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Ask HN: Does everything has to have a ROI?

7 points by johnsmith4739 ↗ HN
I'm one of the founders of a startup operating in the HR bubble and while so far none of our clients asked, one of our advisors - SV senior position, relatively big startup - suggested we figure out a way to calculate the ROI for using our solutions.

I feel that we're not particularly fit to be evaluated in this particular way, because we're more likely a hygiene solution: if you don't do what we help you do, things will stink.

Beside this, we're doing behavioural qualification so we don't address orgs that don't have a clear and present need for our solution.

But, I don't want to be right, I want to be smart (or at least less stupid) and I can imagine a scenario where this ROI issue could come up, and I wonder how can I navigate it. Thanks in advance!

5 comments

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mindcrime
The one way I know of to quantify something like "what's the value of preventing something bad from happening" is to use the kind of techniques described in Douglas Hubbard's How To Measure Anything[1]. Teach some experts within the customer company how to do calibrated probability assessment[2], then build a model, and run a Monte Carlo simulation[3] over that model. That gives you a way to at least loosely quantify things. It's not perfect, but for what you're doing it probably doesn't need to be.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibrated_probability_assessm...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method