How To Develop A Brand New App, Even If No One On Your Team Knows How To Program

You want to create a new app, but you don’t have an IT department and you don’t know where to begin. You’re in over your head. Well, there’s good news: people in your shoes successfully develop apps all the time. If you find the right developers, then chances are, you’ll see your vision come to life. If you’re thinking of getting started, you have a couple options: Hire a team of in-house programmers. You can go out and find a product manager, a UI/UX designer, a backend engineer, a frontend engineer, and a senior engineer. Hiring in-house gives you a lot of control over the end product. But it can also be expensive — often north of $50,000 per month. And it forces you to invest tons of you and your team’s time on hiring, managing, and HR. Hire an app development agency, like us. This can be risky — hire a bad agency, and you could end up wasting a lot of money. But hire a good agency, and you can get a much better product for much less money, while investing much less of your own time and energy. If you don’t have the infrastructure in place to develop an app in-house already, it’s almost always best to find some app development experts, tell them what they need to know, and then let them do the work for you. That way, you can focus on helping your business by doing what you’re good at. But if you choose to go with an agency, how can you be sure they’re good? Their content. Read a few of an agency’s blog posts and see if they’re any good. If you feel like you’ve learned something useful about app development, you can bet they’re a good agency. How “sales-y” they feel. A bad agency will sell themselves down your throat, no matter what. A good agency will try to provide value above all else, and they won’t be afraid to walk away from a deal if the fit isn’t right. Where they’re from. Overseas app developers are cheaper, but they’re usually terrible. Most of the time, if you hire a developer because they charge 5 times less than the competition, you’ll have to hire someone else to clean up the mess they make afterwards. In fact, a client recently came to us after trying to hire an overseas development team and getting a worthless end product. Why Should You Trust Us? Here’s a little about me: my name’s Chris Chalfant, and 10 years ago I taught myself how to code. A year ago I started Remote Cloud Consulting, because I wanted to help non-techy people like you turn their tech visions into reality. It’s not just me, though. I’ve made my name in this business by hiring really good people — people who really know what they’re doing. Together, we’ve come up with an airtight process to develop amazing apps, and we’ve used that process to make client after client happy. Above all, our past clients have loved us. And we think you will, too. "Remote Cloud Consulting has changed my life and my business for the better. Incredibly glad to have done business with this company." Quinn Childress, CEO Nucleus Operations "Chris has an exceptional work ethic and is very committed to what he focuses on." Karsh Kumar, CEO One Tap, Inc. Now, you’d be crazy to hire us without getting to know us better first, which is why we recommend talking to us on a call. We can chat for 30 minutes, and after that, we’ll tell you if we think we’re a good fit. Then, if you’re convinced, you can give us your business. If you like what you’re seeing so far, and you’d like to chat with us one-on-one about the software you need, then book a call with us today. Here are 9 reasons to get started: 1. We know what you need. Building software in-house, by yourself, for the first time, is a bad idea. It rarely works out. For one, you might have an idea of what your app should do, but you might not know exactly what it should look like. All the time, we recommend new features to our clients — features we’ve seen work time and time again in other apps — and they say, “that’s an amazing idea, it’ll make this app work, and I never would have thought of it myself!” For two, if you’re not a developer, you probably can’t manage developers very well. And leaving employees who have never worked together before to their own devices can lead to chaos. When the project doesn’t have a “road map”, then chances are, it won’t get finished on time, and it’ll cost more than you want it to cost. 2. We take a top-down approach, so the customer gets the software they want. You’ve done surveys, interviews, and everything in between to get to know your customers better. But if you hire a new developer off the street, will they know your customers as well as you? Probably not. With us, your high-level vision will be put into detailed specifications for your review before development begins. You tell us what you want the product to do, and we build it with the best user experience possible. 3. We’re experts at designing an MVP. If you’re building software, you should start with an MVP — a Minimum Viable Product. If you’re not already familiar with the term, it’s basically a version of your software reduced to the bare minimum. It’s useful because building an MVP lets you start tinkering with your product sooner. While a full-fledged software might take 6-12 months to develop, an MVP can take 1, 2, or sometimes even shorter. You can even show it off to some of your customers and see what they think. You can get feedback from them, which will help you design a better app down the road. And more importantly, you can see if there’s even a market for the app you’re building — that way, you don’t spend $30,000 developing something that no one even wants to begin with. If you decide to go with us, the first thing we’ll do for you is build an MVP. That way, you can decide whether or not your app is even worth building with minimal investment. 4. We’ve got all the expertise you need in one place. Trying to hire competent cloud developers who know cybersecurity as well as they know frontend javascript? You’ll probably have some trouble — there aren’t a ton of people who know both, and the few who do are expensive. We have a lineup of people to handle every little detail. It’s like having a full team of developers, except you’re paying them much less than the $50,000 per month they’d command in the job market. 5. We future-proof your app, to make sure it’s never obsolete. All tools, languages, and services we use have stood the test of time, and unless all the world’s computers suddenly stop working, we’re pretty sure they’ll stay relevant well into the future. (Our favorites include AWS services, Node.js, React.js, React Native, Electron.js, Kubernetes, and Docker.) That way, you know your software won’t “expire” because the technology behind it becomes outdated. 6. We can scale you to the moon 🚀 Scaling an app is harder than it sounds. You know how websites crash when they get too many users? That can happen to your app, too, if you’re not careful. Anticipate tons of users? Not a problem. We use the same stuff that big tech players like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix use, meaning over 10 million people can use your app at once. 7. Save on costs with pay-per-use pricing. We also offer pay-per-use pricing, which means you won’t pay for any cloud services you don’t use. 8. We will get you your software on time. Have a tight budget? Not a problem. Need a quick turnaround? That’s not a problem either. Some projects have a short term budget of $150,000 and need something built in 8 weeks. Others have a budget of $40,000 for 6 months. We can make a wide range of budgets and timeframes work, including those 2. 9. It’s Now or Never A Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” In this context, that means the longer you put off developing your app, the longer it’ll take to get it to market. And even worse, the greater the chance someone steals your idea. Sure, you’re busy this week — we all are. But if you can find 30 minutes somewhere in your calendar, we’ll get on a call, and we’ll let you know if we can help you. Even better, once you set the wheels in motion, we can work with virtually no assistance from you. If you want, then this will be the last week you have to think about software development for more than a few minutes. If you’ve made it this far, you should contact us to schedule a call. Your time is too valuable to overthink this decision. Give us 30 minutes, and we can get started.