How do you overcome the customer's mindset of build vs buy, and having an internal competition/enemies from your customers?
It might be a more straight-forward decision when the customer is starting from scratch. However, when the customer is invested in their in-house solution, what does it take to convince them to try your solution?
1) Win ICs: Do the "crappy" work of running marketplace search really well. This is ops, data logging and correctness, A/B testing, and managing the complexity of requirements from all competing teams who want to manipulate search results and boost things. These are things that backend search teams usually don't love, but we solve their problems so that they can focus on their expertise and ship features.
2) Don't Compete, combine: Our approach allows us to combine all competing recommendation systems together into a unified model. There is never a this-or-that decision, or a feeling of losing out. This also applies to other vendors. This is a pain for ML ops, but it's worth it. From an ML approach, mixing different systems typically outperforms any component system so long as you have the infra and parameter complexity management to handle them.
3) Build a brand of being the best: Not everything in big companies is engineering experience and metrics. Decisions get made when you're the hot solution that the cool people that you want to be like use. We deliberately focus on working with hot marketplaces and hiring awesome engineers with top experience to built this brand.