My team spent 6 months building a custom CRM and it totally backfired

I thought building our own CRM would save us from paying $2,500 a month for Salesforce. But after 6 months of development and a huge distraction to my devs in Seattle, we ended up with a clunky mess that nobody liked using. We scrapped it and went back to Salesforce, losing about $40k in developer time. Has anyone else regretted trying to build your own systems instead of buying?

2 comments

2 Comments

jana_hernandez3d ago

Watch people try to fix something themselves first before just buying the right tool. My neighbor spent three weekends patching his roof instead of paying a roofer $800. Now his ceiling has water damage and it cost him double. Same with a buddy who insisted on changing his own oil and stripped the drain plug. People get this idea that doing it yourself is always cheaper but they forget their time has value and they probably don't know what they're doing. Software is no different.

phoenix_campbell883d ago

And honestly, this mindset bleeds into everything, not just home repairs. I've seen people spend hours trying to hack together a free software solution for their small business when the paid tool would've saved them a week of frustration and done it better. It's like they're so scared of throwing money at a problem that they forget time is money too. Same with cooking - my neighbor insists on baking everything from scratch for every holiday and ends up stressed and exhausted when a store-bought pie would've let them actually enjoy the day. There's this weird pride in struggling through things yourself, even when hiring someone makes way more sense. The older I get, the more I realize knowing when NOT to DIY is actually a skill in itself.