My quite simplistic understanding is that (a) yes, there are already existing solutions, but (b) the people providing those solutions will charge you a lot of money, especially if you later become dependent on them; and you still need to check their work, and they may disagree with you on some details because at the end of the day they are optimizing for themselves, not for you.
Doing things yourself requires extra time and energy, but the money which would otherwise become someone else’s profit now stays in your pockets. Essentially, as soon as you feel reasonably sure that the project will be successful, getting rid of each subcontractor means increasing your profit. You don’t need to become an expert on everything, you can still hire the experts, but now they are your employees working for a salary, instead of a separate company optimizing for their own profit.
Not sure how realistic this is, but if you imagine that even a typical successful company somewhat resembles the Dilbert comic, then if you can build your own company better, you can just take over their people who do the actual work, and stop feeding the remaining ones.
EDIT: I don’t have an experience running a company, but I am thinking about a friend who recently reconstructed his house. His original thoughts were “I am a software developer, this is my competitive advantage, so I will just pay the people who are experts on house construction”, but it turned out that the real world doesn’t work this way. Most of the so-called experts were quite incompetent, and he had to do a lot of research in their field of expertise just to be able to tell the difference. When the reconstruction was over, he already felt like he could start a new profession and do better than most of these experts. In this case, however, those experts were typically sole proprietors. If instead they would have been companies renting the experts, and if my friend would be in some kind of a business of repeatedly reconstructing houses, it would make sense for him to start optimizing the details seriously, and build replacements of what exists out there.
My quite simplistic understanding is that (a) yes, there are already existing solutions, but (b) the people providing those solutions will charge you a lot of money, especially if you later become dependent on them; and you still need to check their work, and they may disagree with you on some details because at the end of the day they are optimizing for themselves, not for you.
Doing things yourself requires extra time and energy, but the money which would otherwise become someone else’s profit now stays in your pockets. Essentially, as soon as you feel reasonably sure that the project will be successful, getting rid of each subcontractor means increasing your profit. You don’t need to become an expert on everything, you can still hire the experts, but now they are your employees working for a salary, instead of a separate company optimizing for their own profit.
Not sure how realistic this is, but if you imagine that even a typical successful company somewhat resembles the Dilbert comic, then if you can build your own company better, you can just take over their people who do the actual work, and stop feeding the remaining ones.
EDIT: I don’t have an experience running a company, but I am thinking about a friend who recently reconstructed his house. His original thoughts were “I am a software developer, this is my competitive advantage, so I will just pay the people who are experts on house construction”, but it turned out that the real world doesn’t work this way. Most of the so-called experts were quite incompetent, and he had to do a lot of research in their field of expertise just to be able to tell the difference. When the reconstruction was over, he already felt like he could start a new profession and do better than most of these experts. In this case, however, those experts were typically sole proprietors. If instead they would have been companies renting the experts, and if my friend would be in some kind of a business of repeatedly reconstructing houses, it would make sense for him to start optimizing the details seriously, and build replacements of what exists out there.