To build or to buy - that is thy question
"To build or to buy - that is thy question". In the era of LLMs, many teams seem stuck in a strange middle ground: doing neither.
When you can - theoretically - build it, purchasing, suddenly feels icky. Pre-LLM era, teams often bought things because building them was hard, expensive, or outside their expertise. Now that math feels different:
“You can build ANYTHING.”
However, many teams misread that as:
“You can build EVERYTHING.”
Those are two very different statements. Say there are 4 products you could spend time building: A, B, C and D. You can build any of them. The catch: if you choose to build A, that takes away focus from B, C and D. Try building all 4, and you end up with sub-optimal versions of each.
So what SHOULD you build? Your business. Your product. The thing that translates directly into revenue.
You can technically build a CRM, a Slack clone, and everything in between. But that comes at the cost of focusing on your own product.
Secondly, teams often heavily discount TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), which is very different from build cost:
- Cost of upkeep - fixing bugs, maintaining infra, adding features, monitoring, testing
- Opportunity cost - time spent maintaining non-core systems is time not spent improving your actual product
- Loss of potential capabilities - your internal CRM probably won’t be as feature-rich as HubSpot. Their team wakes up every day thinking about making CRM better. You don’t. Your competition that chose to buy - they get to leverage all of those present and future capabilities while you are stuck living with your barebones version.
Yes - you CAN build ANYTHING. The new game is choosing which ones you build vs buy - carefully doing the math on the ROI based on TCO.
#BuildOrBuy #SaaS #BuildInPublic #StartupLife #AgenticAI