The illusion of free money by whitelabelling software

We’ll whitelabel our application and get our money back!

It sounds like an easy win: build a tool for yourself and then sell it to others to recoup the investment. But this idea is often gravely underestimated. Creating a product for the market is an entirely different challenge from building an internal tool. When you try to do both at once, the vision gets muddled. Every decision becomes a compromise between solving your own problem and serving a hypothetical external customer.

Make a choice. Either commit to building a product, search for product-market fit while dogfooding it internally, and grow from there. Or consciously decide to create an internal tool that perfectly solves your own problem, and nothing else. That’s the real reason to custom-build. If you can’t find a strong internal use case, maybe you shouldn’t build the tool at all.