I think if you put in charge a good visionary that truly understands your requirements (either a curious new hire or someone from within), you can drive development externally.
I wouldn't hire and staff for this, because it will be a hard sell for anyone with great SWE skills to work on internal software, while you can hire rockstar freelancers to build a good foundation, and evolve your own platform opportunistically with additional freelance work.
You can also leverage LCOL countries to set up your own dev shop, possibly Eastern Europe if you want good timezone overlap. Feel free to reach out if needed, this is my wheelhouse.
The only question you need to answer is supportability. If the platform is the cornerstone of your business, what happens if/when it goes down? What kind of SLO would you have internally? Who is on-call?
I wouldn't hire and staff for this, because it will be a hard sell for anyone with great SWE skills to work on internal software, while you can hire rockstar freelancers to build a good foundation, and evolve your own platform opportunistically with additional freelance work.
You can also leverage LCOL countries to set up your own dev shop, possibly Eastern Europe if you want good timezone overlap. Feel free to reach out if needed, this is my wheelhouse.
The only question you need to answer is supportability. If the platform is the cornerstone of your business, what happens if/when it goes down? What kind of SLO would you have internally? Who is on-call?