Software Development for Startups as a Linchpin of Successful Business

Artem Semenko
DigitalSuits
Published in
5 min readDec 15, 2021

The specificity of a startup as a web resource lies in an innovative idea and non-standard tasks that it must solve. There are a few options here: hire in-house employees, contact an agency, or trust freelancers. How to define which option suits you best? How not to go wrong with the development team partnership? Let’s consider the material in more detail.

Why Your Startup Needs a Software Development Company?

Due to the problem of finding employees and the complexity of setting technical tasks, many startups still don’t even overcome the milestone of creating a minimum viable product — MVP.

To turn your idea into reality — it’s vital to approach professional engineers. Running a startup is challenging, and top managers usually don’t have enough time to dive deep into software development stages or even coding, while the time and budgeting are limited.

What options to consider when it comes to software product development? There are usually several options: hire an in-house team or outsource software development to an agency, or turn to freelancers. Hiring your own team will be time-consuming and expensive. It requires a lot of resources and management — you will need to spend time on recruiting, to define the tech stack, to understand how many employees you need, to provide a social package, to monitor motivation and corporate perks and goodies. The more reasonable solution will be considering the software development agency or freelancers. Today I want to focus on these two options in more detail.

Some startup founders decide to turn to freelance platforms aiming to find performers and assemble a team in the hope that this route will be faster and cheaper. It seems you pay less, but in a reality, you would face significant drawbacks as:

  1. You will have to hire the whole team from scratch.
  2. Freelancers need micromanagement as they don’t see the whole picture of the project.
  3. Freelancers have a narrow-focus specific area of expertise.
  4. You probably will have to compete for their time, as freelancers have many different projects and rarely free time slots.
  5. Freelancers don’t provide turnkey services.
  6. Freelancers are not committed to your project, as it is likely a one-time job.

A software development company is an alternative to freelancing, which will save you the hassle of assembling a team of different specialists who are not familiar, sometimes located in different time zones, and have not tried working together. When developing software for a startup, the team usually includes front-end, back-end developers, a designer, a project manager and a quality assurance engineer. Unlike freelancers, the company provides full-cycle development — from idea validation to product maintenance and support.

By outsourcing development to a software development agency, a startup can focus on business development key points — marketing, product strategy, and expanding the network. It’s important to organize the product launch in such a way that everybody does what they do best. The agency is the best option for product development, and now I will explain why.

Advantages that Startups Get from a Software Development Company

Time is a key resource in the development of a startup. An idea should go out into the world as soon as possible and start bringing in money. Comparing a software development company and freelancing is like comparing apples and oranges in terms of the involvement and time spent by the founders of the startup. Let’s consider the benefits of partnering with a software development company.

No administrative hassle

By outsourcing software development to a professional agency, you save your time and budget. You don’t need to hire recruiters to select the right engineers, no need to rent an office and buy workstations for the team, worry about staff replacements or training and no need for HR to improve the engagement and motivation of your employees. All these are covered by your tech partner.

Fair ratio of skills and rates

Outsourcing allows to get the right engineers with necessary tech skills but also cuts expenses. Ukraine is now one of the most popular software development outsourcing destinations. The country offers ample opportunities — from its vast IT talent pool and wide experience to cost efficiency and strong technical skills. Rates for a Middle Software Engineer vary from $26–$38, while a Senior Software Engineer’s hourly rate is $39–$60. Ukraine occupies a leading position in the fastest-growing destinations for global software development services for startups.

Fast recruitment

To develop your product, you will need different specialists, not only coders. To ensure smooth development of the product, it’s necessary to involve UI/UX designers, DevOps specialists, QA engineers, business analysts, and project managers. In a tight time frame, it is quite difficult to quickly find a decent team. A software outsourcing vendor usually has all necessary employees on board. Thus, you can quickly and easily hire the right people for your team and boost your development process. Moreover, the vendor provides an agile system of team members replacement in case of illness or resignation. As a result, you pick the right team in the shortest period without the need for hiring and searching employees. This is especially beneficial when you require a specialist for a short time or periodically, for example, DevOps or QA services.

Unique expertise

When hiring a dedicated team for your project, you get access to the expertise of the whole software development company — engineering, UI/UX design, business analyst, project management, and even business consulting. Usually, team members have already had the specific experience of your domain and will share their insights. The company also analyzes from both a technical and a business point of view so a startup will never go beyond the creativity and deadline.

Flexible team management

When it comes to product development, you have two ways of managing the process — be a project manager and control everything from A to Z or communicate only with the dedicated project manager, who will manage the team and the process and keep you updated all the time. Delegating management to a project manager frees up your time that can be devoted to other business tasks. The responsibility for prioritizing and delivering the tech product rests with the vendor. To contunie reading about the advantages you can get from outsouring your software development, click on the link https://bit.ly/3EWTYIU

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