Make the oil, buy the website

A carpenter in Jeddah makes tables and benches by hand, and good ones. Over the winter he also built his own website, wrote the code for its checkout, designed his own packing crates and arranged deliveries with a cousin's van.

Each of those felt like independence. Each one took hours he could have spent at the bench.

The old question underneath is whether to make a thing or buy it. Two tests help. Can you buy it easily, from plenty of suppliers competing for your money? And would your customers notice, or care, if you made it yourself?

A website template passes the first test with room to spare. There are hundreds of them, cheap, and he can change his mind whenever he likes. Nobody buying a walnut table cares who wrote the checkout. So he should buy it, and the crate, and very likely the delivery.

The finish is different. For years he bought his oil from the one supplier in town, and it yellowed the pale woods within a year. Customers noticed. Some said so. There was nobody else to buy from. That is when making your own earns its place: the supplier holds the power, and the customer cares about the result.

For one person working alone, this is not theory. A day has a fixed number of useful hours, and every hour spent rebuilding something that could be bought is an hour taken from the one thing only he can make.

So he should mix the oil himself, and let somebody else build the website.