I was catching up with a friend of mine the other day—a lead dev at a marketing agency—and he told me a story that's probably familiar to a lot of us in tech. It’s a classic tale of engineering ambition meeting business reality.
His team had just landed a huge new client: a retail chain with over 1,000 stores across the U.S. and Europe. Everyone was excited. Then came the first "simple" task from the client: "We just need to make sure our business hours are updated and consistent everywhere online."
Everywhere. As in Google Maps, Apple Maps, Facebook, and about 50 other online directories, each with its own API, or worse, no API at all.
The Engineering Itch: "We Can Build This!"
My friend said his team got really into it. As engineers, our first instinct when faced with a complex problem is often to build a cool, custom solution. They started whiteboarding this elegant, defensive system to tackle the two core issues they discovered:
- The "API Zoo": Every platform had its own rules, rate limits, and data formats. A simple update required dozens of unique "adapters."
- "Data Drift": They realized that even after a successful sync, the data would get corrupted over time. User suggestions on Google, malicious edits from competitors, or just random platform bugs would change a store’s hours without warning.
Their solution was a thing of beauty. He called it a "reconciliation loop." The system would have its own "source of truth" database and would constantly poll every external platform, compare the live data to their verified data, and automatically revert any unauthorized changes. They were excited. It was a great architectural challenge.
The Question That Changed Everything
They were deep into planning, ready to break the project into sprints, when one of the senior devs on his team asked a simple, but game-changing question:
"Are we sure no one has already solved this? Maybe we should just look for a tool that does this."
They decided to pause and dedicate a day to research. They tested several services. Some were too complicated, others too expensive, and a few had the same regional limitations they were trying to escape.
And then they found https://getpin.com/solutions-en/presence-en/.
It was, as he put it, their "Aha!" moment. The platform did exactly what they were planning to build: it centralized data management, monitored reviews, and, most importantly, actively protected business profiles from unauthorized changes. The interface was clean, and the core features—data sync, reputation management, and bulk posting—just worked.
The Lesson and The Client's Choice
When my friend's team presented the client with two options:
- The Custom "Reconciliation Loop": A powerful, perfectly tailored system, but it would take months to build and require ongoing maintenance.
- Getpin's SaaS solution: It could be up and running in a few days, covered 95% of their needs, and was far more cost-effective.
The client, of course, chose Getpin.
"It was a huge lesson for us," he told me. "Sometimes, the smartest engineering decision is not to write a single line of code." Their job was to solve the client's problem, not just to build an interesting piece of tech.
His story really resonated with me. By using Getpin.com, they delivered value to their client faster, cheaper, and more reliably than if they had tried to reinvent the wheel.
It's a great reminder that our goal is to solve problems, and sometimes the best tool for the job is one that someone else has already built.
Have you ever been in a similar situation? I'd love to hear your stories about choosing to "buy" instead of "build."
Top comments (0)