The Hidden Costs of Choosing the Wrong Tech Stack

Have you ever chosen a piece of software because it was cheaper, someone recommended it, your coach used it, or it simply looked easier to use? Most of us have, and sometimes those decisions work out just fine. 

But other times, the most expensive software decision isn't the software itself. It's everything you have to fix later. Choosing the wrong tech stack can quietly drain your business through lost time, wasted money, stalled growth, reduced team productivity, and a whole lot of frustration. 

Today, we're exploring the hidden costs that many business owners never think about until they're already dealing with the consequences. 

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Transcript

The Real Price Of Cheap Software

Carrie Saunders 0:00

Have you ever chosen a piece of software because it was cheaper? Someone recommended it, your coach used it, it looked easier. Most of us have, and sometimes those decisions work out just fine. But sometimes the most expensive software decision isn't the software itself, it's everything you have to fix later. Because choosing the wrong tech stack can quietly cost you time, money, growth, team productivity, and a whole bunch of frustration. Today we're talking about the hidden costs most business owners never consider until they're already experiencing them. Let's dive in. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool. Welcome back to the show.

What A Tech Stack Means

Carrie Saunders 1:07

Today we're talking about the hidden costs of tech stack that most people don't talk about. Before talking about choosing the wrong one, let's quickly define what a tech stack is because sometimes I'll get clients and I'll ask them what their tech stack is, and they're like, What are you talking about, Carrie? They aren't quite sure what I mean. So for a simple explanation, your tech stack is a collection of tools that run your business. For example, it could be your website platform. This could be WooCommerce, it could be Go High Level, it could be Kajabi, it could be e-commerce uh brands like Magento, it could be Xcar, it could be WooCommerce. So any of your e-commerce platforms or your course creator and coach platforms. It could be a CRM. And some of those I just mentioned have that built in. Some of them do not. It could be email marketing. Again, some of those I just mentioned, those specific softwares have that, some of them don't. It could be scheduling tools for your social media. It could be your payment systems, it could be automation tools, it could be AI that you use to help you with run your business. And so the goal isn't to have the most tools. We aren't playing Pokemon here. We aren't trying to catch them all. The goal is to have the right tools working together and doing a great job of saving you time and money.

Why Smart Owners Pick Wrong Tools

Carrie Saunders 2:24

So let's talk about why do we choose the wrong tools? I've been guilty of it before. We all have. It's something completely normal for business owners to do. Most people don't intentionally choose bad software at all. Sometimes it's the recommendation trap. Sometimes my friend used it. My coach recommended it. You know, my Facebook group that I'm in loves it. You know, sometimes we get peer pressure from others. I see this on Facebook a lot in groups, peer pressure to use a specific tool when that tool may not be the right tool for them. The reason I listed several tools in the beginning of this episode is we do work with several. We work with a handful in each category of online business that we help. The reason being, not one software tool is meant for everybody. And we prefer to find the clients that are great fit for us, as well as a software tool we're familiar with that they use. And that's how we match, you know, who's a good fit for us, versus we only work with like Kajabi users or we only work with WooCommerce, e-commerce people. We like to have a few tools in our back pocket just because sometimes we can help a client that we love transition to a different software tool that they that's more appropriate for them because they outgrew their other software tool. Another thing we can do sometimes with picking out software tools that can get us into this trap is the pricing trap. Sometimes people will choose a software tool solely on monthly cost or yearly cost. They may ignore setup fees, they may ignore maintenance, they may ignore integrations of whether it connects to the other things that they need, and they may just not be thinking it through. And they see that, oh, this one's on sale for 50% off this month for three months, so I'm going to switch to that one because it's a lot cheaper. Sometimes that's not the best thing to do. We want to make sure that our software tools are going to be able to grow with us for a reasonable amount of time. Not any software is going to, you know, meet our needs for the whole lifetime of our business, but we want to make sure it's going to be worth our time and effort for at least a shorter long-term time frame. And then another thing I see is the feature trap. Sometimes people buy software for features they'll never use. Conversely, sometimes people will buy software with features that they will need in, say, in a couple years, but that software doesn't have it. So then you're going to have that migration cost to a new piece of software when you do need that new feature. Sometimes they don't think about the actual business problems they're trying to solve whenever they are picking out their technology and their software to help them run their business. This is, you know, we're talking about current business problems, just like we're talking about current features that we need, as well as future near-term features and business problems that we need to be solving. We need to be thinking right now, as well as about three to five years into the future with the software we are working with and we are picking. And also I see the trend trap. There is actually as of this recording, um, there's a current trend to move from Chat GBT to Claude. Is it right for everybody to do that move? Not everybody. Is it right for you? Maybe. But just because everybody's moving to a specific platform, whether it's AI or some other software, that doesn't mean it's going to be the best fit for you or the best change for you. So we want to make sure that we don't fall into that trend trap. Sure, that switch might make sense, but we need to make sure we're evaluating it before we just jump ship and switch something. And we want to make sure we have in our head that popular, a piece of popular software doesn't necessarily mean it's right for your business. For example, we have some e-commerce clients that even though Shopify is super popular, it would not fit their business model at all. It would not be a good fit for them. So it would be a disservice of me to suggest they switch to Shopify. It's just not going to fit them. Just like sometimes when you're using, you know, course creator or coach software, you know, switching to another one sometimes just isn't the right fit. It's not going to go with them financially as well as well as feature-wise.

Hidden Costs That Show Up Later

Carrie Saunders 6:37

So there are some hidden costs of technology in our tech stack that some people don't talk about. Integration headaches. This is something we see have seen over the past 20-some years, you know, in e-commerce, you know, when we're helping e-commerce uh owners as well as online business owners that are courses, course creators and coaches, is integration headaches. They picked a piece of software that was a great deal at the time, but it doesn't do everything they need. So then they have to connect these other little pieces of software that are also a great deal and get them all to work together and talk together. Um, or you have a shopping cart that can do a few things, but not quite all the things. So then you have to get all these plugins that can cost you a lot of extra money and a lot of integration time. So integration headaches can be a number one cost, a hidden cost about not picking the right tech. Sometimes when you do this, you're going to get technology that can do two things, like can do the same thing, but not all the things that you need. So you may have duplicate technologies where, yeah, this one can be a shopping cart checkout, and so can this one, but I like this one for this other feature. You can kind of see where I'm going here that sometimes the features overlap. Sometimes we have a manual process to get things moving through the multiple systems, and you have to, you know, do the thing yourself and they can't talk to each other automatically. And it can cause missed opportunities in making sure that your business is flowing as smoothly and is flowing in a way that you know you're not having to touch it so much. Also, when you have lots of pieces of software that you're connecting together, that can cause a lot of training time. Every new tool requires learning, setup, and troubleshooting and figuring it out. And I'm sure if you're sitting here listening and you have, say, five or more software tools you kind of use and connect together, you probably can get this that there's a lot of a learning curve between all of it. So having a piece of software that can do most of what you need and then just bolting on a few other items is generally what I see the most successful way to do it with business owners that we work with. And then what happens when you do need to switch that software? Migration costs can be another hidden cost. So we want to look at software that's also easy to migrate from or to, uh, depending on which way you're going in the future. So it's not something like to really like dig into a huge amount. And you might need someone like us to help you understand whether something's easy or not for the migration, but understanding whether it is easy to migrate from your current e-commerce platform to another one from your current CRM customer relationship manager system, your course creator or coach platform. You know, can it be easy to migrate off of that if you need to? Email platforms, etc. We want to make sure that you're not completely super locked in and you actually have access to your data so you can migrate in the future. That's probably the most important part of this hidden cost right here. And then we want to talk about the last cost, hidden cost of this is opportunity costs. When you're spending a lot of time managing your tools, you have a lot of time you're not spending on selling, serving your clients, creating content, and building relationships. So you're not having the time to work on your business and work in your business if you're spending too much time managing your software tools. So this is something where you want to pick a tool that's easy for you to manage, or find a trusted partner like us that can help you manage it for you and make sure that you are always running in tip-top shape and that everything's going smoothly for you. And then finally, that last hidden cost is growth limitations. This is something I've experienced myself. Some software will only work at certain number of users, they may fail at, you know, hundreds of thousands of users. Um, we've had software we work with that, you know, couldn't handle um almost a million products. So we had to modify the software heavily for this client to make it work with a you know a million products. It was it was literally a million products, it was a large mall. Um, we've had this happen to course creators and coaches, where their software platform limits them on the number of items they can sell in the software without bumping up to a much larger cost, um monthly cost for adding in more products. So I want you to look at the growth limitations from a usability standpoint. You know, how many products or customers or services can you have in it, and whether that's going to cost you a lot more money. Because some software doesn't become wrong until your business grows, which is why I mentioned earlier that we want to be looking not only at our needs right now, but our needs in like about three to five years, because we don't want to be switching software every single year. We want something that's going to last at least several years for us so that we can focus on our business and aren't focusing on switching software all

Five Questions Before You Switch

Carrie Saunders 11:39

the time. So let's talk about some questions you can use to help you decide. And we're always here to help you as well. You can always jump into our free Facebook group and ask us advice just for reference. That is smarteronlinebusiness.com forward slash Facebook will get you there. So, some questions. Let's go back to those questions. What should we ask before choosing a software? So, number one is what business problem am I actually solving? We need to answer that. We also need to ask this question, and I've already alluded to this. What will this look like in a three years? Not just today, but three years, maybe five years. Some software can last you for 10, 15, 20 years. Depends upon that software platform and how much they are good at updating it. Question number three: how does this fit into my existing systems? Are we going to be basically throwing a rock into a cog and making everything stop? Or will this help you know things move along smoothly? Also, number question number four is what happens if I outgrow it? Can you migrate from it? Can you export your data? Can you scale with it? What so what happens if you outgrow it? That's also still future thinking, but it's a little bit more of a specific question on that. And then who supports it when things break? This is really, really, really key. Who supports it when things break? You want to have a software system that is very attentive, whether it's directly from the software company themselves or whether you have a trusted partner like us who partners with the software. So who is going to be your support behind it when you are stuck or when it fails? Very, very important question. So, with those five questions, hopefully that helps you make some better decisions.

Signs You Have Outgrown Your Stack

Carrie Saunders 13:25

And I want to next talk about the signs that you've outgrown your current tech stack because this is an important thing to know. Especially it's more important to know before you get too far into being well beyond outgrowing your current tech stack so you can make that migration before it becomes super painful. So I want you to ask yourself: are you constantly creating workarounds with your software? Are you manually moving information between the tools? Sometimes this just means you need to hire somebody to help you integrate something. But if you're manually moving information between the tools, that can be a red flag. Are your team members frustrated? Is reporting difficult? Is getting the data out of it difficult? Are you avoiding growth because the system can't handle it? That one's pretty key too. I've been stuck there before. I had a software system that only allowed three products for a specific price, and I was stuck because I couldn't make more products without going up in price, and I wasn't ready to go up in price yet because I wasn't making money, enough money on those first three products. So are you avoiding growth because your system can't handle it? So outgrowing software isn't very your, it's actually usually a strong sign that your business is growing, and it's a great place to be if you're prepared for it. You know, this can be a very, very good thing.

Self Check And Next Steps

Carrie Saunders 14:46

So to get a little bit of a recap going on here, smart tech decisions look like not the cheapest, not the trendiest, and not the one with the most features. But instead, we want to choose tools that solve current problems, support future growth. So that feature part I just mentioned, not all the features, can be a little bit of a caveat here because we do want to have enough features that it supports our future growth, you know, ones that we aren't using quite yet. We also want to choose tools that integrate well with others, and then we want a tool that's manageable for your team. A good tech stack should make your business simpler, not make it more complicated, not compound any problems. So, again, to reiterate, if you're wondering whether your current systems are helping your business or hurting your business, sometimes it just takes an outside perspective to see where the bottlenecks are. That's something that we love to do here. I love to take a zoom out and really diagnose your systems and see where you are. You can always jump over to our Facebook group again, that's Smarteronline Business.com forward slash Facebook to ask questions there. You can also, we have sometimes people have a huge system and they want to hire us to really dig in and to dive into make sure that they're making the best business decisions for themselves. So I want you to do a quick self-check when you're done with this episode. I want you to ask yourself these four questions. Do all my major tools have a clear purpose? Do they work effectively together? Could I explain my systems to a new team member? Am I spending more time managing tools than using them? If not, it might be time to reevaluate your tech stack. And one thing I want you to keep in your head is the most expensive software decision isn't usually the software itself. It's everything you have to fix later or the constraints it puts upon you. That's all we have for this week's episode of Smarter Online Business Podcast. I hope you thoroughly enjoy it. As always, you can find our show notes over at smarteronlinebusiness.com as well as extra resources. And be sure to maintain review us on your favorite podcast player that helps spread the word and get us out to other business owners just like you and help them as well. And we will see you next week.