The great martech debate: Build vs. buy

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I recently worked with a very well-known “unicorn” (a private company valued at more than $1 billion by investors).

The unicorn’s founder proudly told me that they were building their own AdWords campaign management software and that they had even hired an engineer from Google’s AdWords team (because, you know, one engineer probably knows the entire AdWords code set…). I did my best to dissuade the company from this strategy, but my arguments were ignored.

It’s possible that the unicorn will build an amazing piece of software that will outperform any other tool ever invented, but it’s more likely that the company will waste millions of dollars, hours of precious engineering time and lots of advertising dollars before they come to the conclusion that they should never have tried to build their own campaign management software in the first place.

My experience suggests that it almost never makes sense to build your own martech software. In this article, I’ll explain the strong arguments against “build,” why you should be in favor of “buy,” and detail the limited use cases where building is a good strategy.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]


Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

David Rodnitzky is CEO and co-founder of 3Q Digital, a Harte Hanks company, a marketing firm with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and downtown Chicago. David is the founder of the LinkedIn Online Lead Generation Group, an advisor for Marin Software, and a regular contributor to the 3Q Digital blog. He can be found at numerous speaking engagements across the SEM community.


 

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