5 Tips On Finding The Right Development Company
So, you have finally made up your mind on launching a startup, starting an ecommerce/mcommerce business or taking an existing business one step further into the online jungle. What challenge do you face here? Right, technical implementation. You can either learn coding yourself which takes considerable amount of time and effort, or find someone who could do this for you. If you settle on the second option you face another dilemma: finding appropriate engineer freelancers unknown to each other or hiring a well-established team? There are many arguments for the latter which we will not mention here, and, in case you think it’s the best option, you face the challenge of finding the right team. Our tips are based on 8 years experience as a web and mobile development company and meant to make the challenge easier for you:
- Look for a company that makes their work principles clear. So you will know what kind of interaction, technical implementation and management strategies to expect. It’s crucial to be aware of your minimum personal involvement level required and maximum of that allowed.
- Read through the stories they tell. Go to their website and check out if they have a blog and if it’s regularly updated. Reading blog posts will help you decide whether it is the dream team that completely understands your needs, or not.
- Portfolio matters. Finding neither most recent work examples nor client reviews on their website? Where did you dig them up actually? Your best fit is the company that displays projects similar to yours in their portfolio. You can check them out and decide if you like their work.
- Don’t rely on the cheapest offer. Otherwise, you run the risk of receiving a product that is neither functional nor nice looking.
- Neither fixed-price relationships are recommended. Developing a website or a mobile app you can never be sure, once and for all, how much work and time will be required to build working product. No engineer will ever be able to tell you the exact final numbers at the stage of negotiations. If less time gets spent on the project you overpay. On the other side, if it’s more, the developers will not feel motivated enough to deliver top notch quality.
Devvela: We work very close with the client and build their product iteration by iteration, creating MVP and MMP which allows the client to test their marketing hypotheses early and decide on the next step. All this is clearly explained on our website .
Devvela: One day we noticed that our services are mostly popular among startup founders, so we decided to bring them some additional value by researching and writing about entrepreneurship. We learn and we share the learning with our clients and potential clients via our blog which allows us better understand them.
Devvela: if a client comes to our website looking for a team that could build their web or mobile based startup from scratch they will find the story of Player’s Health which is a good example of such project. And, of course, there are more stories to find in the projects section.
Devvela: Of course, you will save some money, but, believe us or not, we used to work with clients who had to fix up poor low-cost projects. In total, their costs were bigger than if they built the project with us from scratch. Be assured, the few bucks you spare won’t be enough to turn some kind of a mess into a good product. On the other hand, we know at least three reasons to avoid the strategy of being the cheapest.
Devvela: Our client first pays for the discovery document which we create combining dialogue with technical research, development of the original idea, and estimation. Having this document they know approximately how much time, work and money it will cost, and decide whether they pay us for building the product or not. And if the client settles on hiring our team they pay only for work hours. We move iteration by iteration, and after each of them our client can decide if adding next features makes sense, or pivot.
Finding the right development team is one of the key challenges when building a web/mobile based startup. Besides all mentioned above, there is such thing as spiritual compatibility. But this is something we can’t see and measure beforehands. In our cruel world, you only find out after you have tried. However, we wish you a good luck finding your team!
