6 reasons why startups should outsource development work
Author: Magda Piechota
If you are thinking of putting this great idea for an app that you have in your head into life, but have no technical skills and no technical partners by your side, there are just two things you can do to make it happen:
Hire people to work for you as an in-house team, or outsource the development to a software house to build it for you.
Most of the people think that having an in-house team is a safer and better business decision. You have full control over the product and the team, and you can make sure everything is going as you planned.
Well, it’s not.
Outsourcing saves your time, money and energy, and lets you focus on the marketing side of your product.
If you are an entrepreneur building your company from scratch, working hard on that idea you have and trying to make it happen, outsourcing is a perfect solution for you. There are many reasons for that, but let me keep it simple: outsourcing saves your time, money and energy, and lets you focus on the marketing side of your product. How? Let me explain.
No need to dive into the unknown to hire an in-house team
If you are a non-technical person trying to build your in-house team, this may be a real challenge. How do you estimate the real value of the candidates you find? How do you test their skills? How do you know if they make a good team member? What about their code’s quality?
If you have no technical friend from the field, you have to rely on your gut feeling. And in most cases, it may let you down.
With a software studio, you do not have to worry about the team — it is already in place. Software studios have teams of seasoned developers, people who have worked together on many projects, experts in various, sometimes niche, technologies, who know they can rely on each other.
They do not need the warm-up time to start working on your project. They are already a well-oiled machine ready to spit out a good quality code for you.
Direct access to talent and specialized skills
A software studio deals with many various projects during its lifetime. Most of them are challenging and require the latest technology to be implemented and run. Hence, the variety of talents and experience a software studio has cannot be beaten by any freshly formed in-house team.
Software studio’s teams are exposed to the best and newest in the technical world simply because they need to stay competitive all the time; they are not bogged down with retainer work requiring only a variation on a theme work. They dynamically move from one project to another, switch tools, technologies and solutions following the latest trends in industry. Their sole goal is to be a vanguard of technology — out of necessity and for their sake.
While a startup, according to Steve Blank is: “an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” And technology is only a tool used to achieve that.
Flexibility and speed
Being experts in their field allows them to work and solve problems much quicker than an in-house team can. And the fact that they are outsiders coming to your project means they do so with fresh and open minds and can contribute to your idea looking at it from an entirely different angle. But, being outsiders does not mean that they do not care for your product.
On the contrary, they do, and very much so. The core business of any software house is software development, building best quality software every day. It is their goal now to make your product work and look good. The people working in software studios are enthusiasts loving what they do, living their job, diving into code and new technologies not with fear, but with open hearts and minds. They love challenges, and creating a perfect product for you is yet another challenge for them.
Full transparency of work
If you are afraid you will not know what is happening with your idea in the software studio, then do not be. Full transparency of work is one of the core rules of cooperation with a client in a software studio.
It is their job to keep you in the loop, inform you about the progress of the work and maintain their processes transparent to you as a client.
They must be experts in communication and build healthy relationships with the customer — after all, you are the one who is paying their bills, and who will be their best advocate helping them reach more clients when your product is finished, and you are happy.
Time you gain to focus on your own tasks
Having an outsourced team work for you does not mean you have to be with them all the time. It means that with clear communication and cooperation procedures in place, you can relax and focus on the business side of things, doing your job, and let the team do their work for you.
If you have your in-house team, usually you are the one spending all your time managing the product and the development itself. Who is then going to take care of the business and marketing of your product? Outsourcing makes a ton of sense if software development is not your core business.
Reduced costs and better security
The rule of a thumb in a startup industry is that when creating the first instance of your product, you better keep the costs low, and go with an outsourced provider that understands your requirements best.
Take Skype, for example. The concept for the service was born in Sweden, but the development was done in Estonia by a team famous for creating Kazaa, a file-sharing service.
The most important thing for you at this moment is to get your product in the hands of the customer as quickly as possible. And no in-house team can give you a better guarantee to do that than an outsourced studio full of creative and passionate people with a solid background in development and equally substantial experience.
Anything can happen in a highly competitive landscape of San Francisco. People follow the flow of money there; skilled developers are very expensive and at a premium and will leave you the moment they get a more attractive offer, jeopardizing your whole venture, crashing your timelines, and forcing you to seek out expensive expert help.
With an outsourced software house you are covered — the agreements and penalties are in place there for the peace of your mind and to make sure the product is delivered no matter what. No in-house team can give you such a guarantee.
The benefits of outsourcing the production of your idea are vast and real. The people you hire will have the passion and the drive to build you an outstanding product. And if look outside of the USA, taking Poland for example, you will see that there are plenty of small software houses filled with great talent.
Polish developers are currently world champions in coding (https://helloworldopen.com). Their advantages are quite substantial: attractive prices, dedication to work, and lack of communication problems — there is no cultural gap you may encounter when dealing with studios from Asia. If you are afraid that they will not do their job properly, or that you will not have good communication with them ask for a trial run.
Let them make a simple product for you first, to see how they work and what their work ethos is. If you like what you receive, you can continue to work with them on the real thing.
After all, a startup should focus on searching for a scalable business, clearly defined experiments, growing the business and delegating software development to a right partner.
