The price of thinking

Year 2018, it was a Thursday. I was working on putting up a server to deploy an application. He had been reading documentation in different places since Monday of that same week and it seemed that he would not get anywhere until Friday (the final day where everything should be installed). Different words in the installation guides that I followed made it difficult for me since the writer had assumed that he had some knowledge of the subject.

I wrote to a colleague who had worked on installing servers all week. He was the one who had recommended these guides to me, but since I was a beginner on the subject, of course, I wasn’t going to understand them in a couple of days.

I explained him my difficulties. I asked him to explain certain terms that I also could not understand despite my insistent searches on Google.

And then one of the wisest pieces of advice I have heard to this day would come:

But why do not pay for a service that does everything work for you?

If you come from an economic situation during which I lived much of my childhood where I did not have a budget to do what I wanted, many ideas will come to you regarding paying for a service. “But, it’s costly”, “It’s in dollars, why is not in my currency?”, “Reading, I can do it myself.”

And they are all right indeed.

But on my whim of wanting to do it myself, I was sacrificing customer time, time that I would use to sell or start testing your application. The service cost about $30 a month, and it allowed me to do all the work I wanted to do: it would self-install a server with all the necessary things and it was up to you to remove or add according to your needs. That $ 30 a year was about $ 320, including a discount if you paid annually. Suppose we calculated with my rate per hour at that time, approximately $ 20. That meant that with 16 hours of my work, I could pay for the tool per year. And more had happened to me of 24 hours between Monday and Thursday trying to do it by myself since it is assumed that I was «saving» this way.

So?

Unless you have all the time in the world, always consider paying for some service first. If you don’t plan on spending amounts of money like $300 a year or more and prefer to pay an employee or do it yourself: are you prepared to handle a big budget in the future? Do you plan to spend minutes of your life in front of the computer instead of delivering more value to your customers?

For me, Internet services are the new employees of the 2020s that we live in. We do not have precisely physical robots, but digital robots doing the work for us 😉.