Software startup articles

Basically, selling a few expensive licenses to big companies may be as profitable as selling lots of cheap licenses to SMEs. If you plan on selling your software through a website, you should start with offering users a free trial of your product to see if it works for them. Meanwhile, you may gain revenue from support and maintenance. Basically, you may own a successful software business without a technical partner. However, having someone more code-savvy may be useful.

They can be involved part-time into your company and review the architecture and code. In return, you may offer them equity in your company. However, you will have to share your growing profit with the co-owner in the future.

One more option is to turn to a reliable vendor offering software as a service. However, you will depend on them a lot, as you will have less control over the software development. Besides, you should allocate some extra time and budget for communication with the vendor to make sure the software satisfies your requirements. Once you have an idea, obtain the necessary patents and register trademarks to protect it.

Make your collaborators sign a non-disclosure agreement at the product creation stage to prevent leakage of any project-related information. State your business purpose, product, target audience, competitors, financial needs, and the expected time to market for your product.

Quirky, Inc. The startup struggled to raise money, went through numerous layoffs, and even shut one of its offices. Later on, they eventually filed for bankruptcy and sold the business in September Now, the invention startup is back with new owners and a new business model.

The platform preserves its purpose, but Quirky itself will no longer manufacture products. Instead, they delegated this task to other companies. The startup conducted no market validation and chose the wrong distribution channel — retail chains.

So, they overspent on inventory but failed to recognize whether each product addressed a real consumer need. After all, clicking on an invention you like is different from being ready to pay for it. Determine the legal structure of your business for the purpose of taxation. Take care of insurance in case something goes wrong with your software.

Organizing your own software development team is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Consider outsourcing your development efforts at least at the first stages. This way, you will get this piece of work done by specialists.

If they are overseas employees, you may benefit from their lower labor rates compared to those of the specialists inside the US. Longer project engagement, costly onsite training, language barriers, and different time zones are possible drawbacks with this option. However, reliable contractors mitigate them to the minimum.

On the contrary, hiring wrong people will ruin even the most elaborate plan. GovWorks Inc. The founders had a sound business plan, sufficient venture capital, and a growing audience. The absence of well-coordinated teamwork led the company to a failure. Testing reveals bugs in your software and ensures its quality. This way, you increase customer satisfaction, which adds to your profit and reputation. However, factors such as time pressure can make you delegate your testing efforts to others.

Here are our tips. You KNOW your users would love them, right? What problem are you trying to solve? Related, your marketing needs to focus on the benefits your software provides — not the features it boasts. How does each feature provide value to the users? The user experience is everything.

No matter how great your idea is or how significant the problem that you solve, inconvenience will keep people from using your product. Where will they be using your product? When will they be using it? However, the market-driven nature of those requirements also demands alternatives. For example, startups can use scenarios to identify requirements in the form of user stories and estimate the effort for each story. However, polishing requirements that address an unsolicited need a waste of effort.

Requirements elicitation methods are moving toward testing the problem and understanding if the solution fits real needs before the product goes to market the so-called customer development process. In the startup context, customers often steer requirements, and developers must be ready to embrace change from day one. The use of architecture and design patterns to make features modular and independent is crucial when functionality is continuously updated or removed. Therefore, employing architectural practices and frameworks that enable easy extension of the design can dramatically benefit the alignment between the product and market uncertainty.

Scientific evidence also points to the advantages of constant code refactoring. Reimplementing the whole system might be costly and risky if it must be immediately scalable to a growing number of users. Therefore, some quality assurance is needed for the functionality that brings the most value to customers. The use of ongoing customer acceptance through focus groups made up of early adopters can provide a time-efficient way to discover major bugs.

But solutions are still scarce for easily accessible automated testing frameworks and the more practical user interface-testing approaches. Time pressure and lack of resources often lead startups to adopt a loose organizational structure without traditional management hierarchies. Empowerment of team members represents the main viable strategy for enhancing performance and success. Working on innovative products requires creativity—an ability to adapt to new roles and face new challenges every day, working overtime if necessary.

Indeed, in building a startup company, the team needs expertise to counterbalance its lack of resources. Nevertheless, the absence of structure might hinder important activities, such as sharing knowledge and team coordination, especially when the company grows. In this case, collocation is essential to facilitate informal communication and close interactions between team members. Startups can take advantage of the newest technologies and development tools without having to worry about legacy or previous working experiences.

In general, startup employees prefer using those technologies that can quickly accommodate change in the product and its management. To mitigate the lack of resources, startups often appear to take advantage of open source solutions when possible, which also give them access to a large pool of evaluators and evolving contributions.

To quickly validate the product, they tend to use agile and lean methods in an ad hoc manner. Evidence suggests that engineering activities must be tailored to the startup context to allow flexibility and reactiveness in development workfl ows.

Decision makers in startups confront continuous unpredictability; the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect. On the other hand, fl exible and reactive methods designed to stimustimulate customer feedback increase the number of perspectives and solutions available to decision makers. Developers need the freedom to choose activities quickly, stop immediately when the results are wrong, fix the approach, and learn from previous failures.

Reported common practices, which ride the wave of rapidly evolving technologies and markets, are as follows:. The growing startup phenomenon opens uncharted opportunities as well as challenges in research. It is important to note that there are some topics that are far too critical to be left to the responsibility of just a single founder. These topics are everybodys responsibility, at all times, and will eventually be an indication of your startup values.

And finally we can now categorize our big list by putting each of the topics we identified during brainstorming into an appropriate category:. We already noted that there are some topics that are far too critical to be left to the responsibility of just a single founder.

They must be strategic, create a vision and plan accordingly. They are team builders responsible for gathering founders, partners, advisors, investors, and employees. They take ultimate responsibility for hiring and firing.

They must figure out how to acquire customers, find a great business model, prove customer value, and build out a sales pipeline. They must track core business metrics, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and monthly recurring revenue. The hustler must execute or outsource the logistics of running a business - incorporating, legal, IP, accounting, budgeting, HR, offices, equipment.