A lot of Software as a Service (SaaS) companies became big and successful, pitching a build v/s buy decision to their customers, offering to do the work so that they can focus their energies on what they do best. Many companies created pages, slide decks, customer stories, etc, talking about it. And you know what, it made sense at that time, which is why customers bought. Finding the arguments and counter-arguments to this is a Google search away.
There was a time during 2020-2023 when the demand for software engineers sharply increased, and so did the salaries. A whole new wave of startups pitching build v/s buy decisions was started. I did one too. It was quite time-consuming to build a reliable and secure webhook system, and I thought, why should small teams focus their energy on this? In all customer discovery calls, the discussions revolved around a build v/s a buy decision. When I had no interest left in discussing this with potential customers, I stopped working on that startup. At that time, AI wasn't as good, and I still felt it would be a sluggish business, and I had no intention of continuing to live my life that way for the next 10 years.
Last month, something crazy happened. I was planning on receiving someone's webhooks, and I thought, let's embrace the cursor's agent mode and vibe code. I copy-pasted all the docs related to webhooks and asked it to verify the webhooks. In a few more queries, it got everything right, working and secure. While I haven't felt the need to implement a webhook sending system, I am fairly certain that if I feed it all the good practices for webhooks in context, it's going to get it right in a few steps. In a few more instances of building out integrations, I just copy-pasted docs into the context window, and holy shit everything worked after a few tries. When I have to write scraping code these days, I copy-paste the cURL from the browser and the HTML response and ask to extract the stuff that's important, and it gets it right in one shot.
My hot take is: if a build v/s buy decision comes up frequently in meetings with your customers, you're a dead man walking. Either figure out a different market altogether, or a different customer segment who don't think they can build it themselves.
If you ask me personally, I love to serve customers who feel like the product is a black box magic genie that makes their problems go away, puts in their credit card details and moves on to other important things in their life. I don't want them thinking they could do it themselves.
Ask yourself, when you started a startup, did you think you should build out a data centre, or your own ChatGPT, or your own LinkedIn? No, right! You put in your credit card details and hoped the payments didn't fail. If your customers worry that their payments shouldn't fail, you don't have to worry about your revenue 😂