
Buy it or build it: Etsy - AlexMuir
http://alexmuir.com/buy-it-or-build-it--etsy
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ajones
You inflated numbers from your initial calculations, but I don't believe you
inflated them enough. How do you expect a team of 20 to recreate an entire
company in one year? Here's some things that I believe you missed:

\- You need a team of product and project managers to put in time to plan the
product and a high-level road map. The more granular product decisions are
able to be performed in parallel to the build, if building the product in an
agile fashion.

\- Etsy has an amazing engineering culture that cannot be constructed if the
developers are just focused on delivering the product. This culture has lead
to many internal tools that help with site reliability.

\- Etsy has already built a team of strong contributors. If Amazon were to
build their own Etsy-like marketplace, there would be recruiting costs and
false positives which will slow down delivery.

This list could go on and on, but is meant to illustrate that there's more to
this sort of project than engineering, marketing, and infrastructure.

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exolymph
This is an interesting thought experiment.

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cellularmitosis
As an iOS dev, I find it particularly interesting to see the spread between
the cost of just developing the app ($1MM) to the total ($970MM).

