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I was doing this research for whether we should build our own customer relationship management system or should we just buy one. When I typed “build vs buy crm” in Google, I noticed the common advice given by the top results was geared towards a buying decision. I am not talking about Google ads here, but organic results.
In general, we tend to ignore ads when performing a search like this one. We know that advertisers have an incentive to sell you something, so we rather go for organic content instead. But, don’t you agree that organic content creators have their incentives too?
If you think about it, a company creating a CRM solution has an incentive to create content encouraging people to buy their solution. On the other hand, not many content creators have the incentive to tell you to build your own solution. No one is making money by telling you to build your solution, unless they are selling you a course for how to build it or something. But still, this is very niche content for a course creator, and most likely the value someone gets from selling a CRM system is much more than selling a course. There are asymmetric incentives at play here. One side of our “build vs buy” equation pushes for more content to be created in its favor.
This reminds me of a former colleague of mine who used to repeat this quote by…