Tips for entrepreneurs building software

Did you know that choosing the wrong software provider to build your prototype/MVP can kill your business before you even start it?

There are many types of entrepreneur endevours, a lot of them however, require the entrepreneur to build a software solution to even validate the idea.

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If possible, it is better to validate the idea without even write a single line of code, there are many ideas which have been validated with something as basic as Excel Spreadsheets.

If you still need to build a custom software solution, you must be very careful on the person or company you hire to build it.

I have more than 17 years of experience working for a multitude of customers, small and big companies, and I have seen great software, and terrible software.

A common patten you find is entrepreneurs reducing costs in software development by hiring the cheapeast freelancers or companies, low prices are not necessarily a problem, the problem is that low prices often, not always but often, also mean low quality services.

Your initial prototype/MVP must be a discardable solution, something that will be enough to validate your idea and business model, then after you have validated your business model and have a decent revenue, you must re-implement the software from scratch, make it scalable, and implement best-practices, however, what you usually see, is the same initial piece of software keep been used and a constant addition of patches, instead of rebuilding from scratch, this is a terrible approach, which in reality is not saving you costs, it is adding you a lot of hidden costs which are silently killing your business. It is adding you costs in lots of ways such as

• Trying to force the technology to do things is was not designed for.
• Un-paid customer support to solve bugs in production which could have been prevented.
• Lost of productivity by researching causes of production bugs which could have been prevented.
• Loss of customers due to not been able to give them quick solutions.

In one of my latest entrepreneurship endeavours a friend hired some overseas low-cost providers, she came first to me for advice, I did mentioned her to be careful when hiring low-cost providers, she did not listened to my warning, around 4 weeks latest she was complaining not only that the provider gave her a totally different solution form what they had agreed, but also that the provider rarely showed up for meetings.

How do you make sure your software development provider is good?

First, I would recommend you that you make sure your provider has experience in entrepreneurship, that is able to think in terms of giving you high quality products while also reducing your costs as an entrepreneur.

Second, it is better for the provider to be part of your company, I mean, hire a full-time software developer that really believes in your idea.

Great software developers with entrepreneurship experience would usually

• Tell you about existent Open-Source solutions (if they know of any), that could solve your business problem while reducing you the need of building software from scratch.
• Inform you of low-code/no-code tools that may be better to use for the initial phase of your business.
• Have a lots of owned personal full systems and libraries created by themselves, which in many cases could be used in your solution in order to reduce development time.
• Use lots of code generation tools to reduce the need of manually creating boilerplate code, which drastically reduces your costs.
• Present you with multiple solutions to problems while also giving you the pros and cons, including the costs, and development time.
• Say no when certain functionality cannot be developed in a given time, and present you with alternatives.
• Prevent you from building an over-complex solution when it is not necessary, especially if you are in the initial phases of building your business.
• Prevent you from building solutions with obsolote technologies.
• Inform you of better frameworks and technologies than the ones you were planning, if they know of any.

The best software developers who can save you costs and give you great quality usually want

• Be working in the latest technologies.
• Ensure quality and reduce bugs by having Automated Tests.
• Work on challenging tasks and implementing new functionality.

I hope this information has been useful for your entrepreneur endeavours so you can reduce your costs and avoid wasting lots of money when you should not.