The decision to build or buy when it comes to software is a thing of nightmares for many. There are so many considerations, from cost to timeframe, expertise, team capacity and scaling complexity, to name a few. But, with the right framework in place it doesn’t have to be that scary, says Built Right host Matt Paige.
To walk you through how to make this decision with confidence, we welcome guest Jerrik Arango, Principal Software Engineer at HatchWorks onto the show to talk about the main factors that need to be considered. He shares the framework they have in place to help with the process and provides some great examples along the way.
Keep reading for top takeaways or tune into the episode below.
What should people be thinking about when faced with the decision to build or buy? Matt and Jarrick aim to demystify this process by providing a framework to help you evaluate the options. Here are the nine crucial factors that will help to make the crucial ‘build vs buy’ decision a lot easier.
1. Competitive differentiation
Consider whether the software you’re looking to build or buy is your ‘secret sauce’. Some of the questions that need to be answered are:
- Is it a core process unique to your business?
- Is it something that will set you apart from competitors?
- What resources do you have?
Another consideration is whether you want complete autonomy over your roadmap. If you buy a solution, you may just be allowing someone else to own the roadmap and ideally, you want a partner that you’re buying from to have the same vision. As Matt explains, this is a big part of the decision-making process.
2. Cost
Evaluate both the short-term and the long-term costs associated with building vs buying. While building can entail upfront development expenses and ongoing maintenance, buying might incur licensing and subscription fees. Factor in implementation, support and potential upsell costs when assessing the total expenditure.
3. Scaling and complexity
Determine the complexity of the software and whether it aligns with your team’s expertise. If it’s highly strategic and core to your business, building custom software might be a better fit. However, for less strategic components, an off-the-shelf solution might be perfect for your needs.
4. Maturity and commoditization
Consider the maturity level of available solutions. Off-the-shelf products are often more mature, offering immediate functionality. Building customer software allows you to tailor features, but, explains Jarrick, it might require more time and resources to reach the desired maturity level.
5. Timeframe
How quickly do you need to deploy the software? If speed is of the essence, an off-the-shelf solution can offer faster implementation. Building custom software may take longer, but it can provide greater flexibility when it comes to aligning with your business needs.
6. Internal expertise
Do you have the expertise and capacity within your team to build and maintain the software? If you lack the necessary skills in-house, you can augment your team with external experts or opt for a third-party solution.
7. Team capacity
Consider your team’s availability and capacity to take on the software development process. Building software requires dedicated resources, which might detract from other crucial tasks. Off-the-shelf solutions can free up your team’s time.
8. Support structure
Examine the ongoing support offered by both options. With custom software, you’re responsible for maintaining it, while off-the-shelf solutions can provide operational support. Weigh up the pros and cons of support based on your organization’s capabilities.
9. Data and security
This is, of course, an extremely important consideration, explains Jerrick. Does your software deal with sensitive data and would the third-party own that data, or would you? And is there a competitive disadvantage or advantage to that? These are some of the things to look at when making a decision. Carefully assess the security measures provided by off-the-shelf solutions, says Matt. A custom solution could allow you to tailor security measures.
Ultimately, the decision to build or buy a software solution involves a complex interplay of factors. By evaluating these nine considerations, you can reduce the stress and make an informed decision that aligns with your business goals and constraints.
Plus, explains Matt, advances in low code and no code solutions can offer alternatives that may bridge the gap between custom and off-the-shelf software, expanding your options further.
For more information on how to approach the build vs buy decision, check out the full episode.
Facing the Build vs Buy dilemma in tech? Make sure to subscribe to the Built Right podcast for more insights and discussions like these. Share your thoughts and experiences with us. Let’s create, innovate, and elevate the world of design together!
[00:01:00] Matt Paige: Hey everybody, welcome to the show. Excited. You’ve decided to join me today considering you got many other things you could be doing with your time.
[00:01:23] Matt Paige: I appreciate it. And today we’re going into a topic that is the thing of nightmares for many. Just thinking about it can cause sweaty palms, shortness of breath, and even panic attacks. And I’m talking about the decision to build. Or buy when it comes to software, and it shouldn’t be that scary though.
[00:01:42] Matt Paige: Today we’re gonna help you make this decision easy with a little framework we like to use. And we’re gonna get into the main things to consider when making this decision, a framework to reduce the stress. ’cause it shouldn’t be that stressful. And we’ll give you some examples along the way. And to help me break this down, I’m joined by Jerrik Arango, one of Patchworks principal software engineers.
[00:02:03] Matt Paige: He’s got over 18 years of experience with a wide range of technology expertise from e-commerce to sporting events. Even presidential elections. I may want to learn some more about that as we go in. J I’m curious now, but you’ve worked at brands like P G A P G A, tour, cartoon Network and Fanatics, but welcome to the show, j
[00:02:24] Jerrik Arango: Yeah, thanks Matt.
[00:02:25] Jerrik Arango: I’m glad to be here.
[00:02:28] Matt Paige: Awesome to have you. So Jerrik’s been through this this fun build verse buy adventure many times with clients internally. So he is got some war stories along the way. But, Jerrik, set this up like at the core. What should people be thinking about when they’re thinking Build verse buy.
[00:02:48] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. You’re, doing this, you’re at this point because for a reason, right? You’ve got something, that you want to deliver, you want to bring to the world. And that’s lots of times we hear that’s your secret sauce, right? There’s something unique about you and that product that you want to, bring forward.
[00:03:12] Jerrik Arango: So you really want to consider that and Right. A lot of times you can buy software that will help you. But that software normally is a common denominator. That is something that’ll help you standardize. You might your secret sauce might be, might not be the payroll for your employees.
[00:03:34] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. And so you’ll potentially, you might want to go into having a payroll software or maybe internal, messaging, you use something like Slack.
[00:03:47] Matt Paige: Yeah. And it’s, we’ve seen this before too. We’ve had clients come to us, they have this great idea for this product, and what they’re describing is like a C RMM or an E R P.
[00:03:55] Matt Paige: And we’re like the people have perfected this. Maybe it shouldn’t be the best thing to build, but you hit on a core point. It, At the core of it, like if you’re deciding to build, it should be because it’s your secret sauce, right? It’s, it needs to be tailored to your needs. You have a deep expertise in this domain.
[00:04:15] Matt Paige: But for buying, buy the standard, standardize. If something exists, it’s already out there. It’s not part of like your core differentiator, just buy it. It’s at the core. That’s some of the big factors. In there and we got a little framework that we like to use. It goes through nine different criteria and we’ll pop through each one and we’ll go deeper into than others.
[00:04:39] Matt Paige: Some. I’m sure Jerrik will have some examples we can jump into. Probably got a few as well. But to hit the list I’ll, hit the list and then Jerrik, we can start to step through ’em. But if you think of the evaluation criteria for this decision, the first one is competitive differentiation.
[00:04:55] Matt Paige: It’s cost. Scale, complexity, maturity, and commoditization timeframe. Internal expertise, team capacity, support structure, and data and security. And it seems like a lot of different factors. They’re not scary things. These are things that are gonna help make this decision a lot easier. But let’s, jump into the first one, competitive differentiation.
[00:05:20] Matt Paige: What is this factor? What questions should you be asking and ultimately what, factors into that decision would this criteria of build and buy.
[00:05:31] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. As I mentioned is it that secret sauce of yours, right? Is it a core process of your business?
[00:05:42] Jerrik Arango: You want to ask and challenge challenge that with with that question. Also as you mentioned differentiation. Will this set you apart? Right? Will this make you different? Or like you mentioned, right? C r m or Right. You have something out of the box that’s at the forefront.
[00:06:03] Jerrik Arango: What makes you different from everyone else? Another question you could think of is with the resources that you have do you have the skillset to support that? Do you have that, deep knowledge and understanding for this piece of your product or your business do you have it to be able to deliver on that?
[00:06:30] Jerrik Arango: Also do you the roadmap sometimes you might be a startup, you might be you want, you might want to test this product. With small group of, customers or users and you want to, know that roadmap and how, much time do you have to invest.
[00:06:56] Matt Paige: I think the roadmap’s an interesting one too. ’cause, and we’ve seen this with clients and it’s a it’s a big part of the decision. ’cause if you go and buy a solution, You’re just allowing somebody else to own the roadmap and ideally a partner that you’re buying from they have a vision for the roadmap.
[00:07:19] Matt Paige: You maybe can give some recommendations, but you really don’t have autonomy to really influence that roadmap as much. That’s a big piece of it. And if you’re trying to build something that is gonna be differentiated that you do want to have control over, I think that’s one of those big ones that.
[00:07:35] Matt Paige: You really gotta think through is it okay that you’re not gonna have a ton of influence on new features, new functionality, and all of that?
[00:07:43] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. And diving deeper into the roadmap, there’s there’s all kinds of opportunities and decisions you can make. If you want to get out fast to, to like more of a proof of concept it, makes even more sense to what can I have off the shelf that I can use to get the idea across. But then you right you, don’t wanna build your secret sauce, your product on top of a POC. And that’s where then you might take a different approach.
[00:08:16] Jerrik Arango: This is what we’re gonna build custom. This is what our product rests on and how is that foundation? You want to build on something solid? So that might be using. A third party and off the shelf, or going more custom. And if we’re talking about uniqueness most of the time that sh that will fall a little more on the custom side.
[00:08:40] Matt Paige: Yeah. And you bring up an interesting point. This may be worth getting into later, but I. Like you talk about proof of concept, like maybe it is good to use something off, off the shelf just to prove it out and if it if it has legs, then maybe you do truly build it custom and then you get into the whole world of no code, low code and all of that, which allows you to move faster.
[00:08:59] Matt Paige: But it could have some restrictions down the road as well. Yeah. So I think let’s go into, yeah, go ahead.
[00:09:09] Jerrik Arango: Yeah, no I think you I remember watching one of the previous episodes from the Bill Red podcast and, I think episode four, you’ve got Joseph there that he touched on great points about the M V P and that process that you can, that’s a whole other thing that you can look into when you’re in that stage.
[00:09:30] Matt Paige: Yeah, that’s a great call out. The discussion with Joseph. We talked about M V P versus like M V R when you’re modernizing. Awesome, content there. All right, so that’s the first one. Competitive differentiation. I think it’s first for a reason. I think that’s probably one of the biggest decision criteria.
[00:09:48] Matt Paige: And also think about waiting too, if you’re truly running through this in a structured way, I would give some more weights to competitive differentiation. But the next one for us is cost. So cost is always a factor when you’re making a business decision, but take us through how it relates to a build versus buy type of decision.
[00:10:07] Matt Paige: What type of cost exists?
[00:10:09] Jerrik Arango: Yeah, so there’s if, you’re going custom, there’s implementation costs. There’s also that, that focus opportunity cost as far as, it’s gonna take time to build it. You’re gonna have resources focused on that. Now is this your main product or is this something supporting or something on the side?
[00:10:34] Jerrik Arango: But you’re gonna have a good amount of. Focus distracted or it might be aligned, right? There’s ongoing cost as well. Normally we can get something out a good application product sophisticated in about six months. But that product is always, is gonna be ongoing, right?
[00:10:57] Jerrik Arango: There’s maintenance, there’s you might have feature development to a certain point but there’s an ongoing cost, right? Even from infrastructure. And as I mentioned, there’s opportunity costs if I’m focusing, looking into this maybe to vet the idea. Which hopefully we’ve already done some, legwork there.
[00:11:20] Jerrik Arango: That it’s worth now taking the next step to invest in. There’s definitely opportunity cost if you’re doing this. What else could you have been doing?
[00:11:29] Matt Paige: Yeah, and I think opportunity cost, that’s one that often gets, so if we focus to build this thing, we’re you, we’re putting resources towards that so they’re not gonna be able to do something else.
[00:11:40] Matt Paige: I think that’s one that a lot of people forget, but you really need to think through that. And it’s a lot of times with build versus buy, I don’t know if you see this, but I see a lot of people compare with the buy decision. It’s like the software licensing, all of that. And when they think of build, they just think about building it to get it to market and they, don’t think about all the ongoing cost of maintaining and enhancing and all of that.
[00:12:05] Matt Paige: It’s not just a one time cost. You gotta maintain the thing after you’ve built it as well. Yeah
[00:12:13] Jerrik Arango: And upfront you might wanna go with the third party where you’ll have a lower cost upfront. But in the long term the custom will give you a better return on investment. It might, yeah take a little longer.
[00:12:27] Jerrik Arango: You might have to invest more upfront but in the end you can save you can save more on your investment and you have more control for the future. I was in a situation not too long ago where. It wasn’t necessarily that secret sauce, but that secret sauce depended on this. And oh yeah.
[00:12:49] Jerrik Arango: They were looking for different third parties that we can use. And while that was happening, I was working on developing a custom solution in the end. And, it has to do with the roadmap. Do you need this was more of a startup. Do you need. How, soon do you need to get to market to, to help support your startup, your this product that’s coming to fruition.
[00:13:15] Jerrik Arango: And and this, custom solution was, built now, right? The, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, right? Yeah. And, sometimes going with a third party solution, right? You also want to take into account how stable, right? If, your product is, sitting on top of this. You want that third party or that this software to be stable, you want to have control over it because that could even you might have a great idea, you might have a great product, but if it’s not dependable you’re gonna use losers users quick.
[00:13:53] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. And so, right, this custom solution, in this example, it ended up being a fraction of the cost of any of the third party offerings. You had a lot more control and the business really depended, or the main, the secret sauce really depended on, on this software. So the custom solution here ended up winning and, proving itself.
[00:14:19] Jerrik Arango: There was doubters in the organization and there was. Challenges with this service and there was an, there was a try. There was let’s test it out. Let’s see it. And the custom solution are always one.
[00:14:33] Matt Paige: Yeah, that, no, that’s really interesting. I never thought about that in terms of the dependency.
[00:14:37] Matt Paige: It may not be your secret sauce, but if your secret sauce depends on this thing, then it does become important, right? That you have autonomy over it, you own the roadmap. And all of that. So that’s a great example to think through. All right, so let’s go to the third one. Scale and complexity. Talk us through this one.
[00:14:54] Matt Paige: When you should how, you should think about scale and complexity of either customer or a bot solution.
[00:15:01] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. If your function is if your solution is pretty simple then You might wanna go more on the build. Yeah. And I think it comes down to,
[00:15:19] Matt Paige: to it’s like almost this, matrix view, right?
[00:15:23] Matt Paige: Because if it’s not complex, but super strategic, it’s obviously let’s go build that. But if it’s, what is it If it’s not strategic, but very complex, it’s don’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. So it’s like that, Marrying of those two criteria together kind of factor in
[00:15:43] Jerrik Arango: And, kinda how I touched at the beginning of that expertise, that, that knowledge that you have, right?
[00:15:50] Jerrik Arango: That’s gonna, that’s gonna be part of the reason, right? Or your secret sauce. Yeah. And so you want to focus on what you’re bringing that’s unique, right? What’s unique about, you, about the product and. And so you might wanna buy when it’s something that’s supporting you that you need, right?
[00:16:11] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. But you don’t, that isn’t your lane. And so you can leverage a company that’s a hundred percent dedicated to building out that side. They’ve got experts, they’re working 24 7 on that. And so you can leverage their expertise into your product, into your right into your business. Yeah.
[00:16:32] Jerrik Arango: No, I love
[00:16:32] Matt Paige: that. And I, gotta pause for a second for those on video you’ll see this, but those just listen, you won’t be able to, I keep seeing like something swimming out to the side. Is that like an eel you have in an aquarium over to the behind you there? Yeah, so
[00:16:45] Jerrik Arango: usually I’ll blur out my background, but no.
[00:16:48] Jerrik Arango: That’s cool. It might get distracting. I’ve got, yeah, those are called dojo LOEs. They grow about a foot long.
[00:16:54] Matt Paige: Wow. That’s, is it an eel, do you have other stuff in there or is it just the eel? No, I’ve
[00:16:59] Jerrik Arango: got all kinds of fish in there. Yeah. Nice.
[00:17:02] Matt Paige: Okay, cool. I gotta say that after we get done, then recording. Yeah.
[00:17:05] Matt Paige: All right, next one up. Maturity and commoditization. What, does this factor this criteria all about?
[00:17:16] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. Just as, we were touching on the maturity, right? If you’re, building this product or right. Yeah. If you’re buying this solution that’s gonna help you out it’ll, it will most likely be, it will be a lot more mature than you starting off building something. And so you can leverage that maturity again based on your roadmap, on your timelines, and but as if you’re going custom It’ll be less mature, but you’ll be able to, enhance it, to customize it.
[00:17:56] Jerrik Arango: It’ll be unique to yourself. You, really wanna weigh that, roadmap and that at that time. Yeah. So
[00:18:05] Matt Paige: more time to evolve it, I think too, it’s it gets back to the commoditization of the industry as well. I think we talked, we’ve talked about like e R P and C R M. Highly commoditized, been proven and done before.
[00:18:21] Matt Paige: And I think that’s where it’s so important to start out with the competitive landscape of whatever you’re trying to build. What exists out there. You gotta check that first before you go and or thinking about building. Now if you’re building, if you’re trying to disrupt like the c r M game and you got some u new unique way to do it, and that’s what you’re selling different.
[00:18:41] Matt Paige: Different story. If, this is just a function within your business, then yeah that’s that’s, a different way to think about it. Timeframe. Yeah. You
[00:18:51] Jerrik Arango: wanna foc, you’re good. Yep. Yeah. You, wanna focus on that uniqueness. What did, what’s the reason, right? What’s the purpose of why you’re starting on this journey. Even nowadays you consumers want choices and sometimes you can have this But someone does it better, right? There’s the quality aspect. You mentioned c r m there’s CRMs out there, but The quality might not be there for the niche that you’re in or that you know that you want to do.
[00:19:25] Jerrik Arango: It might be a c r M for a specific industry and it, doesn’t quite have the bells and whistles or the customization that you want. So can you build something on top of that? Do you build custom to support that and diff and make you different from the rest?
[00:19:43] Matt Paige: Yeah, no that’s, a great point.
[00:19:45] Matt Paige: It’s sometimes off the shelf is. Built for most, but not the few. It’s kinda that 80 20 rule. And if you’re in that 20% there, there are cases where custom makes, sense. Timeframe, so this is the next one, and we’ve talked a little bit about this, but when you’re factoring in the time it takes to build something how do you make this consideration set or factoring with build versus buy?
[00:20:13] Matt Paige: I think build obviously gets the Right or wrong the, connotation that it takes very long to do relative to a buy, I can just buy, it’s ready to go off the shelf. But talk us through that. ’cause that’s not always the case based on your, scenario.
[00:20:31] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. If the timeline’s tight and the time to market is a higher priority, you definitely want to consider more on the buying buying side.
[00:20:43] Jerrik Arango: If you have more runway and you have the available resources. Then you’ll, probably want to go custom where you have that more control. You can develop it as time goes on. There was another, example that I was on. It was a streaming service that we were building.
[00:21:04] Jerrik Arango: And there was this third party sometimes it might not be the solu, the software might not be the whole thing but it might be components to your solution. And so there was this third party that we, that was decided to be used and It, brought a lot of challenges.
[00:21:21] Jerrik Arango: There was also a lot of, man hours getting that third party integrated. So there was still work there and in the end it was, again, it was that weakest link in our chain. Yeah. And, it kept on failing. And ultimately that project unfortunately didn’t work out. And the main reason was that, choosing of the third party, now there might.
[00:21:47] Jerrik Arango: Be another third party that would’ve worked better and we could have gone to market a lot quicker or Right. The consideration of should we have gone custom.
[00:21:58] Matt Paige: Yeah, no, that’s the biggest thing I’m taking away from this episode is this concept of the chain. And where your weakest link is and how to think about that.
[00:22:07] Matt Paige: That’s a great way to, to think about it. It’s, we could get
[00:22:11] Jerrik Arango: into, yeah. There’s a G D P R and all this data privacy that came up, right? That’s something else that you can consider is right. This third party, it might be it has some data. How do you control that?
[00:22:27] Jerrik Arango: Do you own that data? Is this third party owning it? Is there a competitive disadvantage or advantage to that? So there’s a lot of things that you would want to consider when you’re going when you’re gonna buy something is right that, that control, that ownership of the different aspects.
[00:22:47] Matt Paige: Yeah, maybe we diverge a bit there. I that’s a great point. And I don’t know your perspective here, but you have the, all the generative AI stuff, the chat G P T, and you’re putting your data out there and it’s and not that it’s gonna be publicly available to the world, but you’re giving it to somebody else we’ve heard of like the Samsung breach and all of these things.
[00:23:10] Matt Paige: And that may be an interesting kind of build verse buy decision in the future is okay. Do we take like an open source llama or something like that large language model and try to build our own thing versus going with an off the shelf type of chat G B T for a, use case we’re dealing with.
[00:23:28] Matt Paige: So it’s like a whole nother level with this privacy data comes into play. And like we
[00:23:34] Jerrik Arango: were talking about the expertise, right? You might not be, you might not have that, the talent or the skillset for thinking about security. And so buying something off the shelf, you’ll be able to bring in that maturity of maybe right.
[00:23:51] Jerrik Arango: Security has been taken care of, has been thought of, it’s a reputable third party or software that, that you’re gonna use. But at the same time, like you mentioned Samsung there’s a whole bunch of other examples we could name where the. Company came out as they had a breach, but when you dig deeper, it ended up being because of a, it could have been a third party that they were using, which a lot of times it’s a bummer. That wasn’t necessarily you, but the third party you chose they had a leak. Yeah. And I saw that happen many times where you want to protect your brand. I your brand identity and this third party ends up affecting you. Yeah.
[00:24:38] Matt Paige: That’s a great, consideration and you actually hit on the next one right there, which is internal expertise.
[00:24:43] Matt Paige: And I think you hit it in a, great point is, this expertise the domain knowledge core to your people in your business, or do you even want it to be, that’s a good criteria for whether you, build versus buy as well. And the next one, team capacity. This is a, an important one. Take us into this ’cause like team capacity.
[00:25:03] Matt Paige: The obvious thing is, do I have the people to build the thing? But it’s more to that, it gets back to that opportunity cost and what else could they be doing that’s maybe more important.
[00:25:13] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. Again, And it depends on the different scenarios, different stage, right? The size of your company, the maturity.
[00:25:24] Jerrik Arango: If you have you have fewer resources and you’ve got this product you’re stronger on the product side you’re, thinking through this. There’s also opportunity where you can. Augment your team and possibly, get the experts and to help you build custom.
[00:25:42] Jerrik Arango: So even if you don’t have that expertise in house you can leverage a third party and, get. That expertise to help you build this custom where you’ll still have that uniqueness, that custom control to build your product. Or if you don’t have you don’t have the, assets or the the time, then you can buy you can think of buying if they’re off the shelf where.
[00:26:11] Jerrik Arango: They do have that that expertise already comes out of the box. You’ll have support. Sometimes you have to pay a fee for that support, but that’s something you could consider. Yeah. And, you’re teeing
[00:26:24] Matt Paige: up the next one right after that support structure and that is something that can be a benefit of the buy at times.
[00:26:31] Matt Paige: ’cause sometimes they have the operational support behind it and it is a consideration when you’re building. Whether it’s working with a partner like Patchworks, do they have plans and things they can actually support after you’ve built the solution, right? But what, about support structure?
[00:26:50] Matt Paige: Anything else there to consider?
[00:26:53] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. When you go custom and you build this you, own it, right? And you have to keep the lights on. There’s infrastructure, there’s ongoing maintenance. And you’re, gonna have that cost. Now if you buy something off the shelf They normally they wanna make a profit, they wanna expand, they want to grow their account. Yeah. And, you could also get stuck into this rabbit hole of these services. Price might be increasing. There’s these additional things that, that plugins or widgets that you might need, that you want to add on.
[00:27:30] Jerrik Arango: Yep. And without noticing you’ll, quickly ramp up on, on the cost of, having that that off the shelf product. Yeah.
[00:27:41] Matt Paige: The,
[00:27:42] Matt Paige: Almighty upsell, right? So that’s a really important thing, right? If you are talking about a buy solution, what does that truly look like? So it’s not just the initial buy of the product, it’s implementation cost, it’s maintenance, it’s all of that.
[00:27:55] Matt Paige: Something to consider as you look at a buy versus bill. ’cause a lot of times the buy looks more attractive on paper it’s not always the case.
[00:28:07] Jerrik Arango: And, a lot of times you wanna make sure that you don’t corner yourself for the future. So some, a lot of times when you’re get buying off the shelf As I mentioned it’s, usually a common denominator, right?
[00:28:21] Jerrik Arango: It’s a c r m, it’s not a c r M for maybe real estate, or it’s a c RMM for for, something else. And so it’s, made to be a common denominator to. L and going back to that uniqueness having that you, don’t want to corner yourself where you’re developing these features that make you unique.
[00:28:44] Jerrik Arango: But now you’re limited by the the off-the-shelf product that, that you’ve purchased. Versus if you’re going custom in a way the sky’s the limit as far as you can always develop it and build on it. But Right, that is, that little slower startup on that.
[00:29:03] Matt Paige: Yeah, definitely. And the last one we, did a little divergent topic on this one, but the data insecurity, anything else to talk about on the last kind of factor here related to data insecurity?
[00:29:18] Matt Paige: I know we touched on it a minute ago, but any other kind of points you want to hit on there with the build or the buy decision?
[00:29:25] Jerrik Arango: Yeah. Something else that comes to mind that’s sensitive could be e-commerce and having that, user credit card information user information.
[00:29:38] Jerrik Arango: And so how do you handle that? Do you have the expertise? Do you have the support to, have that locked down or again, depending on the maturity of where your product is, where you’re going You might buy off the shelf to help you handle some of those areas. Right? Keeping that data secure.
[00:29:58] Jerrik Arango: Also right data breaches. You want to w make sure and you want to, take care of your investment and your brand name. If you lose confidence in your clients and right, and. And your users, you, you get hit a lot harder. So taking that into consideration as far as how do you protect yourself from possibly other off the shelf products that might that you could compare and see quality pick one, that one might be cheaper but.
[00:30:33] Jerrik Arango: Are you less secure there or is it better for you to take that in-house and really, hold onto it? Really take care of that. And so that’ll be up to you. It depends on what area of your application or your product you’re using this for.
[00:30:49] Matt Paige: Yeah, no that’s, a great point. It’s the and I think the one thing too, the build versus buy decision, it’s not.
[00:30:57] Matt Paige: Always as easy as we build everything or we buy everything. Like to your point earlier, and that’s what’s so great about having somebody like a Jerrik that can like navigate these waters. ’cause you may want to buy, maybe there’s an e-comm component related to purchase that you want to purchase and integrate with a custom solution.
[00:31:16] Matt Paige: So there’s different components and pieces. So it’s many times a lot more nuanced than just like we buy every. Everything, or we build everything. And I think that’s what’s interesting with our, built right method that we use. And it’s taking existing frameworks off the shelf, libraries, things like that allow us.
[00:31:36] Matt Paige: To make a custom solution a lot faster, a lot cheaper as well. There’s all kinds of things out there. I don’t know. Any, parting words with the build versus buy or the low code, no code and all the different other components that have come into play to make building custom a lot more easier, more uniform, more cost effective.
[00:32:02] Jerrik Arango: Oh, I think mute.
[00:32:06] Matt Paige: We’re missing the, last dissertation, the all the good knowledge. Building
[00:32:12] Jerrik Arango: up the suspense. Yeah. You, were mentioning plugin or module, we can use different components. And it’s a smaller third party or off the shelf, for example, a calendar.
[00:32:25] Jerrik Arango: I can, I could grab this calendar widge and not have to recreate that and use it for your bigger i your bigger picture and your unique product where the calendar’s not really gonna going to affect that. Thing I’ll, end with is you, really wanna watch out that you don’t corner yourself and sometimes that just like that calendar, you can have this off the shelf that really helps speed up your delivery. It could help speed up even your quality. But you don’t want to corner yourself in the future. Does your de, does your business depend on this? That example I gave ear early on there are several third parties that do this, but if your business, your secret sauce even depends on this you might want to, you, you wanna.
[00:33:12] Jerrik Arango: Make sure it doesn’t go away. What happens if that third party goes out of business or they close down? They stop supporting it, right? What do you do now? So you don’t want to corner yourself and you also want that freedom to to keep on developing, improving your, product and you wanna maintain relative, we’ve seen so.
[00:33:30] Jerrik Arango: Many industries, how they change drastically. And you need to be able to, pivot, to be agile. So taking that into consideration is I would definitely say is worth it.
[00:33:42] Matt Paige: Yeah. No, I think that’s a great place to end to Great, kind of parting words with the, almighty build verse buy decision.
[00:33:49] Matt Paige: But thanks for joining us today on the Built Right podcast, Jerich. We really enjoyed it. Thank you.
[00:33:55] Jerrik Arango: Yeah, thanks for having me.
