Why are you building so many things from scratch in your app?

Would you start a taxi business by building a car?

Let's analyse this with a simple taxi/cab business example. A situation in which instead of focusing on providing a service and making money, the owner focuses on building a car from scratch, starting from the smallest screw, is doomed to failure from the start. This process will take a very long time, consume huge amounts of money and delay or even make the start of the business impossible. Instead, it's better to focus on what's most important for the business, providing a passenger transportation service, rather than building vehicles from scratch. Of course, this is an exaggerated example, but it clearly shows the situation that exists in most startups to a greater or lesser extent.

Technology is a tool for business goals.

Startups often make mistakes in choosing technology early in their development. Developers may be too fascinated by new tools and technologies, forgetting the importance of the business. This can lead to a situation where the team focuses on details that do not bring value to the final customer. As a result, this can increase product development costs and slow down the pace of work. To avoid such problems, startups should find the golden mean between building everything from scratch and using off-the-shelf solutions. It is important to choose the right tools for the product, the market situation and the available team. This way, you can ensure a faster pace of work and better quality of the product, as well as reduce the risk of making mistakes.

The risk of an inexperienced development team and lack of a Tech Leader

Beginning technical teams or inexperienced programmers often try to build things that have already been invented because they are fascinated by technology and new solutions. This is understandable, as people just learning new programming languages, frameworks, and libraries are fascinated by technology's possibilities. It becomes fascinating to see every new element you can see in your application. However, focusing on the technology and creating features and modules on their own, instead of creating value for the business, the product and the target customer, can lead to things that should take a day, taking a month. While leading to business failure. That's why it's important to choose solutions wisely and use support from experienced people to avoid such situations at the earliest possible stage.

Off-the-shelf solutions or full custom?

We have a spectrum of options when building a digital product, but let's look at two extremes. The first is to take full advantage of off-the-shelf solutions. The second is to build everything from scratch.

This second point is particularly broad in the IT industry, where we deal with multiple applications, architecture and infrastructure layers. Building everything from scratch will be time-consuming, even with new tools and technologies. Therefore, it is crucial to find the golden mean between these two extremes and select the right tools and technologies for our product needs.

How the right decision affects success or failure, or how to have a landing page in 1 hour, not 4 weeks.?

Currently, many technology startups on the market provide new products to make life easier for business people. Take, for example, the situation where we want to create a simple marketing website or landing page. On the one hand, we can hire a graphic designer to design the entire page. Then we engage a programmer who will write all the elements in pure HTML and CSS, taking weeks to do it.?

On the other hand, we can use a ready-made template and, for example, Webflow, which will make such a page available within an hour. As a result, from the moment of the idea to the realisation and publication of the page passes only an hour, and we can already drop in a marketing campaign and start promoting our service or product.

Of course, the example with the landing page is already very cliched because every person working in marketing at this stage knows how to use such solutions. However, when building more complex solutions in IT, the use of ready-made tools is even more prominent. Suppose you are creating an online course management module that requires integration with payment, invoicing, and notification systems. The payment system can be done with Stripe.com, and the invoicing system can be integrated with an external API. And for notifications, we can use Software-as-a-Service like Mailchimp and OneSignal. Thus, we have to write as our solution only the part that handles the courses and the integration between the different parts of the system.

Good or bad decisions? How to give direction and respond to risks

When building an online product, every day we make a huge number of decisions that define what form the product we have worked on for months will be published in. The result of these decisions is whether the system will be convenient for users, whether it will be scalable, whether it will meet business requirements, and thus whether it will make the business successful in the market. The number of decisions we make makes it worthwhile every so often, for example, every 4-6 weeks, to look at the roadmap together with the team and verify whether we are going in the right direction and whether the tools we have chosen recently have served their purpose. On the basis of an open discussion, we can coordinate the work much more easily, and by doing so, we will eliminate the risk of project failure much faster than if we did such a review every few months.

Have you encountered a situation where the desire to write custom solutions started a snowball of problems?