When you miss the tools you used at Big Tech

Do you buy a solution or build one yourself

A common startup dilemma

A few weeks into Statsig, we encountered a dilemma most startups eventually face: do we buy a solution or build one ourselves?

During those early days, we were already missing the internal tools we used at Meta (Facebook). Despite building an alternative to Gatekeeper, which allowed Meta engineers to build features visible only to a targeted set of users, there were other tools that we wanted to replicate. But instead of taking the easier approach of buying an off-the-shelf solution right out of the gate, we defaulted to being scrappy.

However, we learned that this path works only sometimes…

When opting to build a solution goes wrong

Word Docs, Google Docs, or Notion?

When you’re just getting started, you don't need much more than a few email addresses. You’ll probably go to Google for Gmail or Microsoft for Outlook. The annoying (but potentially great) part about each of these Workspaces is that they come with a whole suite of tools for you to use – documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and cloud storage.

However, no matter which one you pick, if you achieve any sort of scale and start to hire a larger team, someone will eventually complain and want the other one. For us, we picked Microsoft 365 primarily because of Excel. Inevitably, someone asked for Google Docs.

After about a year, Word Docs and SharePoint weren’t working well for us. Organizing files under different teams and across the company became a challenge. In addition, collaboration tooling became even more important as we started hiring a remote sales team. All this frustration led us to clamor internally to use a tool like Notion. So what did we do?

Rather than go out and buy Notion, Vijaye first looked for open-source alternatives (classic Vijaye). He found Outline and set it up on our intern deployment, with a “d” shortcut to get to documents from our internal bunnyLOL. It worked at first, more because people were forced to use it than they enjoyed it. And then the feature requests started rolling in.

Why can’t I tag people? How do I make private documents? After enough pain points with no engineering team to support it, managing the deployment quickly became a nuisance that wasn’t worth maintaining. Begrudgingly, Vijaye paid for Notion, and we’ve been happily using it ever since. Lesson learned, just buy a tool to manage internal documents.

When building a solution goes right

The search for bunnyLOL

During the first week, one of the tools we missed the most was bunnyLOL (referenced above). It's a shared bookmarking service that can replace your default search engine. It makes it easy for groups of people to share shortcuts to the common tools they all use.

What we really wanted was to be able to type “lunch” into our address bar and have it take us to our Peachd order form for the day. So I whipped up a web controller on our intern deployment that could do just that.

Over time, we added to it. Instead of simple redirects, you can parameterize your commands. Typing “c <company_name>” will take you to a debugging view for a specific company. Or typing “google <serach_query>” will...take you to Bing?

While some people have used this shared bookmarking tool to troll their coworkers, others use the power for good. We even added a dynamic config in a Statsig project so anyone can easily add new commands.

Here are just some of the bunny commands we use regularly. And yes, we have a shared Spotify playlist.

Building an internal performance review tool

Over time, as we needed to provide a more formalized process for feedback and growth for individuals, we began running performance reviews for employees. Again, rather than buying an off-the-shelf tool to help with this, Vijaye opted to build our own.

We aren’t big enough for engineering teams to build and support these tools, but Vijaye enjoys building simple apps for one-off pain points we have. He whipped this particular one up over a dreary January weekend.

We’ve used it for a few performance cycles and it has made the process so much simpler. The alternative was managing Notion docs for 80 people with spreadsheets to request feedback. Instead, the tool aggregates information and manages feedback requests in one place.

Now that he’s built one that stuck, he found a framework that works well. So he cranked out a tool for managing interview loops as well. For the readers who work at Meta – look familiar?

Finding your alternatives to Big Tech tooling

As an early-stage startup, you can afford to spend time building things that are not core to your product. Yes, I know, this is a controversial take. But my advice is to pick and choose the battles you want to face.

To make your life a bit easier, we came across a few GitHub repos that list alternatives to the tech and services that Big Tech uses.

I wouldn’t recommend trying to recreate all the internal developer infrastructure that Meta or Google have, rather, if you encounter a problem you solved with a tool you used before, you might find something similar to replace it.

Ex-Meta (Facebook) List by Grzegorz Kowszewicz

Ex-Google List b John Huang

A peek into our tech stack

To add a bit of perspective, here are the tools we replaced from the ex-Facebook list. Just to call this out explicitly though, below is a snapshot of where we landed after three and a half years. For some of these tools, we went through a bunch of variations (as I mentioned above with the Notion). Hopefully, this gives you some direction on how you can replace the tools you missed at Big Tech.

Let me know in the comments below which tools you replaced and with what. Would love to hear how you solved the startup dilemma.

Happy tooling :)

Tore, Founding Engineer at Statsig