Two columns on a napkin that should have changed your roadmap a year ago.
Everyone says “build versus buy” like it’s a real comparison they ran. Almost nobody runs it. They feel their way to “build,” because building is the default and defaults don’t have to be defended. So let’s actually do the napkin, because the napkin is brutal and it’s usually right.
Pick something concrete. Say you want a content engine in your category: real organic traffic that converts, the kind of asset that pays you for years. Two ways to get it.
Build it. You hire or contract a team. Call it a writer, an editor, an SEO, and a chunk of your own attention, because it dies without you. Figure low six figures a year all-in once you count the people, the tools, and the months your eyes are on it instead of the product. Then wait. Good content programs take twelve to eighteen months to compound into traffic that matters, and that’s when they work. A meaningful share never get there, because you lose patience, or the strategy was wrong, or Google changes its mind. So the real cost isn’t the cash. It’s the cash times the months times the probability you actually arrive.
Buy it. A site already doing the traffic you want, already ranked, already past the eighteen-month wait, trades at roughly three to four times annual profit. A site netting a hundred grand a year is a three-to-four-hundred-grand purchase. That number looks bigger than the build budget until you remember what it includes: the eighteen months are already served, the ranking risk is already retired, the thing already works. You are not buying a plan. You are buying an outcome someone else took the risk to produce.
Now put them side by side honestly. The build column says “low six figures a year, for one to two years, with maybe a 40 percent chance it works.” The buy column says “three to four hundred grand, once, and it works on day one.” When you write the probability into the build column, which everyone leaves out, the comparison stops being close. You’re not comparing prices. You’re comparing a price to a lottery ticket that also costs money every month you hold it.
There are real reasons to build anyway. If nothing comparable is for sale, you build. If you can build it dramatically cheaper than the market because you have an unfair advantage, a distribution channel, an audience, a product the content just plugs into, you build, because your build column is genuinely smaller than everyone else’s. And if the thing is your actual core competence, the part customers pay you for, you build, because that’s not an asset to acquire, it’s the company.
But “we’ll just build it” as a reflex, with no napkin, on a thing that isn’t your core and is sitting right there for sale at four times earnings? That’s not a strategy. That’s a preference for the feeling of progress over the fact of it.
Run the napkin before the next roadmap meeting. Both columns. Probability included. Then make the call with the math in front of you instead of the vibe.