Why People Choose Custom Software

Entrance founder Nate Richards talking about the unique value that custom software brings to business (Transcript Below)

As a business why would you consider custom software today when there’s so much available off the shelf? Number one is, the off the shelf software is built for the lowest common denominator in the industry so that it can be implemented over and over and over and over. But if I want to innovate, if I have some new thing to bring to the industry the software is going to really struggle to support that innovation. Often times it has to be a custom application.

Number two might be, I have some proprietary way of doing something and I’m looking to create a competitive advantage. I want to have something that my competitors don’t have. I want to give my customers an experience that my competitors can’t give them. And today that proprietary process, methodology, know-how, lives in people’s heads, lives in excel spreadsheets. By building a piece of custom software we are able to capture that proprietary know-how into an experiential component of what we give our customers. So instead of giving them a report where the result of this proprietary process is just a chart, now I can create an interactive experience where they can have this competitive advantage as part of their daily experience with our company.

And finally is, so I do have all this off the shelf software in my business. I’ve got accounting software, I’ve got operations software, I’ve got my website and it really doesn’t all tie together. None of these systems talk to each other and I’m constantly finding pockets of people whose whole lives seem to be dedicated to copying and pasting, exporting and importing data to move around in this system of systems. And so by building a piece of custom software we’re able to create an overlay to unify all of these different disparate systems that are in the business.