Hello Reader

AI platforms now make it possible to spin up an agent or system for almost anything. Which means you're probably wondering if you should be building something yourself or asking your team to do it.

But is it worth doing?

If you follow all the hype online, you're probably feeling like you're missing out if you're not vibe coding a fully integrated content creation platform.

But despite what these LinkedIn gurus are telling you, you can't spin up your own app in a day. If you want to build something durable and usable, there's serious investment involved.

This week's edition follows four agency and marketing practitioners and how they made the decision about whether to build or buy their own solution.

Read on to find out what they did.

The build that should have been a buy

Megan Clarke, CEO, Clapping Dog Media

Megan Clarke runs Clapping Dog Media, a content marketing agency. Like a lot of us this year, she watched other agency owners on LinkedIn building custom AI platforms and started to feel like she was missing something.

She hired a development agency to build a bespoke content system to support her SEO and AEO service. Six months later, she was $12,000 in with nothing launched. The scope kept moving and every week burned more of her time and budget.

She was struggling to see a path to positive return on the other side.

In the end, she decided to scrap the project.

“When I sat down and assessed the project, I couldn’t justify the time and expense,” Megan says. “And when I finally made the decision I was so relieved. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.”

Megan has since redirected her focus to higher-margin services for her clients, using tools that fit her budget. For her, buying existing platforms was the sensible choice and the one that allowed her to do what she does best: serve her clients.

The build that solved a client problem ​
​

Chris Arden, CEO

Chris Arden runs Demand Lab in Texas. He's a fractional CMO and GTM engineer with 20 years of demand generation experience and a background heavy in data analysis. His growth pipeline runs on outbound to newly-funded B2B companies, where he steps in as an interim marketing leader.

That channel gets harder every year. B2B email reply rates have dropped from 7% to 3%, and you’re now competing with 376 billion emails that go out daily.

“Every B2B vendor with a similar ICP is running the same Clay-plus-Apollo playbook,” Chris says. “Which means that when a company raises funding, its CEO gets 60 near-identical pitches on the same day. If you send the same email, you’ll never stand out.”

So Chris set out to solve that problem.

Over one weekend, in under six hours of active work, he built an AI agent that:

1. Reads his VC funding newsletters as they arrive each morning
2. Scores each newly-funded company against his ICP
3. Loads qualified accounts into a staging database
4. Generates a bespoke landing page for each company
5. Sends custom email and LinkedIn outreach driving to the custom landing page

In one weekend it produced 137 live landing pages, one per qualified account.

Here’s an example of one of the landing pages:

His stack includes Claude Pro, Netlify for hosting, Dripify for LinkedIn, Instantly for email and Google Sheets for staging. What used to require a developer, a data team and several weeks of engineering time now runs itself off the arrival of a newsletter in his inbox.

Chris's build worked because he knew the problem well enough to see which parts of the workflow to build, and he had enough technical fluency to build it without hiring anyone.

Given the success of his landing page build, Chris decided to tackle the next item on his wish list. This time he created the GTM Model Leaderboard, a website that shows which models perform the best in a range of GTM tasks.

If you’re in a similar situation and have a weekend to spare, then building might be your best choice.

Filling an empty role with an AI solution

Jodie Woodworth, Head of Marketing

Jodie Woodworth runs marketing for a Motorola Solutions subsidiary. Earlier this year her Product Marketing Manager left, and the backfill was blocked until Q4. She still needed positioning documents, sales enablement and market analysis to keep shipping, and she had no person to do the work.

She decided to build an AI workflow to help, but she was limited to company approved tools. The restrictions didn’t stop her, though. She trained Gemini on the Pragmatic Institute framework, and built a 300-document company brain in NotebookLM.

The system produces 25 page positioning guides in hours instead of weeks. Inbound leads are up, lead quality is up and her team's burnout is down. Her brand also started showing up in AI search platforms, which she had not planned for.

For Jodie, it made sense to use existing tools. They had the capabilities she needed, didn’t require technical knowledge for set up and were already approved by her IT team.

The build that became a product

Nick Zeckets, Founder and "Chief Fire Starter"

Nick Zeckets runs Smoke Signals, an agency with a small team. He is naturally technical and thinks like an entrepreneur, which means he’s well versed in building solutions to customer problems.

When he looked at what was on the market for what he needed, nothing solved the problem exactly the way he wanted. He could see that an integrated solution would produce a much better outcome than stitching existing tools together.

So he launched Throughline.

“Think of it as a content operating system that builds GTM campaigns from a single source of truth about a business,” Nick says. “It ingests your CRM data, closed and lost deals, call transcripts, review sites, social data and competitive research, then produces the assets you need to run outbound.”

The outputs can include benchmark content, social posts, sales enablement, outbound sequences and interactive tools. It also creates talk tracks for sales development reps, all modeled on the target buyer.

Early results from beta clients show a three to four times lift on email response rates.

Underneath, the platform runs seven sequential agents including Claude, ElevenLabs for voice, and Voyage for vector search. Nick also integrated Redis, Railway, Firecrawl and Parallel.ai.

But this build wasn’t easy.

It took Nick six months of dedicated work and a whole lot of technical knowledge. That included stitching the backend together himself, and absorbing the cost and taking on the risk.

"Now that I've done this myself, I'm more inclined to say builder beware," says Nick. “Building is a serious endeavor, you really need the time to focus."

An ambitious build can produce something unique to your agency or business, but ambitious builds are not the right first move for someone with no technical expertise and little time for building.

Want to try out Content OS for yourself? Nick is running a beta for companies with outbound sales teams using HubSpot. Head to throughline.smokesignals.ai or email Nick directly and tell him you're a reader here. He’ll move you to the front of the queue.

Build or Buy?

Sometimes it’s not clear if you should build or buy. If you’re wrestling with this decision, you can use the signal checklist below.

If you answer more questions in one section rather than the other, you’ll know what to do. If you don’t have a clear winner then you need to more clearly define your situation and goals.

Signals you should build

• The tool doesn't exist. You've looked and every vendor is solving an adjacent problem to the one you have.
• The workflow is unique enough that no vendor is likely to put it on their roadmap.
• You (or someone on your team) has built things before. Tinkering doesn't count.
• The "buy" isn't available. Headcount and budget is frozen and the work still has to get done.
• You already have the tools and permissions in place.
• The problem is high-volume, repetitive and low-stakes. If it breaks, no one gets hurt and no one stops paying you.

Signals you should buy

• Someone else has already solved it, and their price is less than three months of your team's time.
• The problem is core to how you make money. If it goes down, revenue stops.
• You would need to outsource the build to a dev shop.
• The urge to build is coming from feeling behind. There’s no specific problem you’re trying to solve.
• You can't describe the ROI in one sentence.
• You don’t have time or a resource for ongoing maintenance.

"Honestly, the two hours flew by." That's Michael Hughes, CMO at Chorus Connection, after one of my workshops.

Today is the last day to register for the Masterclass. Registration closes at noon PT, then the doors close.

On July 23, Toyah and I are running the Masterclass version of that same session. It runs ninety minutes and covers the full system live, from research to finished assets.

You leave with the recording, the prompt library and Toyah's design templates.

​Register for the Masterclass​

Tahnee