Building vs Buying: Messaging Platforms

Communicating with your clients and leads is critical. And communicating with them the way they want is even more important.

Here’s a tidbit for you: 9/10 customers want to be texted by a business over any other method of communication. Which is probably why you’re here. You want to know if you should build a text messaging solution or buy one (like Hatch).

Let’s chat about building

First and foremost, building a text messaging platform from scratch is a significant undertaking. It requires a significant investment of time, money, and resources to develop and maintain. You need developers, designers, a UX/UI team, and more to create the platform and then continue to support it as it evolves. Even if you already have these people in place, you have them in place for a different purpose. Which they can’t do any longer because they’ve got to hammer out a business texting platform.

Let’s say you’re lucky and have extra budget, extra developers, and an itch that only building your own business text messaging platform can scratch. Time is going to grind you down. Developing a business text messaging platform is a months-long process. For some companies, it’s years. To be honest, we are still constantly re-iterating and improving and it’s literally our only focus! At best, you’re six months away from having a passable platform. But realistically, we’d guess 12-18 months to get it where you feel confident in it. That’s a whole lot of leads waiting to be texted back…

Long Term Support & Reliability

Let's say they can build it. Is it going to be reliable? The big miss is that when someone “Frankensteins” something together, they have zero support, can't troubleshoot when something goes down, and it takes 12-18 months for you to actually feel comfortable utilizing it in any capacity that can be sustainable. Additionally, is it just text? While we agree that 85% of your responses are going to be via text message, you are missing critical parts of communication that people utilize on a daily basis. An omnichannel approach out of the box (text, email, and voicemail drops) ensures you are going to reach 100% of your audience. Nothing will slip through the cracks. Utilizing a company like Hatch gives you a few things:

• An omnichannel approach

• Integrations out of the box

• Real-life support (actual humans who have done this for a while)

• Assurance that you have an entire team around you

• Allows your team to focus on their job. Not something they have never done before (like building software)

The Buying Solution

While building a text messaging platform internally may seem like a good idea at first, it can be a significant undertaking that requires a lot of time, money, and resources. Our advice? Save your devs the headache, and save yourself the development funds. Purchase a pre-existing text messaging platform like Hatch and save your business time and money in the long run. 

We can have you sending text messages (complete with templates, texting cadences, and more) in just a matter of days. Sounds a whole lot better than 12-18 months, right?

Ready to learn more about Hatch? Book a demo here or grab our eBook below full of tips and strategies to instantly engage your leads the way they want to communicate (PS - it's texting).