IdeaRoast Analysis
The Roast
"You're building a product for a problem Datadog is actively solving in-house, betting that customers will adopt yet another vendor to save money on a tool they've already committed to—basically asking companies to replace a hammer with a slightly lighter hammer wrapped in bureaucracy. The margins are slim, the sales cycle is nuclear, and you'll spend 18 months proving ROI to procurement teams who'd rather just upgrade their contract."
Reality Check
💀 Why This Fails
- • Datadog has massive engineering resources and will continuously improve cost controls; you're chasing a moving target with 1/1000th of their budget.
- • Enterprise adoption requires proof of zero data loss, multi-year commitment, and integration testing—18–24 months to first dollar is optimistic.
- • Procurement friction is brutal: even 50% savings means lawyers, security audits, and architectural reviews that exceed your sales capacity.
✅ The Pivot
Pivot to **'Observability Spend Audit as a Service'**: Position yourself as a fractional observability architect who audits enterprise logging/APM stacks (Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, etc.) and delivers a 30-day ROI playbook with zero platform lock-in. Charge $8k–15k per audit, target 10–15 audits/year. You own the expertise gap (most teams don't have this in-house), avoid building/maintaining software, and can start immediately with just documentation + Slack. Once you have 20 customers, you'll understand the product upsell naturally.