When you're creating a new product at a startup, every engineering hour counts. You can't build everything from scratch, but you also can't buy your way out of every problem. The key is knowing where to draw the line.

My approach in this scenario is simple: build what makes you unique, buy everything else.

If a feature was core to our competitive advantage - the thing that would make customers choose us over competitors - we built it. For functionality where solutions already existed or where we were dealing with table stakes functionality that users take for granted such as login, we looked for existing solutions.

Making the Decision

If there is any doubt on what to build vs. buy, it's always worth looking back to the objectives of the business and considering how this decision would affect them. It was far more important to get our product out in the market and being used by our customers, so we made choices that reflected that.

Buying software comes with its own complications. Often there are multiple tools that can help you achieve your goals. Some lightweight SWOT analysis can help you get a handle on what's needed, but it's also worth looking at what your team have used before and factoring that in to the choice made. Why spend weeks learning a new authentication system when we could integrate Auth0 in a day?

The biggest trap with decision making can be analysis paralysis. In start up world, time is everything - so sometimes you just have to make your best guess with the information you have and move forward.

When It Doesn't Work Out

Not every decision can be perfect. We once chose a third-party service that seemed ideal but later became a problem as we learnt more about how our product was being used. Something that seemed fit for purpose during our SWOT analysis became a bottleneck for our team.

With hindsight, we could have done further testing in this area - but our product was also still evolving in to it's current form and we were still learning how our users would interact with the product so it's difficult to accurately surmise that we would have found the problem.

As your startup and product grows, and you understand more about how your users are using your product, you can start to unpick some of those initial choices that didn't work out.

The Real Win

Taking a Buy vs. Build mentality on each software decision worked really well for us. The biggest benefit wasn't just time saved - it was focus gained. By outsourcing the mundane stuff, our team could obsess over the features that actually mattered to users. We became experts in our domain instead of generalists trying to solve every problem.

Start with what makes you different. Everything else can probably be bought.