Software Development for Startups
How to facilitate rapid development for web and mobile and what technologies to use in 2020.
Updated on 12 July 2020 | 19 min read
In this highly saturated market, choosing a team to work with during a software development project is a crucial part of your business strategy. The question is, whether it is best to approach a startup team or an established web development company? On the first look, bigger businesses tend to seem more appealing and trustworthy in their development services, however, you cannot write off the results that a tech startup can bring you. These dynamic teams of battle-tested individuals are known to deliver excellent results that can prove your initial doubts wrong.
Big chance for startups
Startup tech companies have seen an increase of trust over the years thanks to the fact that consumers are now more likely to trust personal brands. Oftentimes, big tech companies come off as cold, corporate, with no quality assurance, and stiff thus making people averse towards them. Multinational software agencies are also known to propose run-off-the-mill templated solutions for projects which contributed to the mistrust of clients at software development services.
Clients value good communication and dynamic approach
Clients these days value warm and friendly relationships with their partnered solutions and that is what tech startups are best at. They make clients feel heard and involved in their projects and development services. Tech startups are known for their personalized and new solutions that give clients a sense of inclusivity in the project by delivering a viable product or the so-called MVP (Minimum Viable Product). These small but capable startups understand the importance of creating dynamic solutions and delivering fast results.
In contrast to bigger agencies, smaller teams often handle a limited amount of projects. Having a limited amount of projects would not be a bad thing especially for the clients from the project management perspective. Because thanks to that, the projects are handled with the utmost care and precision.
Another thing you should take note of is how these smaller teams are geared in both tech and business acumen. Unlike bigger counterparts, some of these teams do not have an exclusive person for marketing and sales. They would often need to fill in the shoes of these positions themselves. Making them the best choice for clients who are looking for someone who would truly understand the ins and outs of the business.
Startups are often finding it hard to sustain their businesses as custom software development is not an easy job. It is not uncommon to find a team closing down due to a lack of projects or conflicts. Nevertheless, you should not shy away from them. Talk to multiple vendors and discuss your project with them.
Before you start make sure to have a technical person on board
The first step you need to do is to find a person who has the technical knowledge to interview the teams you are considering to bring in as your vendor for development services. Non-tech people might struggle to understand technical jargon. The project itself may pose several questions that are problematic to handle with a simple Google search.
Field experience is the best but if you are lacking in personnel, then someone who is at least tech-savvy will be a good choice. Ensure that you are getting the most out of this venture by appointing someone qualified to do the job of finding the best fit team.
Go for a US-located partner
One factor you should consider when choosing a trusted partner for your development needs is location. While the cheaper option would be to work with a remote team located in Eastern countries, ideally you should be working with a web development company based in the United States. The reason for that is America’s Seed Fund powered by the National Science Foundation better known as NSF.
This program is also known as the NSF Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer Program (SBIR/STTR). This federal program supports Research and Development done by startups and small businesses in the United States to develop breakthrough technologies that can be commercialized and produce an impact on the market.
As a result, you will be getting the latest cutting edge solutions that the market can offer. Are you looking for the latest solutions for your custom software product or do you want to try outsourcing to save costs? Weigh your options and pick a dedicated team that would best fit your needs.
Pick a team with marketing and scaling experience
It would be good to consider the crew that has experience in product development, UI design, architecture design, marketing, social media, and scaling of a business. This aspect is quite advantageous for your company. A lot of inexperienced teams end up over-engineering the product at an early stage of product development, which wastes a lot of resources. Some teams may get over-excited about creating an impactful solution that they end up neglecting its practicality for the business.
Your dedicated team should have a clear understanding of how a business works from budgets to business solutions, and know what agile development is. Have someone who can deliver quick results. They might be able to offer you solutions that would boost your project exponentially. Also, you may opt to get external advice from growth hacking consultants on how good development services shall be delivered.
Do not forget about communication
Rapid development services require fast and open communication. A start-up team with closely knitted members usually shines in this aspect. However, for teams who work remotely for you, an obstacle might appear – time zone differences. Thus, a good move to best this challenge is to have a fixed time overlap, and regular catch-ups in order to ensure that everyone is up to date and a part of the discussion. This will ensure seamless MVP development.
A good idea is to set up recurring scheduled video calls with the entire team during which you will go through the past week’s progress and discuss any challenges that have appeared. These calls should also be done as a part of the Agile development process which most Tech startups use. This process would involve planning, review, and retrospective. Make some time in your schedule to participate in these meetings.
As the saying goes, people want to talk to people. Take a good look at your team and check whether they are focused, confident about the results they are delivering to you and if they are excited about the project. Otherwise, find out which parts are they having difficulties with and discuss it thoroughly during the meeting. It also helps to have dedicated team tools such as Slack, Jira, or Asana. Whichever you choose, always check if everyone is up-to-date. Such an approach is typical for agile development style of working (increasingly popular in the United States).
Ensure that you are getting the most out of this venture by appointing someone qualified to do the job of finding the best fit team.
Do not underestimate the importance of feedback
Let us say that you have found your dream team and you are in the process of pushing your mobile or web app through its stages. What would be needed during these stages? That would be feedback.
Sounds fairly simple but this heavily affects your team and your project. In line with having open communications, feedback should always be a part of your discussions. A feedback loop might sound tiring but this is the key to align your priorities well and to nail down your KPI’s and architecture design.
Tech startups usually apply Agile development in their teams and if that is the case for your vendor, make it a point to be a part of their sprint planning, review, and retrospective. Although the sprint review is the best time to produce feedback, you and your team could also apply this whenever it highly is needed.
A great method to give and receive feedback through team project management tools such as JIRA, Asana, and Slack. These tools help everyone effectively communicate the status of the project and speed up product development. Tools such as JIRA and Asana would provide you with a great project overview and quality assurance. It would be a great advantage for yourself if you are working with a team that is located on the other side of the globe.
I’ve worked with DevsData on numerous projects over the last 3 years and I’m very happy. They demonstrated a strong degree of proactivity, taking time to thoroughly understand the problem and business perspective. The solutions they designed exceeded my expectations.
Analyze and draw conclusions from the data you have
Always be data-driven. Integrating analytics to your web or mobile software should start at an early stage. The earlier the better. As a result, you will have an extensive database that will be playing a significant role in product development. Always do A/B testing and track how your users interact with your product and adjust according to the data you have collected. This will ensure you deliver a viable product (or MVP = Minimum Viable Product) on time. It is highly recommended to use tools such as Google Analytics, Fullstory, Crashlytics in Firebase, and Mixpanel.
Right approach to software development for startups from the very beginning
It is very important to be prepared for custom software development and product development from the beginning. It will take your business further than ever, and enable your organization to be accessible from anywhere and at any place via smartphones or laptops.
Things you should pay special attention to from the very beginning:
1. Establish clear communication paths
From the first day of software development, make sure everyone understands the roles assigned to them.
2. Define best practices and conventions
If you have experience in custom software development, analyze with your team what went well and what went wrong. Be prepared for any unforeseen problems encountered in the past.
3. Choose an appropriate continuous integration system
Continuous integration is crucial for every project. You want to make sure that you can release the new software development elements with minimal effort.
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4. Choose your tools and applications
Make sure you choose the tools that will be used during the software development phase because one thing that you want to avoid is using too many different tools for achieving the same purpose.
5. Use version control systems
Using a version control system is a great way to protect our product against unforeseen problems during the development process.
6. Development environment
The development environment will be the sandbox of the development team. That is why it will not be stable at all times, and you can expect data inconsistencies.
7. Testing environment
Quality assurance is crucial. You need to provide the right environment for customers to test their software. One way of doing it is by hiring a professional software tester who would thoroughly test the written program, find bugs and areas for improvement.
8. Staging and production environments
The staging and production come hand in hand and they should mirror each other. This will ensure that the operations run on staging will have the same results on production.
9. Create a document for local project setup
When new people join the software development, it is important to provide them with appropriate documentation for the local project setup.
The steps described above are not a recipe for creating the perfect custom software. Many issues that should be noted will arise during the development phase. Each project is significantly different, but these steps are a good reference point for quality assurance and project success.
Find a person who has the technical knowledge to interview the teams you are considering to bring in as your Vendor.
Appropriate technologies for rapid development
There are multiple technologies used for rapid software development for startups. Below we will discuss only a few of them that we use at our development company DevsData. Once you get acquainted with them, you can tell us which one you think are most important.
Mobile App technologies
1. Google flutter
Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Flutter’s hot reload helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add new features, and fix bugs faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.
You can easily delight your users with Flutter’s built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.
Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons, and fonts to provide full native performance on both iOS and Android.
2. React Native
React Native is an open-source mobile application framework created by Facebook. It combines the best parts of native development with React, a best-in-class JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
React Native lets every software development company create truly native apps and does not compromise on their users’ experience. It provides a core set of platform-agnostic native components like View, Text, and Image that map directly to the platform’s native UI building blocks.
React components wrap existing native code and interact with native APIs via React’s declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript. This enables native app and web development for whole new teams of developers, and can let existing native teams work much faster.
You can see your changes as soon as you save. With the power of JavaScript, React Native lets you iterate very fast.
Google Flutter and React Native are two most popular platforms for mobile app development. Check where Flutter is expected to go in the future.
3. Firebase
Firebase is a mobile app and web development platform developed by Firebase, Inc. It gives you functionality like analytics, databases, messaging, and crash reporting so you can move quickly and focus on your users during the product development process.
Firebase is built on Google infrastructure and scales automatically, for even the largest apps. His products work great individually but share data and insights, so they work even better together. We use it extensively at DevsData, especially for startups or MVP projects, since it saves time needed to develop a functional application.
Cross-industry expertise
Over the years, we've been accumulating our expertise in building software and conducting recruitment projects for different segments. Below are six industries in which we have particularly strong knowledge.
Retail / E-commerce
Construction
Pharmacy
Telco
Financial Services,
Hedge Funds
Entertainment
& Media
Chat technologies
SendBird is a complete chat platform for your mobile apps and websites: Chat and Messaging SDKs and API, and a fully managed chat infrastructure.
It provides real-time messaging that connects your marketplace’s buyers, sellers, and service providers, so you can inform and engage users to convert on more transactions more frequently. SendBird builds trust and convenience by empowering your marketplace to communicate and network – enabling better liquidity at scale and ensuring a viable product.
SendBird’s chat and messaging SDKs and Platform API allow developers to customize and build meaningful chat experiences for applications without reinventing the wheel. His unmatched scalability and flexibility means you can build a world-class conversational product, customized to your app with minimum distraction. SendBird significantly speeds up the product development process.
Video call technologies
TokBox develops and operates OpenTok, the leading cloud platform for adding live video, voice & messaging to your websites, and mobile apps. Authors believe that integrating real-time communications into products should be simple, whether you are developing an app for one-to-one calls or for complex large-scale broadcasts.
The OpenTok platform is fully customizable and flexible and leverages cutting-edge video, audio, and networking technology WebRTC to bring the best possible experience to your browser or device through simple APIs and improves UX UI experience.
Rapid prototyping of the screens
MockFlow is a cloud-based wireframe mockup software development solution designed for website and software developers, designers, UX professionals (who also develop UI design as a part of their development services), and marketers. It lets them perform tasks, design user-interface prototypes for websites and mobile apps, and collaborate with projects in real-time.
Wireframing is a valuable tool for people who work on website design and mobile applications. As a result, MockFlow is the ideal online software solution not just for website designers, but also for decision-makers and stakeholders who want to put their ideas into a much more comprehensible mockup or a wireframe to show to designers and vice versa.
As a wireframing software solution, MockFlow allows users to create a mockup or a skeleton of a website or mobile application they want to develop. The system provides a basic layout of the application, including its features and functions, without having to build the actual website. Developers can use this platform to show their clients the basic framework and to get final approval or to make the necessary adjustments during the product development.
Have someone who can deliver quick results They might be able to offer you solutions that would boost your project exponentially.
PWA applications
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are a new generation of internet applications. PWA is a different type of mobile app which is delivered through the net. It uses all the new technologies to comply with the native application. If you want to read more about PWA, read WebWave’s latest post.
Google Analytics – do not underestimate the power of data
The more you know about your users, the better equipped you will be to make smart choices about your website, mobile app, or SaaS (software as a service) application development investments. Measure what matters, from download and first use through usage, purchases, and loyalty. Google Analytics helps you capture and understand user behavior in most kinds of applications, including mobile apps (iOS and Android), web and SaaS applications, and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
With minimal instrumentation, Google Analytics provides many pieces of information to help you understand the behavior of users as they interact with your site or application. Standard metrics include the number of users interacting with your application, the number of sessions those users create, and the screens or web pages that they visit. Having such rich data can significantly speed up the project development process.
With additional instrumentation, you can gain an even richer understanding of how people interact with individual application screens or pages on a website (UX UI). You can also add further instrumentation to capture more detailed interactions where needed using event tracking for granular interactions like those with video players, downloads, form submission, etc.
You can also measure the number of important business actions that users complete (called Goal Conversions), as well as e-commerce transactions and purchases.
Your project MVP in 45 days
Take away
While it may seem as a mundane task selecting a team to work with, it is crucial to ensure the success of your project by MVP development and proper UX UI design. It is advisable to pick up a startup with a dedicated team instead of a huge web development company. By doing so you will ensure that you are approached individually and all your project needs would be tackled with proper attention. Software development for startups is challenging and we know it.
However, it has become imperative for businesses to adapt to the digital landscape to stay competitive and deliver extraordinary development services. Take note of the changes that other companies are applying to their processes to adapt to technology. This could serve as an important benchmark data which you could use when developing your custom software. Your chosen team should also be informed of this crucial data.
Choose a development team that would understand how your business works and how the business data you have presented can be used to your advantage. The choice of appropriate technologies is also a huge game changer. That is why at DevsData we make this process of custom software development as transparent as possible so that at each stage of the project you have a direct insight into what is going on. Check our locations in the United States and tell us about your project idea.
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DevsData LLC is truly exceptional – their backend developers are some of the best I’ve ever worked with.”
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