This post first appeared in Forbes

I joined a startup in 2013 as its first marketing hire. We had fifteen employees and were earning less than $1 million in yearly revenue. By the time I left, we had grown to over a hundred employees and 20 times the revenue. Additionally, I had grown the marketing department from just me to a team of eight. One of the key lessons I learned on the job was knowing when to build versus when to buy and how that choice impacts the thing that matters most: speed.

Many founders, especially technical founders, tend to favor building tools rather than buying them. As the first marketing hire, it’s important to resist that urge. My startup, an online platform for learning to code, had a team of admissions officers and a team of learner success managers. This is somewhat similar to the way business-to-business (B2B) organizations would employ sales and account management teams. Over the course of three years, these two teams took diverging paths with their tech stacks. This offers us two perfect petri dishes to examine the consequences of building your own tech versus buying from someone else.

Build

Our co-founder managed the account management team and, as an engineer, believed that we should build our own tools and seek to automate low-leverage tasks. So, when our account managers needed to log data about how customers were using the product, our co-founder would create a web form to log that data directly into our product’s database. When the team needed a report on that data, he would build a reporting dashboard exactly to their specifications. When we needed to change the status of a user from active to withdrawn, that too would be a web form with the data pumping directly into our web app. Through incremental additions like this over two years, we slowly built a homegrown education-CRM tool entirely our own.

This approach had strengths: It gave the team exactly what they needed. And since the data lived in the product itself, rather than in a parallel system, some tasks could be automated, such as welcome emails triggered directly from the app.

But this approach also had shortcomings: Every small change to a web form, to add a field or handle an edge case, had to go through engineering. And there were unforeseen hurdles that increased the project scope, such as handling daylight savings time and adjusting account manager-student pairings.

 Buy

While our co-founder saw building tools as an opportunity to automate some of the work and help the business scale, I had a different point of view. I’d been starved of engineering support in other roles, so I wanted to choose a path that would minimize our future engineering dependencies. Looking at how our admissions team operated, I saw parallels to how B2B sales teams operated and decided that Salesforce, although not an ideal fit for an education business, might get us 80% of what we needed.

Implementing Salesforce was a herculean upfront challenge: It took an entire quarter to implement, not to mention over $40,000 a year in subscription fees. And I knew as an education startup we’d only be using 10% of the functionality it had to offer. All of this -- the time, money and opportunity cost -- felt like a huge sacrifice at the time.

But once it was set up, it paid for itself: When we needed to capture new data on sales calls, we created a new field on the lead within Salesforce -- no engineers necessary. We could create new data reports on the fly. And while the account management team eventually had a perfectly tailored tech stack, it took three years to get there. Our sales team had 80% of what we would ever need by the end of that first quarter.

This is perhaps the biggest advantage of buying technology rather than building yourself: speed. Whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s directive to “move fast and break things” or Jeff Bezos’s decision framework of “one-way and two-way doors,” a common thread in startup wisdom is this: Your biggest advantage over large incumbents is speed.

One of the big drawbacks of building is productizing the recipe too early. Over the next two years, the sales team learned more about the ideal customer experience. Salesforce gave us the flexibility to modify our processes without engineering help. Had we built the perfect solution from the outset, we would have had to re-engineer it many times over the next two years as our ideal process evolved. 

By far the biggest advantage of Salesforce was a feature set we didn't strongly consider when making a build-versus-buy decision: the robust reporting suite. The reporting functionality enabled us to answer almost any question on our own. This put the sales team light years ahead of the account management team in terms of its ability to be data-driven. 

In summary, know that engineers will want to automate everything. As the first marketing hire, you sometimes have to remind your colleagues of what Paul Graham said: “Do things that don’t scale.” At first, you are trying to perfect your recipe for product-market fit and sustainable growth. Until that's perfected, you want to be flexible and agile. So, buy flexible off-the-shelf parts whenever possible and iterate rapidly. Once you perfect the recipes and achieve some traction, only then does it make sense to build it in-house.

Being the first marketing hire is tough. The decisions you make on your technical stack will have consequences for years to come, leaving a mark that will outlast your tenure. But being there at the beginning may be the most fulfilling work of your career. Enjoy every moment of it.