Build It or Buy It? Three Apps I Decided To Build

Chris Davis 0:10
And we’re back with another episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Listen. It’s only fitting to start this, this episode off with a. With a question that my wife asked me the other day.

Chris Davis 0:24
She came into my office and I. And I ran in after and said, hey, hey, look at this. And her statement was, don’t tell me you built another app. And I kind of laughed at myself because in the moment of reflection, I look back and I’m like, yeah, I guess I have been building.

Chris Davis 0:48
Building. Crazy, right? You know, it’s always a new idea. And in the community, we have this running dialogue around, is this a problem or is this power, right?

Chris Davis 1:04
The ability to build these apps in this way. And I say it’s both. I think it’s a problem without discipline and it’s power, right? We now no longer have to rely on companies to give us the software that we really need.

Chris Davis 1:26
Now, there’s a caveat to this, and that’s why I’m following up. This Build it or buy it series is with a series, the Build it or buy it episode with another one. Because after I recorded that episode, I realized there is no one way, there is no clean way for me to say, hey, this is when you build. This is when you buy it is so dynamic.

Chris Davis 1:51
And I wanted to discuss today. Well, in this episode, some of the applications that I have chose to build instead of buy. Now, when I say build, I’m talking about personal software for myself in my personal life and in business, that allows me to operate my business more efficiently, more effectively. It, it super.

Chris Davis 2:19
It, it provides superpowers to people on my team. So they have to do less because the application is doing more. And I’m saying that more of a coach, player. There was a point in time where, yes, I was on the court, I’m scoring the buckets, and now I’m just coaching.

Chris Davis 2:38
Now you may catch me at a practice shooting with the team. Have you seen those clips of the NBA coaches in practice? Sometimes they’ll play with the players and let them know, hey, I still have it. That’s how I am with building systems.

Chris Davis 2:53
There was a day in time where that was my bread and butter. That was what I did. And now it’s more so of I’m the coach. I do it in my spare time, but the majority of my time is spent leading teams and helping them leverage AI and automation in a way that really scales the internal operations to scale the external revenue.

Chris Davis 3:17
Well I should say to scale, to increase the internal revenue. Forget external revenue. So with that being said, that’s the context in which I’m talking about building software and it’s why I recorded the episode Personal Software so you will always understand the context in which I’m speaking from now. In addition, I will say this.

Chris Davis 3:45
There are on average the software that you use is going to be over featured, right? It’s going to have more features than you can ever use, more options, more settings, and at the same time it’s often going to lack the exact settings and features that you need. And that’s where this build it or buy it question comes. I’m not actually trying to replace an entire platform.

Chris Davis 4:18
Well actually let me say this. I have replaced all my form platforms, right? Forms are just something that on the surface it looks real simple. Oh, collect some information.

Chris Davis 4:30
But then when you start to integrate it with your tech stack and customer journey and understand when you want to pre fill, sometimes you want to track where they’re coming from. It actually is easy to get complex with form building. So that is one caveat. But I didn’t do that intentionally.

Chris Davis 4:48
I didn’t set out to replace Jotform and all of these platforms that I was using. It just happened organically as I was learning and as I was solving my own need. But my thing is this, when I’m talking about build it or buy it, I’m Talking about that 10% that you need the app to do that you could just build on your own and leave the 90% on the table, right? You have a software system or a software that is five things that you need it to do and it does one.

Chris Davis 5:28
So take that one and expound on it and see if it makes sense to build out those four. Furthermore, depending on the environment that your, your apps are running in, for me, a lot of my apps, a lot of my building still takes place on open source software like WordPress or other platforms. Well, guess what, once you have the code base downloaded, you can start to fix things yourself and stop relying on support, right? One thing I hate is relying on waiting on a support ticket.

Chris Davis 6:02
If I can solve it myself now with AI and say, hey, can you create a script, a snippet, a plugin? Oh my goodness, the game definitely changes. Not just that, but with a SaaS platform, if it has a good API, there’s often apps that you can build based on the API that can do some of the stuff, some of the features that you want the platform to do. But the platform is either slow to implement it or they just don’t have that on their schedule as something that they’re interested in adding a feature to.

Chris Davis 6:40
It’s further down their roadmap. So there are a lot of reasons, a lot of reasons to build. But in this episode, I wanted to share three apps to start giving you some examples. It’s easy for me to talk at you and say, hey, you should do this and do that.

Chris Davis 6:57
Let me just give you some examples. I found that understanding is expedited through sharing, right? When someone shares what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, the dots connect quicker, which is the environment that I built the community around. Now, with that being said, the first one, I’ll start off with exactly what my wife was talking about.

Chris Davis 7:20
And it was a. It’s an app, terrible name. I’ll let AI name it. It doesn’t matter because it’s just an app for me.

Chris Davis 7:27
But it’s a fitness app and it’s called Food Coins. And essentially it. I set for the month, the types of snacks, how many times I’m going to eat pizza, how many times I’m going to have chips, waffles for breakfast, snacks, whatever. I have a finite coin amount, okay?

Chris Davis 7:45
This is how I’ve gamified, gamified it in my brain, everybody. So those coins either replenish daily, weekly or monthly. And I go into this app and when I eat a snack, I just spend a coin, and it just keeps track of what I’m eating and helps me, at a very easy basic scale, track my nutrition. And I’m saying that because I’ve done the MyFitnessPals, I’ve done the advanced macro spreadsheets, I’ve done the calorie counting, and I’m to a point where I just need to hone in on my snacking and some of the terrible carbs that I take in, right?

Chris Davis 8:26
So this allows me to do it in a way that’s not. I mean, it’s so easy. I load, I load it up and then I tap the big coin and it goes away. And I’ve got some other features in there where it can track if I’ve added an extra one or, you know, some reporting and all of that.

Chris Davis 8:42
But for the most part, there was nothing like that on the market. There was a habit tracker that was on the market that I was like, you know what? I could use that, right? I could bend that functionality to, to, to meet this need.

Chris Davis 8:58
But why? Why, when I can build it? Exactly how I’m thinking in this stage of my fitness journey, this is the most important. Now, if, as my stage changes, maybe I will go back to calorie count or something like that.

Chris Davis 9:12
Depending on my goals, I could either update the app, or I come back and say, okay, is it time for my fitness pal? Right? So that’s one. And speaking of habit, that was another app that I built.

Chris Davis 9:25
It’s a habit tracker. And the reason why I built this one is pretty much the same premises I’ve been talking about is that I was trying to build some healthy habits, and I just wanted a simple app, and I found one. I found a simple app in the app store, downloaded it, used it, and it was working pretty well. And then what happens, everybody?

Chris Davis 9:48
There’s a few features in the freemium model that just aren’t available. So none. None of the software. If I’m being honest, none of the software that I’ve built has replaced expensive software.

Chris Davis 10:01
They’re like $5 a month, $10 a month here and there. However, it adds up in my lion, five here, 10 there, three here. Before you know it, you’ve got $50 a month in subscription fees for all of these applications that you’re using. So for this habit Tracker, it’s like $8 a month.

Chris Davis 10:22
But the question is, do I really want to spend $8 a month for the rest of the time that I’m using this app? Right. And the features that it had that I wanted, it was just two. It was just two.

Chris Davis 10:35
So what did I do this time in that Coin. The fitness Coin app, I had it. It created it from scratch, and then I went in and I told it to give it like a. What is it?

Chris Davis 10:49
Fanduel. It’s gambling. Not gambling, but it is gambling. But it’s a.

Chris Davis 10:55
It’s a type of app. Sports betting. There. I told it.

Chris Davis 10:58
Give it a sports betting app theme. So it. That. That took care of the design.

Chris Davis 11:02
Well, this one, I just took screenshots of the app, and I said, hey, I want you to pretty much emulate this, but these are the features that I want to add. And I got to the finish line much faster. Which brings me to another point, is that when. When you’re thinking of buying it, buying or building it, you really should never start from scratch.

Chris Davis 11:23
When it comes from building. When it comes to building, there’s. There’s usually. No, not usually.

Chris Davis 11:29
There’s always an application that’s already doing what you’re looking to have done in a way that you would like to model, and then you can improve on it. I very rarely start from scratch. AI works better anyway if you give it examples of what, what it’s building and what it should look like. So with that habit tracker, oh my goodness, I was able to build it so, so quickly and it works exactly to how I want to track habits.

Chris Davis 12:02
I’ve been using it for months without issue and another success will buy it or build it, right. But as you can see, these are smaller applications everybody. These are not big SaaS platforms. At any point, if I so choose, I could definitely make it into that.

Chris Davis 12:19
I could easily, you know, do multi tenant and start to deploy it and let other people use it and things like that. And I’m not saying I won’t do that, but for right now, that’s the context. What it allows me to do is it’s helping me get value very sharp. Not just at app building, but understanding how to prompt AI.

Chris Davis 12:42
And when new models come out, I can run a similar skill or a similar prompt in a new model and see the output. So I’m able to not just rely on what people are reporting. Oh, Astra chatgpt, Astra is the next level and Fable, five point whatever, seven point whatever is great. I get to try it in a controlled environment where I’m familiar with the results and I can see the difference.

Chris Davis 13:08
Right. So the third would be a note taking app. And most of you have either are either using your native note taking app on your phone or you’ve downloaded one the Notions. And what else was I using?

Chris Davis 13:23
In the past, I’ve used Notion, I’ve used Workflowy, I’ve used Evernote. When Evernote got acquired and started going crazy, really tripping on their prices and everything, I migrated to Notion and it was seamless, it was easy. I actually still have a lot of notes in Notion. However, I needed a note taker for church.

Chris Davis 13:48
So I’m a man of faith and believer in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. So I go to church on Sundays and throughout the week we do as a family. But because I’m just not a churchgoer, I want to live out what I’m learning. I want to, I wanted to take notes in a way that I could easily reflect on things that stood out and things of that nature.

Chris Davis 14:13
So I was inspired again. You see, I didn’t start from scratch by this app called Workflowy. And they it’s kind of like a bullet point type application, but when you click on a bullet it creates another page and then you can add bullets. So it’s like nested bullets, and you can.

Chris Davis 14:30
It’s real easy and quick to use. So I took that approach. But what I did was based on how I take notes. Of course I want to be able to quickly add a scripture.

Chris Davis 14:41
If I do add a scripture, I want to be able to click it and it pulls it up so I can read it on my phone instead of having to take notes on my phone and then try to go through the physical Bible. So I knew my flow of note taking. I built the app. Oh, my goodness.

Chris Davis 14:58
I mean, it got to the point where AI was recommending things for me to do. It was like, hey, since you’re taking these notes, it’d be nice if. No, it didn’t say it would be nice. It asked me, do you want to be able to star certain notes and then see all of your stars across notes?

Chris Davis 15:15
And I was like, oh, my goodness, yes, I would. Right. Then it gave. Then we came up with an idea that after you take the notes, I can click a.

Chris Davis 15:23
Click a toggle, and it shows me the notes as if it were written in a document, indented in everything. I mean, it is my primary note taking app whenever I’m not. Not just at church now, but even when I’m. When someone is speaking and I want to.

Chris Davis 15:42
When I. And I want to capture. Capture the notes quickly because it’s in the flow of what I do. I could give it to you, and you would probably be like, no, this is too slow.

Chris Davis 15:52
Why do I have to do that? This doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to my brain. So that’s why I built it.

Chris Davis 15:57
And. And that’s. That’s what I’ll say. I’ve got.

Chris Davis 16:00
Oh, my goodness. Wait a minute. Hold on. I’ve got one more.

Chris Davis 16:03
I know I said three, but I have a basketball scoring app. This is the app that if I were to sell, I could probably sell it to a youth basketball league or something like that as their own proprietary app, and it would probably work really well. And the. And the reason being is because it was inspired.

Chris Davis 16:25
Do you guys see a theme here? It was inspired by this app called Game Changer. And it’s the. It’s a.

Chris Davis 16:33
It’s like a sports group, like a sports scheduling, communication and stats app. So you see all of those things that it does. Well. I just really wanted to score the games.

Chris Davis 16:44
I’ve been an assistant coach for the last couple years, and I’m on the bench, and I’m like, I need something that’s very fast, allows me to focus on the game and coach the kids on the bench. I cannot have little buttons in all of these settings. So after a few iterations, I’ve got this app. Big buttons, swipe, actions, everything.

Chris Davis 17:02
Right. Heavily inspired by what was on the market. Not just that. Not just that Game changer app, though.

Chris Davis 17:10
I downloaded other NBA scoring apps and I saw certain things that they did. Nice. And that. I said, okay, I want to do this, but I don’t like how they did that.

Chris Davis 17:18
And I got to piece it together. And by the end of the year, I had it perfected and I was able to create shared links that I could send to the kids and they can see their entire season stats. It was as if they’re playing college ball or something at a very. These are 14, you know, this 14U basketball.

Chris Davis 17:38
I mean, it was amazing. So I’ve had really good experiences building these small internal apps that have improved my personal life as well as my professional. I’m not even gonna mention the budget app that I built that replaced our spreadsheet. My spreadsheet went from Google sheets to my budget.

Chris Davis 17:59
I should say, went from Google sheets to. Well, actually, let me date myself. I used to do my budget on my palm Treo 750. You gotta be 30 and up for that one, maybe even 40 and up to know what that is.

Chris Davis 18:15
Then it went to a Google sheet, then it went to an airtable database, and now it’s in an app, which is another example, which gives you five. Let me slow down. Let me say it. Let me just listen.

Chris Davis 18:25
I will keep going, everyone. Because every time there’s a need in my life, the first question I have is, can an app simplify this? And with that being said, it doesn’t always end well. There is.

Chris Davis 18:39
There are times where you really don’t need to build, right? And it sneaks up on you, everybody. You can’t see it from the outside. And sometimes you get so prideful in a good way, right?

Chris Davis 18:52
Like, I can build anything that you realize maybe you shouldn’t build just anything. And one example is I had a client onboarding, and I was like, you know what? Now that we have, I’ve got this new skill with AI. Let me revisit how I’m doing my onboarding.

Chris Davis 19:12
Intake form to signing the contract, to paying the first payment, right? And in my mind, I’m like, oh, well, intake form should be able to. Cause I was using fill out. Fill out is the software.

Chris Davis 19:26
And I was like, well, fill out just presents a PDF after you fill out the intake form and Then if I could add signing, I think I can streamline this whole process, right? So I tried it. I tried it and I got to the form. The form was able to create a dynamic contract based on the, the.

Chris Davis 19:48
The inputs and insert those values in. Into the. The document. And then we got to the.

Chris Davis 19:55
I got to the point where I could add the signing feature onto it. Most of it worked as you would think, but oh, my goodness, it was so arduous getting text to. If you have a variable in a. So what I did is I went with Google Doc and I put variables in there.

Chris Davis 20:19
And the reason why I went with a Google Doc and variables because it’s. If the text is inserted at the variable, it can move the. It can be inserted without being overlaid. If it’s a PDF and there’s a variable, it can find it.

Chris Davis 20:35
But then if that space is not long enough, the text will overflow and then it’s unreadable. So you need the text to be able to, you need the variable to be inserted as if you’re typing it. That in itself was, was, was quite the, the struggle, right? But then when I, when I got that right, presenting that to the, to the end user in the app was, was very complex because there was styling.

Chris Davis 21:08
And I didn’t, I didn’t realize. You just don’t realize all of these things. I’m like, well, make it HTML. It’s like, well, you’re going from a Google Drive Doc to HTML.

Chris Davis 21:18
And I was fighting with that. It’s not right. Look at your formatting. And you know, essentially I got there and then the signing piece, the actual signing wasn’t hard, like adding a module that signs.

Chris Davis 21:31
But I started to get a false positive on my desktop and then I started pulling it up on other browsers and other devices or what if they’re on their mobile phone? Long story short, everyone, I gained a ton of respect for the pandadocs, the Eversigns, the docusigns, the Zodo signs, the you name it sign platforms. Because it is so much involved with those three steps that I said, you know what? I’m tapping out.

Chris Davis 21:59
That was a full weekend, by the way. It took me a full weekend. Not in front of my computer. You know, you can prompt on the fly now.

Chris Davis 22:09
But it was still a lot of time and a lot of thought and a lot of frustration. So what I ended up doing was I realized I got too big for my britches and said, let me scale this back. All right? I’ve got two functionalities.

Chris Davis 22:22
I’m building a contract dynamically and then I’m signing. What if I just focus this down to a contract builder? It is easy. Based on the intake form, it easily creates a contract that’s ready to sign.

Chris Davis 22:34
Then I can either upload that to a signing platform or use my platform for the specific case. Like I can’t remember because it was a little, little bit ago, but there was a specific use case that it actually did work. And I was like, okay, you know, but if I wanted to add a new contract and put all the variables, it just, it just wasn’t worth it. Everybody, I’m like, you know what, just stick with what I’m using, right?

Chris Davis 23:01
So it’s not always, it doesn’t always turn out the, the best way, right? And you’re not always going to be able to build exactly what you think, but that’s the whole reason why you get started. And in fact, in the community I have a course for personal software, but it’s really not, it’s not your ideal course on, hey, here’s how to build software. It really shows you how to set up your local environment so you can build unlimited apps, right?

Chris Davis 23:34
Because once you’re. Once your local environment is set up and you can build unlimited apps with the cost of whatever Your Cloud or ChatGPT account is now you can, you can continuously play and you can figure out where your buy it or build it line is, right? So I will say this, the build. I lean more towards build it because I’m not trying to build full SaaS platforms and I am the primary user of said thing, okay?

Chris Davis 24:07
So I know very well my needs and my processes. So it works really easy for me. Let me not say easy. It works really well continuously for me, this approach.

Chris Davis 24:22
Just know that you don’t. When you’re coding with AI and yes, I know vibe coding and all of that, whatever you want to call it when you’re coding with AI, just know that you, you do not know true software development. There’s termin terminology that I’m learning. There’s ways of approaching software that I just don’t know.

Chris Davis 24:47
And you learn it on as you go. But certain things that you’ve been engaging with, oh, I wanna be able to upload a file. It’s not that easy, right? But there are ways to do it.

Chris Davis 24:58
You know, we share in a community all the time. The best way to use file uploads for your for your apps. One of my favorite tools right now is cloudflare, but there’s so many once you start to learn how the backend of software works by way of building. With AI, you just get better and better and better.

Chris Davis 25:17
You’re not gonna hit home runs every time, you’re not gonna get base hits every time. I’m using sports analogies. Let me just say you’re not going to get it right all the time. The time.

Chris Davis 25:27
And when the person using your app are not external people, it gets a lot easier. If external people are going to use it, I would shy if you’re going to build it in external people are going to use it, just know you’re going to have to be smarter, you’re going to have to be closer to the development process and you’re more than likely going to need a developer beyond you. Not that AI can’t do it, but to check AI because security is a huge factor. Huge factor.

Chris Davis 26:04
I would not play with security. However, I’ll say this. Some of you are prompting and AI is telling you to get a developer and you don’t, you just don’t know how to prompt it right, or you don’t understand how to get unstuck from the spot that you’re stuck in, right? So all of these things talk to the dynamic nature of building apps.

Chris Davis 26:24
And if you’re not doing it now, you definitely should be, because you don’t have to be. You don’t have to have the goal of making a million dollars to be successful at building apps. And my call to action is actually an internal one. Those of you in the community, once this post, now you’re listening to it, it’s posted.

Chris Davis 26:48
So go into the community and put a comment under this post of a personal app that you have decided to build rather than buy. I just want to make sure that we’re all tracking and sharing because once you get this skill, everyone, you don’t even realize how much you build. And if you’re someone who wants to be a part of that conversation and say, hey, I want to be in this sharing where you’re learning faster and know how to navigate this app building and more technologies. The community link in the description, it’s of no cost to join.

Chris Davis 27:31
We’ve got a group of experienced builders, people who have been building systems for years. So when they share something, it’s worth listening to. Tools get shared that I don’t know of. I start using strategies other members in the community share.

Chris Davis 27:49
I’m like, oh, wow, that was really cool. It’s just, it’s a really good environment and it’s open, it’s open to you as the experience builder to come join and define this build it or buy it more more definitively for you. So with that being said, I hope you enjoyed some of the examples that I’ve gave you that I’ve given you. Hopefully it inspired your thinking.

Chris Davis 28:12
And now what maybe was more confusing like I don’t know what I would do. You can at least go try some stuff if you need that found in place where you can create unlimited apps at no cost, no lovable tokens, no replit tokens and all of that. Just really a cloud or ChatGPT account, we’ve got resources for that as well. If you’re leading a team, a tech team and trying to deploy AI solutions, definitely start small and build upon it.

Chris Davis 28:42
Huge success doing this for the companies that I consult with as a fractional cto. Listen, the opportunity is there and the faster you learn this skill, the better, the better off you’ll be. And with that being said, I’m signing off everyone until the next time I see you all online, automate responsibly, my friends.