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Marketing Engineering

Building Marketing Tools Instead of Buying Them

When a custom plugin or pipeline beats another monthly SaaS subscription — and when it definitively does not.

Dec 8, 2025 · 5 min read · Farzad Vafaei

Most marketing teams do not need more software. They need the three specific behaviours that their current software refuses to combine.

Build when the workflow is the product

  • The task repeats weekly and has a deterministic shape
  • The data already exists in systems you control
  • Vendors charge per seat for something that is one API call

Buy when the data is the product

Index-scale backlink data, historical SERP archives and crawler infrastructure at global scale are not weekend projects. Pay for the corpus; build the workflow on top of it.

def should_build(task):
    return task.repeats_weekly and task.deterministic and not task.needs_global_corpus
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Available for work

Let's build something that matters.

I'm currently open to full-time and contract remote opportunities across Technical SEO, AI Search, marketing automation and growth engineering.

AvailableOpen to Full-Time & Contract OpportunitiesToronto, Canada · Remote