Running a startup is hard, there’s no questioning that. Fighting to realize your idea involves securing funding, hiring talent, making sales, and juggling a million other tasks. The odds are stacked against startups, with most failing within their first year. While your startup is focused on surviving the early years, there’s little time left for handling complex projects like creating a custom software product.
Yet custom software is a valuable investment, almost always paying off when development is complete. Designing a custom software solution is about meeting your organization’s unique and specific needs, whether your startup needs a proprietary internal application, wants to offer a custom application to your customer base, or needs a high-quality web app.
If your startup is looking to venture into software development but is worried about the costs and expertise required, third-party software development agencies offer viable solutions. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the benefits associated with outsourcing software development through a proven agency:
1. Cost-Savings
It’s important to understand the costs involved with software development before investing funds in this area. Generally, small software applications cost between $20,000 and $50,000 to develop. The cost climbs rapidly as you add more complexity, novel features, scalability, and application integrations. You’ll also need to hire a suite of software developers, operations and IT teams, and management staff. These are costly roles to fill, usually around $50-100 per hour plus the cost of benefits. You’ll need to plan for the payroll increases.
2. High Customer and Stakeholder Expectations
If your startup isn’t prepared to handle a software development budget or starts cutting corners, the results may be unfortunate:
- Unstable – software prone to outages or other service interruptions
- Buggy – when using your software, a large number of bugs prevent proper program functionality
- Poor User Experience – software is confusing to use, visually unappealing, or designed without the user in mind
Software development is complex, so it’s much easier to get it wrong than to get it right. Unstable buggy software with a poor user experience can affect your startup’s reputation, brand awareness, and user satisfaction.
These days, customers and stakeholders hold very high expectations for software products. Sure everyone’s used low-budget buggy applications, but everyone’s also experienced high-end software applications built by fortune 500 companies. To set your startup apart from competitors, your software applications must be stable, bug-free, and user-friendly.
3. Access to Top-Tier Talent
To develop in-house, your startup will need to hire a team of talented developers with experience building an application from the ground up. Do your developers know how to automate testing? Are your developers familiar with continuous integration and continuous deployment?
You’ll need to hire operations and IT professionals that can build high-quality, scalable infrastructure to support your software to avoid outages or other service interruptions. And this doesn’t even address the complexities of managing these teams effectively, so you’ll need to hire effective management.
By allowing a third-party to create a custom software solution for your startup, you don’t have to fuss with hiring, growing, and managing a full software development team. A software development agency has experience creating various software products, from beautiful web apps to custom software applications for large-scale distribution. They’ve completed the full software development life cycle dozens, if not hundreds of times. And they’ll have access to talented developers covering a wide area of expertise like Rails, Java, Python, React, Angular, and much more. If project requirements change during development, they can easily pull another developer on the team within that area of expertise, which is far more difficult for your startup to manage directly.
4. Proven Pipelines
If your organization has never endeavored to develop a software product, it’s a daunting task. The software development life cycle is complex and involves various phases and processes.
Besides gaining access to on-demand developers and other professionals, you’ll also benefit from an agency’s established and proven pipelines. Their teams know how to efficiently and effectively advance your custom software through these pipelines. They’ve honed and perfected their process from project inception through the development, testing, and production phases.
Because of this, agencies can produce deliverables at far more aggressive timelines, bringing your software to life within a few months (or less, depending on the project’s complexity).
Get Started with Our Agency
If your interest is piqued and you see the clear value in working with a software development agency that builds professional applications and custom software solutions, from proprietary solutions for internal use to B2B and B2C solutions for large-scale distribution, please reach out to learn more about Modern Launch.
We have an established process and have worked with startups and high-growth companies across various industries with our end-to-end software development services. Here at Modern Launch, we pride ourselves on the product and project management process and work closely with our clients to realize their needs and produce stellar software solutions.
We hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us.
Here’s how you can get in touch with us:
Email: contact@modernlaunch.co
Website: https://modernlaunch.co/
Contact Form: https://modernlaunch.co/#contact-us