Why your Startup should outsource its development
Startup founders have been deliberating over the question of whether or not to outsource the software development of their startup product.
For many Startups, the digital product is what drives the business and is the primary platform for which the company grows and generates revenue.
Building and launching products for Startups can be challenging, however, if done with the right outsourced development partner, this can be highly successful. This allows the Startup founders to focus on their core business and the development agency to focus on the development.
In this article, we look at several factors as to why Startups should outsource their development.
BIG COMPANIES OUTSOURCE TO AGENCIES
You may or may not know but many of the world’s biggest companies, who were once upon a time Startups, outsource their development work to development agencies.
Included in this list are some of the biggest tech companies such as major eCommerce player Alibaba, the popular freelance portal Upwork, telecommunications app Skype and the popular instant messaging platform WhatsApp, to name a few.
These companies are all hugely successful and have all outsourced their development at some point or another, proving that outsourcing development is possible.
If big tech companies are using outsourcing to their advantage, then surely small tech Startups should be doing the same?
NO NEED TO MICROMANAGE THE PRODUCTION TEAM
When you appoint an outsourced development company to take care of all your web and software development requirements, a major benefit is that you don’t have to micromanage the development and testing teams.
The project management is taken care of by the development company, more specifically project managers.
The role of the project managers is to fully manage the project and to provide updates to the Startup stakeholders.
To further elaborate on the project manager’s duties, these include:
- Planning the various project deliverables with the relevant developers and testers.
- Obtaining all necessary resources from the Startup, such as content, API keys, hosting credentials and other related information that is necessary for the development to continue.
- Scheduling and coordinating testing of completed features with the QA (Quality Assurance) team.
- Arranging for deployments of product releases to the appropriate environments.
- Performing demonstrations of feature releases for sign up
- Providing constant updates on the project progress. This is done through various means including verbal, telephonic and through project management tools.
Based on the above duties of the project managers, it’s clear that a lot of the work that is needed to be done in order to ensure that a project is successfully managed is handled by the outsourced development agency.
Project management is a very complex and difficult task that requires years of experience, streamlined processes, the correct systems to be set up and used, as well as having an in-depth understanding of how development projects are executed.
By outsourcing the development project to a competent development team, Startups are freed up from having to micromanage development and testing teams, allowing them to focus on their core business.
FOCUS ON WHAT YOU’RE BEST AT
As a Startup founder, your goal is to validate the viability of your idea as soon as possible. The reasons for this are to gather investors and to be first to market. The earlier you can begin to do this, the better.
You can’t afford to waste time recruiting, onboarding and managing developers (which is no easy task in itself!).
Instead, you want to concentrate on your business/sales/marketing duties to build the foundation of your business’s viability to ensure the success of your Startup.
WE FOCUS ON ALL THINGS DEVELOPMENT
At Elemental our focus is to nurture and grow our development teams, so that they are highly equipped to execute and deliver quality development projects.
We’ve refined our processes and systems over the years to ensure that we can recruit and onboard the right talent, grow their skills and expertise and ensure they are fully equipped to develop projects that we and our clients can be proud of.
This includes all facets of the software development lifecycle from project management, to Quality Assurance and the actual development.
Code quality and the structure of web projects is something that is highly important to ensure that the platforms are stable and able to scale.
Not only do we focus on ensuring that all aspects of the development lifecycle are optimised, we also focus on research and development of new technologies, allowing us to evaluate what we should be introducing from a tech perspective to our clients and their projects.
INCREASED SCALABILITY AND OUTPUT
The nature of Startups is that they are unpredictable. The roadmap of a project is more of a guideline that may need to be adjusted at any point in time. As the project progresses, there might be a need to build unforeseen features and functionality quickly.
This isn’t always as simple as adding a few extra developers to a project and then expecting the production increases exponentially. In fact, it can be challenging to ramp up output quickly. The reason for this is that the features and functionality need to be evaluated with careful planning and assessments performed to determine which types of developers can be added (not all developers are the same and not all features can be done by all developers, especially considering backend vs front end developers). We also need to think about what impact this has on other parts of the project and what interdependencies will be affected.
With an experienced team, knowledgeable project managers and product owners, this makes this task much easier as we’re able to determine the best way to increase capacity and scalability with the least impact on the project.
By purposely being aligned in the ways of working and developing projects, we’re able to scale and roll out features and functionality at a quicker pace, overcoming any potential intricacies and complexities that prove to be a challenge.
This ability to increase speed and scalability allows Startups to get to market quicker and roll out features to their users at a rapid pace.
OUTSOURCING IS TOTALLY VIABLE
Outsourcing of development projects can be done between different geographies with very few limitations, these days.
A few years ago this was more difficult as the technology wasn’t available. Startups were also a lot more hesitant to get their development done by a team in a foreign country as this wasn’t common practice and there was a lot of resistance.
Luckily technology has advanced so much that there are a plethora of software tools that allow for easy communication and highly visible project management, making it completely viable to outsource development projects and ensuring that the project is being executed as per expectation.
Startups are also less concerned about where the development team is located, as long as the work is done and the communication is informative and ongoing.
All of these factors make outsourcing development much more viable and practical, giving Startups a bigger pool of development companies from which to choose.
EXPERTS IN DEVELOPING STARTUP PRODUCTS
When outsourcing development to a specialised development company, the chances are that they have most likely developed and launched custom digital products for Startups in the past.
This experience and knowledge are highly beneficial to the Startup as they’ve been there and done it before, which allows the Startup to benefit from these learnings. It’s no secret that building and launching these types of projects come with their fair share of challenges, twists and turns as the scope of the project changes, with new features being introduced and others being sacrificed.
The development team and the development processes need to be agile in order to adapt to change and to be able to shift gears as the requirements evolve.
Having this experience in their back pocket means that the development agency is able to act as a tech partner and provide insightful input into the project and guide the Startup as to what may or may not work, share experiences of similar situations in the past and ensure that best practices are maintained and not sacrificed in order to get the product shipped quicker.
INDUSTRY SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND FOCUS
Chances are that the Startup is focused on launching a digital product for a certain industry or vertical. Most industries are quite specific unto themselves, meaning that there are stark differences between industries for example if we had to compare the financial industry to the travel industry they are hugely different.
So if your Startup is targeting a certain industry it will be beneficial to know that the outsourced development agency has experience in that industry. This doesn’t mean that if the development agency doesn’t have experience in that industry they won’t be able to complete the development and launch the project.
It will most likely take longer and there may be a few more hurdles to overcome along that way that are industry-specific. Each industry most likely has specific third-party platforms and software providers that may be required to integrate into. If the development company has previously performed these integrations and is familiar with the inner workings of these platforms and APIs, they will be much more capable to do it right the first time and most likely quicker and easier.
Another factor is that certain processes and standards are specific to certain industries, for example in the EdTech (Education Technology) space, understanding how learners and teachers interact with each other and what the learning periods are, are specific to that industry.
Therefore you want to look to outsourced development companies that have industry-specific experience that is relevant to your industry. With this experience, the chances are that the development company will be providing the Startup with loads of insights and advice as to how to go about certain parts of the project.
MVP FOCUS
A key factor to get digital products developed and launched to market quickly is to focus on developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
An MVP in a nutshell is the simplest version of the product with only the bare minimum required features in order to test the viability of the concept and to measure user engagement.
What we’ve found is that many Startup founders jump the gun and want to jam-pack their product with all kinds of features. This is also known as the “Shiny Object Syndrome” where any “Shiny Object” AKA feature is now prioritised to make it into the initial product launch.
However many of these features aren’t actually needed up front and shouldn’t be included in the initial product launch.
This is where the experience of the outsourced development company comes into play. Having experience in similar projects allows the development team to guide Startup as to which features can be shelved for a future phase and what should be included in the MVP.
REDUCED RISK
There are always risks with any web and mobile development project. However, we feel that the risk is lower when Startups decide to use an experienced outsourced development company to perform the development of their project.
Obviously, not all development agencies have the same experience and expertise, so it’s vital that the necessary research and reference checks are done (ideally with existing and previous clients) to confirm that the dev agency is capable of delivering projects as required. A solid portfolio of projects and case studies also goes further to ensure that the company is highly competent to develop world-class web and mobile apps.
Should the development agency prove to be capable and have a strong track record of completing and launching high-quality projects, this should generally ensure that they’re well equipped to handle your project.
CONCLUSION
The above-mentioned reasons have shown why you should outsource your software development project. It guarantees that your product meets market requirements and is delivered on time. So, outsource the software development to an industry-best company and give your newly-funded startup a boost.
Do you have an idea in mind and considering starting a new platform or digital product? We understand it can be a daunting task not knowing how to kick off? So if you’re in need of a tech partner, we’re here to help, get in touch!
