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December 19, 2014

5 Reasons Your Startup Should Consider Software Outsourcing

5_Reasons_Your_Startup_Should_Consider_Outsourcing_Software_DevelopmentStartups often attempt to launch a product or service without full awareness of the options and developments in the tech industry. As a result, they often miss out on the ability to capitalize on a new idea before competitors or fail to innovate when they approach design from only one angle.

Before you start hiring in-house developers and discrediting outsourcing all together, we've got 5 reasons why your startup should consider software outsourcing. There are several tremendous benefits startups should consider before rejecting software outsourcing. In fact, only by outsourcing is it possible for some software startups to get off the ground.

Focus on Your Core Competency

Outsourcing your software product development let’s you focus on your company’s core capabilities. As a software startup, do you think developing the software must be a core competency? Really? Do you think your customers care how many lines of code your developers can write per day? Or how many bugs per week they can fix? It’s more likely they care that your software has the features they need and at a price they can afford. Marketing and sales, or the Customer Development Process, is what most startups need as a core capability.

Conserve Your Capital

There is no question that startups need quality code in their product. The only question is who will write it. Hiring your own developers, perhaps at a reduced salary in exchange for stock or stock options is the traditional approach. But hiring your own development team is hard. Great developers are hard to find, hard to keep and expensive to hire.

Good software outsourcing companies charge between $20 to $40 per hour per developer, depending on the level of seniority, global location, size of the team, length of the engagement, etc. That’s between $3,000 and $7,000 per month per developer. Try hiring great developers in a western country for those amounts.

Leverage Software Development Best Practices & Innovation

Do you want to hire your own internal software development team? Then it's your responsibility to create an engineering culture in your company that will attract great development talent and foster innovation. Managing developers can be like trying to herd cats, but a good software outsourcing company will do just that.

A good software outsourcing firm provides you expert software development best practices and aims to be better at creating applications than your own team of software developer employees. After all, that is all they do; it is their core competency. You gain the benefit of their expertise with the latest software development trends and the ability to innovate using experience gained across multiple client engagements and projects.

Achieve Resource Flexibility

If you have ever had to fire people, especially a whole team of people, you know how painful that can be. And yet even the best companies occasionally have to adjust their workforce. It is more likely to occur at a startup when business is not developing as planned. Outsourcing enables you to reasonably grow and shrink your team to meet your business needs as conditions change.

Outsourcing also enables you to have a more diverse set of resources applied to your software development. You will unlikely be able to afford designers, software architects, testers and software QA resources as full-time employees. Outsourcing gives you access to these resources on a part-time basis as you need them.

Speed Your Product to Market

The traditional approach to starting a software product company is to raise money, buy company tee shirts and hire a room full of developers. That’s what startups did back in the 1990s and it took many months of time to find, hire and build a team, and then hope they could actually work together. Recruiting, training and retaining your development team are benefits you should take advantage of as core competencies of a good software outsourcing company. After you select your software outsourcing partner, your software product team start coding in just a few weeks, not months.

A more modern approach is to have just a few developers who create a minimum viable product or MVP that you can test in the market. But, you still need developers! Some software outsourcing companies are expert at creating your MVP, using lean and agile software development methodologies that embrace the inevitable changes required by your initial customers and market demands. They stand ready to persevere in enhancing your software with additional sprints and/or to pivot and make a completely different app if your original approach needs to be changed.

Don’t let your startup ambitions die on the proverbial grape vine before getting your product developed and introduced to the market. Use software outsourcing to get a professional software development team so you can start testing your product and generating revenue ASAP!

Andy Hilliard

As CEO, Andy leads and advocates for the globalization and collaboration of great software teams with companies in search of talent, innovation and a globally-distributed extension of their engineering function and culture. Andy founded the ground-breaking nearshore software development services company, Isthmus Costa...

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