Josh's honest answer: "we've done both." Early on, "the humble answer is we just have no idea" — so go to market and find the best products while building and testing in parallel. Where they landed: build the layer where your proprietary data makes you the best in the world, buy every layer where it doesn't.
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After roughly ninety to a hundred and eighty days deep in the process, Josh's key learning is that "voice AI is a multi layered system of complexity." Text to speech? "We are not gonna be the best in the world at that. There are phenomenal companies out of the valley doing incredible stuff raising awesome rounds — let's use those products."
But knowing the right way to engage a customer for collections and being "the best at negotiating those outcomes" — that's where InDebted's proprietary dataset gives it an edge. "So I'd say it's built in our case, but with a very big asterisk: building using industry-leading layers of the stack to help us do that." And don't be fooled by the cursory lens — getting an answer that sounds like a human takes very meticulous test-and-tweak work.