It's the 21st century. Internet businesses are making a lot of money. It's only natural that so many people have so many great ideas for software products. Unfortunately, very few of them actually pursue their dreams, build software solutions, and become successful. The most common reason why so many don't build their dream tech startups is the lack of knowledge. They simply don't know where to start. They have good ideas, but they don't know how to build solutions based on those ideas.
You might have expected to read that money was the biggest reason why most people don't start technology startups in the previous paragraph. The truth is that some of those entrepreneurs have some technology backgrounds, so they manage to get started on their projects, but they run out of resources pretty quickly because they chose a wrong technology and team for that. Even startups that get large investments from venture capitalists often run out of cash because of wasting all their resources on all the wrong things. That is why consulting professionals before you start spending your resources is so important.
1. Pick the Right Technologies
I'm often asked what programming language we use in our projects. Those who know what programming is all about know that the answer is not simple. It's not like we use just one programming language for everything. Unfortunately, building software is not that simple. The database requires SQL. The back-end requires a back-end programming language such as Java, Python, or C#. The front-end requires HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So the answer of what programming languages we use in our projects is that we use SQL, C#, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for most projects, but there are some projects where we use even more languages. That doesn't even count the software development frameworks that we use along with those programming languages. As you can see, the technology choices are a lot, so a professional can advise you what technology stack you have to chose for your project.
You don't actually have to know anything about Python or JavaScript to build software with a help of the right people. In fact, depending on your requirements, the chances are you may not even need any software developers for your project. For example, if all you want is an online store, you can just use some of the existing solutions for creating online stores such as Shopify or BigCommerce. Many small business owners spend a lot of money on building software from scratch without even realizing they could sign up for an existing SaaS service for something like $20 a month. I met quite a few small business owners who spent thousands of dollars on the design of their company website without knowing that they could just sign up for a website building service for $20 a month and pay only a couple hundred dollars to buy a premium theme for their website.
Consulting a professional can help you decide if you need to hire a team of software developers or just sign up for a CMS or e-commerce service. Even if you have some technical background and based on your research, you think that you need certain tools for your project, consulting a professional software development firm may still be a good idea. That way you can at least confirm if you picked the right technology tools.
2. Hire the Right Team
When you know what technologies you will need for your project, you will have to find people who can build a solution for you with those technologies. Let's assume you decided to go with Node.js and MySQL for the back-end and React for the front-end combination. Now, you have to make a few important decisions about how your team will be structured:
Should you hire a few back-end and a few front-end developers? Should you hire full-stack developers instead of different people for the front and back ends?
What should be the level of expertise of all developers working on your project? Should all developers be seniors, or should your team be a mix of people with different experience levels?
Do you need any lead developers? If so, how many would you need? Can one lead developer lead the whole dev team?
Do you need a software architect? Who will come up with the software architecture? Hopefully, it's not going to be you.
Do you need a QA team? You may need a QA team to test your application, but at what point should you spend money on this?
Do you need any DevOps engineers? You will have to decide if you need a dedicated DevOps engineer in the team. Maybe one of the senior developers can handle this part of the problem for some time, but you may have to consider hiring a DevOps engineer in the future.
Once you figure out what type of professionals you will need, another question would be how many people you should hire. Depending on your project complexity and requirements, it's possible that you may need just one developer to start with, but if you are not aware of that, you may end up hiring multiple people hoping that more developers will result in better performance. You may be wrong in doing that because it's not about quantity, it's about quality. One developer who is very good at what they do may outperform a hundred average developers. In software development, the difference in the performance of top and average professionals is that big. If you can find the best candidates for each role within your budget, then you can save money because you will hire less people and end up with a high quality work. That, of course, doesn't mean that you have to hire only senior level people. If someone is a senior at some profession that doesn't mean he or she can do well a junior's job. Your team has to be a healthy mix of different levels. You can think of it this way; Michelangelo's David couldn't be created without Michelangelo. A hundred average artists couldn't create David. However, a hundred Michelangelo's are not needed either because they would probably not work well together.
3. Pay the Right Compensation
When you know what technologies you need and who you should hire for that job, you should find out how much you should pay the people you hire. It's not uncommon to overpay or underpay technical experts. If you overpay them, you obviously lose money. If you underpay them, you will not have their full focus, so if a better deal comes along while working on your project, they may prefer those clients over you. How much should you pay?
If you hire 5 senior developers and pay $10,000 a month to each, your monthly budget should be at least $50,000 and yearly budget should be $600,000 for the salary of the developers only. That is the reason why I said that even if you get funding from investors, you may run out of money if you are not careful. Just paying a lot of money doesn't mean you will get great results. You might be asking yourself now whether you should hire an overseas development team. For instance, you may be able to hire a development team in some parts of the world and pay just $500 a month to each developer. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that you will save money. First, you have to understand the local employment rules and regulations to not get into trouble hiring people overseas. Second, you have to be able to screen the potential candidates from a foreign place that you don't know much about, so if you end up hiring people with poor skills, they may damage your software architecture so badly that fixing it may cost you a lot more. It's not so much about the amount you pay, it's about the quality of work you get for the money you spend. It means that you should not aim to pay little or generous compensations to the people you hire. It means that you have to pay the correct amount that doesn't exceed your project budget for the skills that those people have.
4. Know the Cost
If you figured out what type of professionals you have to hire and how much you have to pay them, it should be easy to estimate how much the project will cost. The project cost will roughly be the salary of the people involved plus the licenses for any 3rd party software or libraries you will need, then the the sum of those two multiplied by the time it will take to complete the project:
Project Cost ≈ (Salaries + 3rd Party Software Licenses) * Time
The salaries are going to be the biggest expense that is why we talked so much about them. The 3rd party software licenses are probably going to be a fraction of the cost of salaries. As you can see, your main expense is going to be the salaries, so the equation can be simplified to the cost of salaries multiplied by the time it takes to complete the project:
Project Cost ≈ Salaries * Time
How long it will take to complete the project? If your app is successful, it will never be fully "completed" because there will be a constant need for improvements as your business grows. If you were hoping to pay an X amount to build software and never have to spend a dime on it again, you might be disappointed, but that is the reality. Software is like a living organism, it constantly evolves and changes. If you want to be competitive and keep growing your business, you may never end spending on the maintenance and enhancements of your software. You can't estimate when the development truly ends because it often never ends, but you can estimate when will a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) be ready. An MVP is something that has the bare minimum of what your clients will need. It's not perfect, but it can be enough to get some clients or at least some early adopters of the product. You should not aim at building something perfect that has a stunning design and every possible feature that you can imagine. That will drain all your resources. You should create an MVP, get some clients, thus drive some revenue into your business, and continue the development to stay competitive. Once again, since we stated that successful projects usually don't end, let's rewrite our formula to better reflect the reality:
Minimum Viable Product ≈ Salaries * Time
There have been cases where some companies were able to sell their software products without even having MVP's. I'm not even sure if they started the development at all, but they were able to find some clients because they were good at selling and presenting their ideas to potential clients. Startups like them succeed because they get a stream of revenue while spending time and resources on building their products and growing their businesses. You may not be so good at sales to be able to find clients without even starting the development, but you may find some clients if you have an MVP and are willing to offer some discounts.
Conclusion
Consulting a software development firm before starting a software project doesn't cost much, but it can prevent some hefty mistakes that cost a lot. You can book a consultation session for an hour or two and learn a lot of about what to expect and how to deal with different issues. A professional software development firm can help you with the following:
- Picking the right technologies.
- Hiring the right team.
- Paying the right compensation.
- Knowing the cost.
Our team at Developer Partners can help you with the questions mentioned above. If you would like to schedule a consultation with us, please use our contact form at the following page:
Contact Developer Partners for software development consultation.
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Author:
Hayk Shirinyan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayk-shirinyan-92980b59/
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