Software Development for Startups

How to facilitate rapid development for web and mobile and what technologies to use in 2020.

Martin Zurek

Updated on July 12, 2020 | 21 min read

Big chance for startups

Startup tech companies have seen an increase of trust in recent years thanks to the fact that consumers are now more likely to trust personal brands. Big tech companies can come off as cold and corporate, with no quality assurance. Multinational software agencies are also known to propose run-off-the-mill templated solutions for projects which isn’t often a good fit. After all, every business is unique.

Clients value good communication and a dynamic approach

Clients these days value warm and friendly relationships with their solution partners and that is where tech startups excel. They make clients feel heard and involved in their projects. Tech startups are known for their custom solutions that give clients a sense of inclusivity in the project by maintaining an open and flexible line of communication. 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. This can be a real benefit from a project management perspective: fewer projects means that startups can direct their time and resources in a more focused manner.
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. 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 properly vet your development vendors.. 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.

Go for a US-located partner

One factor you should consider when choosing a trusted partner for your development needs is location. While it might be cheaper to outsource, ideally you should be working with a web development company based in the United States. Why? America’s Seed Fund powered by the National Science Foundation better known as NSF Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer Program (SBIR/STTR) 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 a team that has experience in product development, UI design, architecture design, marketing, social media, and scaling a business. Finding a team that understands how to scale a business will be quite advantageous for your company. A lot of inexperienced development teams end up over-engineering a product during the early stage of product development, wasting resources. Some teams may get so excited about creating an impactful solution that they end up neglecting its practicality for the business.
Your software development partner should have a clear understanding of how a business works from budgets to business solutions, and know what agile development is. They should be able to deliver quick results. Consider seeking external advice from growth hacking consultants to learn how good development services can be delivered.

Do not forget about communication

Rapid development services require fast and open communication. A startup team with close knit members usually shines in this respect. However, for teams who work remotely for you, time zone differences can be an obstacle. If that happens to be the case, consider a fixed time overlap, and regular catch-ups in order to ensure that everyone is up to date and a part of the discussion.
A good idea is to set up regularly scheduled video calls with the entire team to review the past week’s progress and discuss any challenges that may have appeared. These calls should also be done as a part of the Agile development process which most tech startups use. The Agile process involves 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 software development partner 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 where they’re having trouble and raise it during your regular video meetings. It also helps to have dedicated team tools such as Slack, Jira, or Asana. Whichever you choose, always check on progress. Such an approach is typical for the Agile development style of working (which is increasingly popular in the United States).

Ensure that you are getting the most out of your project by appointing someone who’s qualified to find the best team.

Do not underestimate the importance of feedback

Let us say that you have found your dream team and are in the process of pushing your mobile or web app through its development stages. What would be needed during these stages? Simple: feedback.
It may sound simple, but it can often mean the difference between the success or failure of 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 key performance indicators (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 deliver feedback, you and your team could also apply this whenever it’s 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 accelerate product development. Tools such as JIRA and Asana would provide you with a great project overview and quality assurance. It’s particularly helpful when your partners are remote or dispersed around 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.

Jonas Lee

PARTNER & EXECUTIVE VP OF VERUS FINANCIAL LLC;
INVESTOR & SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR

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’ll create an extensive database that will play a significant role in shaping 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. Tools such as Google Analytics, Fullstory, Crashlytics in Firebase, and Mixpanel are highly recommended.

Take the right approach from the start

It is very important to be prepared for a custom software development or product development project from the beginning.
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, relay your experiences with your development partners. Helping them understand what went, will help everyone be more prepared for any unforeseen problems.

3. Choose an appropriate continuous integration system

Continuous integration is crucial for every project. You want to make sure that you can release new software development elements with minimal effort.

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Enterprise Application
Development

Mobile Apps

Big Data and Data
Analytics

Tech Recruitment
Services

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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 to achieve the same purpose.

5. Use version control systems

Using a version control system is a great way to protect your product against unforeseen problems during the development process.

6. Development environment

The development environment will be the sandbox for the development team – a place to experiment and build in a private, secure environment. It won’t always be stable, but that’s ok.

7. Testing environment

Quality assurance is crucial. You need to provide the right environment for customers to test their software. One way to do this is to hire a professional software tester who would thoroughly test the written program, find bugs and identify 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 a software development project, it is important to provide them with appropriate documentation so they can contribute immediately.
The steps described above are not a recipe for creating the perfect custom software. Every 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 by 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.

We love mobile apps

Orange Charger LLC – Property owners setup and installed the outlets were tenants who own EV’s charge. They created an account that connected a bank account to our backend payment system and digitally signed a payment agreement.

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. Their products work great individually but because they share data and insights, 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. Their 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. They 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 an improved UX/UI experience.

Rapid prototyping of 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 demands of a 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

During development, we will focus on essential areas and functionalities, taking engineering shortcuts to deliver maximum business value tailored to your goal, be it investor meetings, marketing launch, fundraising, or internal demonstration. For startups that we work with on MVP, we strive to help them find funding for future development, past MVP stage, by leveraging our network of angel investors and VCs from both the US and EU.

See case studies

Take away

While picking a software development team may seem like a mundane task, it is crucial to ensure the success of your project whether its a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or proper UX/UI design. It is advisable to identify a startup with a dedicated development team instead of a huge web development company. By doing so you will ensure that you’ll receive the individualized attention your project deserves.
However, it has become imperative for businesses to adapt to the digital landscape to stay competitive and deliver extraordinary products and services. Keep an eye on technology trends and be ready to adapt.
Choose a development team that understands 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.