most complex, amazing spreadsheets. Spreadsheets to the point where it’s like, hey, who created this? We need to study their brain.

Chris Davis 18:46
Pivot tables, macro scripts, all types of lookups. I mean, it’s amazing. And every time I talk to the creator of such spreadsheet, what do they say? Yeah, but this is a little tedious.

Chris Davis 18:59
I have to make sure I go and do this. And if somebody does this the wrong way, it will. The. It will propagate throughout the system and we’ll have data that’s not.

Chris Davis 19:09
There are very strict guidelines and rules to using those spreadsheets. Essentially they’re saying, even though I built this and it works, it is human error prone. And I didn’t realize these things were so valuable until I started doing it. So I was working with one client and I sat down and I said, hey, look, let’s just translate this spreadsheet into a dashboard.

Chris Davis 19:32
We’re going to use AI. I just need to have a couple meetings with you. I’m going to interview you. We’re going to get all the specifications.

Chris Davis 19:40
I’m going to have the software developer build the version one of this thing and you tell me what you think. So we went through. My job was to extract how they were thinking, right? Hey, what is this number?

Chris Davis 19:56
What does it mean? How do you get it? What is this one? What does that mean?

Chris Davis 20:00
Once I had all of that, this script, I fed it to AI for it to, you know, synthesize it down, and then I feed that to my developer, who can now use that as a PRD of a sort and work in their environment and get AI to author the first version of it. Mvp, deliver that first version to the person internal to the team. Oh, my goodness. They were like, oh, my gosh, this is it.

Chris Davis 20:29
Oh, I didn’t know this was possible. It’s bar charts and they’re interactive and you can set custom variables and values all within the database, all within the dashboard. And it’s displaying it like that, like instantly. No human error.

Chris Davis 20:46
Hey, you no longer have to go in there, download that CSV, click this button, it’ll do it for you. It’s gonna go out to Shopify, query the table and update it for you. I mean, everything a click of a button away. No imports, no manual reconciliation.

Chris Davis 21:03
When they saw it, when I saw their eyes light up, I knew I had something. And I said, wait a minute, what other spreadsheets can we replace? So I’m saying this to say, just learning, just using the three levers that I gave you in this podcast and then applying them towards replacing your spreadsheets. That move alone, you’re welcome for free.

Chris Davis 21:26
But that move alone is going to catapult your business in whatever industry you’re in. I don’t care how technical or non technical it is, whatever industry you’re in is going to catapult your business to the next stage by making your internal processes more efficient. Right? And that’s what I’m saying is that you may.

Chris Davis 21:50
Some of you are already doing this and you didn’t realize I just gave you language internally. I don’t care what you are externally. Internally, you’re a software company and you should operate as such. You should be intentional now with building out a software practice on how we get things done with software internal to our business.

Chris Davis 22:13
It is your advantage. Those of you who are listening to this and they’re like, oh, my goodness, you’re right. Start, start. Now.

Chris Davis 22:20
You, you need, you need somebody that knows software development. You need somebody to lead this team. Um, I think, yeah, a couple episodes back, you’ll hear, re. Listen to your software.

Chris Davis 22:32
Your technology needs leadership. You need somebody to lead. You need somebody to understand software and then you need to get in the game. You may already have these people and they just need to be trained up.

Chris Davis 22:46
That’s, that’s what one of my clients had is they, they had somebody. He just needed to be trained up. He, he was familiar with a lot. He just needed a little more guidance.

Chris Davis 22:54
Hey, here, here, do this, this, try this prompt. Hey, hey, use this. You use, use Claude code for that instead of Codex, right? Some guidance.

Chris Davis 23:04
I can do that all day now if you want me to build. That’s another, that’s another story. There’s better builders than me, right? But if you have leadership and then you have somebody understand software, it is.

Chris Davis 23:15
There is no reason why you should not be an internal software company. In fact, I’m gonna say this. The companies of the future that grow the fastest are gonna be internally software oriented. I am not talking about Salesforce for your CRM.

Chris Davis 23:33
I’m not talking about SaaS software oriented. I’m talking about personalized software oriented, specific to their business to help their team operate more efficiently and more visibly with more clarity. Right. By being able to see the information and data they actually need to see, when they need to see it, how they need to see it.

Chris Davis 23:59
Okay, you do this right, you do this right, you’re going to be ahead in any marketplace, I’m telling you. Because what, what does every founder want to do? Every founder wants to go from idea to implement it as fast as possible. This is how you do it.

Chris Davis 24:18
You turn your company internally into a software company. I’ve done it and I’m doing it with every client, everybody that hires me in a fractional capacity. That, that’s the goal. Wait a minute.

Chris Davis 24:31
Show me your spreadsheets. Okay. All right. I now see what I’m up against.

Chris Davis 24:35
Right. And then in just leading the team building, you start to see other opportunities. Oh, wait a minute, you’re using Typeform for that. Wait a minute, you’re using tally.

Chris Davis 24:43
You’re using this form software. You’re using a Google form for that. That’s the ultimate. That is the ultimate sin for me.

Chris Davis 24:49
You better not use a Google Google form for that. Again, nothing against Google, but if you’re using a Google form that lets me know how outdated you are, there’s no way you’re up to date using a Google form. Sorry, what do you want me to do? These are facts.

Chris Davis 25:03
I don’t make the facts, I just speak on them. All right, we have far evolved Google Forms, everybody. And if you’re thinking, well, it’s just easy to say, that’s the problem. You’re spreadsheet oriented.

Chris Davis 25:15
You’re using Google forms for stuff that shouldn’t be in Google forms. And you’re not storing things in a true database that is scalable and more secure than a spreadsheet. Software, man, software. So these advantages, you all are unique.

Chris Davis 25:33
I don’t see many people talking about this. I see a lot of people talking about, oh, build an agent. Here’s how I grew a company of size 2 with 20 agents. And here’s your second brain.

Chris Davis 25:44
There’s a way to do this at scale for larger companies and even smaller companies can adapt the same, same approach. But there is a way to do it that is secure, that’s safe, and will withstand the test of time. But you’ve got, you have to be willing to do it that way. In fact, one of the, one of the issues I see is that a lot of founders aren’t willing to pay the cost.

Chris Davis 26:09
I’ve got an episode that covers that. And just know you heard it here for you guys, you got to pay the cost to be the boss, I think that was Snoop Dogg that said that back in the day. But, but listen, it’s true. If, if you, if you want the advantage, you got to pay for it.

Chris Davis 26:27
You have to be willing to invest. Every company that I’ve worked for, that is, that has been willing to invest, has made the quantum leap at quantum speed. The ones that didn’t, they’re still ahead. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still ahead, but they’re not leaving.

Chris Davis 26:42
They’re. They’re hopping. And they’re hopping at a very slow rate. But hopping beats walking, right?

Chris Davis 26:48
So they’re still ahead. It’s just up to you. It really is. How fast do you want to go?

Chris Davis 26:54
The speed in which you desire to move will be validated by how much you’re willing to invest. But again, that’s a whole nother episode. The point of today is, hey, listen everyone, you may be a software company and you don’t even realize it, and if you want to be a software company internally, I’ve just outlined the steps for you to, to get started. So hopefully something that I said was illuminating on the path that you’re already on, and it will help you either course correct or double down on something that’s already working.

Chris Davis 27:24
That is my hopes. If you have somebody on your team that you are sizing up to be that software development lead, if you have someone who you would like to, that’s familiar with your processes, your stack is very good with your team already integrated with your processes as is, and you want to equip them with these skills to start to build software for your company, send them on over. It’s of no cost to anybody. Let them join for free.

Chris Davis 27:56
Figure out, hey, what’s going on in this community over here, but send them on over. The link is somewhere in the description where you’re listening to this podcast and it’s, it’s at no cost. No, no credit card, there’s no, hey, sign up now, you get charged later. Just come hang out, see how we’re doing software, learn.

Chris Davis 28:16
And if you want to expedite, we have paths for that to move faster. And of course there’s always the nuclear option, like, listen, I need this now. Like, let’s go. Maybe it makes sense for you to hire me in a fractional capacity, but those are very far and few.

Chris Davis 28:33
I’m very selective with that type of work. But if you have somebody in your, in your company that you’re eyeing and say, you know what, you’re perfect, you, you can take us to the next level, and they just need to be equipped with skills. We’ve got resources for them. So come on, join the community.

Chris Davis 28:49
With that being said, as always, thank you for your listenership, your support, and your continual. Your continual advocacy of doing things responsibly. You’re here, you’re a listener, because you, you know the value of not just doing a thing, but doing it responsibly. So with that being said, until the next time I see you online, automate responsibly, my friends.