It takes guts to start up a new company. But it also takes a clear vision, a plan, and a target market.
Oh, and money. Money, time, and patience.
But the 21st-century enterprise landscape has added another necessity to the pile. See, we are living, working, and conducting business in an increasingly digital world. Industries that traditionally offer goods and services unrelated to the Information Technology world find themselves scrambling to adapt to this brave new world online.
Meanwhile, IT-related companies, like software developers, now face expectations that have shot through the roof. Do you have a “can’t miss” idea for a new application? Great. So do a dozen other eager entrepreneurs. What makes yours different?
Perhaps we can find the answers below. Read on.
Highly Technical Co-Founders Are a Game-Changer Our growing technical world needs enterprise leaders who ‘get it.’
It’s simple, really. If you want a company that can not only do business but thrive in a tech-oriented environment, common sense says one of your founders needs a tech background. And today, the entire business world is a tech-oriented environment!
Tech companies feel this necessity even more keenly. Not having a founder with a tech background is like having someone open a restaurant without the first clue on preparing or serving food!
The tech market is a crowded, competitive field. Given the rising demands of a growing digitized society, you would think that there would be plenty of business opportunities to go around for every company. However, consumers are becoming increasingly savvy regarding tech, and consequently, they are picky and choosy. Would-be customers want their tech to deliver more functionality, do it faster, and not adversely affect their bank balance.
So, it’s not enough to release tech-related services and goods. These releases need to be good. Scratch that; they need to be great. And if you want great tech products, you need someone in charge who understands this and has the appropriate background to aim the company in the right direction from Day One. After all, it’s easier to establish and follow a focused plan from the get-go than it is to abandon an established way of doing business and commence doing things in a whole new way.
If you have a highly technical co-founder on the startup team, your company will get it right the first time. This way, the business can devote more energy to customer acquisition and engagement, and less time figuring out what went wrong and making mid-course corrections.
Also, if your startup has a CEO/co-founder with a strong tech background, the company’s tech people will have an easier job dealing with them since the person in charge grasps the nuances of the business’s tech aspect. It's difficult for professionals to respect an authority figure who has no clue what those professionals are working with but insists on telling them how to do their jobs.
Bear in mind, your startup’s founding team needs members who have experience in different fields. Yes, it would help if you had a tech-based co-founder, but that person is probably not your first choice for making financial plans. You need both a techie and someone with a head for business, just like an airplane needs both the left and right wings to fly.
Your New Application Needs the Right Developers Launching an app today requires a skilled, experienced dev team to create something that stands out.
Not only are customers raising their expectations for new tech-related goods and services, but more companies are discovering that they need an app in their business plan.
A good app brings in more customers and makes it easier (and sometimes more interesting) to do business with the enterprise in question. It’s getting to the point where every bar, bookstore, barbecue joint, and shoe store is getting its own app.
And why not? After all, a good app gives customers greater convenience, variety, and a means of providing feedback. Conversely, a lousy app results in irritation, frustration, and maybe even killing the customer’s desire to do business with the offending company, going instead to the business where the app makes it easy to find the physical location of the building, make a reservation, or conduct a purchase.
So, what makes the difference between a fantastic app and a piece of junk? Bringing in the right developers! If your business hires a solid, experienced engineering team, you will get higher-quality software applications that your company can release on time. Because as we all know, your apps not only have to be high quality, they need to hit the market before your competitors’ products do!
Good IT teams require an excellent salary and compensation, but you get what you pay for like so many other things in life. In this case, a business pays for the higher level of expertise and long experience of a solid development team. In the long run, the investment saves you money since the right developer team will release the product right the first time. It’s preferable to spend money and resources releasing updates, patches, and bug fixes for sub-par software; also, the optics look bad to would-be customers.
A Technical CEO Rollcall Here are a few examples of CEOs with a highly technical background. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, was writing software before he went to high school. Kevin Systrom, Instagram CEO, taught himself programming. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg drew upon his tech skills to help build the platform from scratch. Drew Huston, Dropbox CEO, wrote his company’s first lines of code in a Boston train station. Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and CEO, wrote his first software program at 13 years old. Steve Wozniak, Apple Computers co-founder, is computer programmer and electronics engineer who, before Apple, worked with circuit boards and “blue boxes.” While Steve Jobs was acknowledged as the force behind Apple’s marketing, Wozniak was the tech genius. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, both went to grad school to get PhDs in Computer Science.
Failed Startups and the Lack of Technological Skills The digital economic landscape is littered with the wreckage of also-ran startups.
According to CBInsights.com, the top six reasons for startup failure are: There was no market need- 42%. Your product may be clever and cool, but if no one needs it, you’re wasting your time. The startup ran out of funds- 29%. Quibi, which specialized in short-form, serialized video content, raised 1.75 billion dollars yet failed. Unfortunately, money (and venture capitalists’ patience) is not infinite. Nor does it guarantee success. The startup didn’t have the right team- 23%. Here’s the reason for what we’re talking about. If you don’t have the right founding team members, you’re off to a bad start. You need a CFO to tell you “this is too expensive to do,” or a CTO who says, “this technology is not feasible within the timeframe.” The business was outcompeted- 19%. You can do everything right, but sometimes, that’s not enough. Sometimes, the other team is just better. Or maybe they have better tech. 🤔 There were issues relating to cost and pricing- 18%. This reason relates to the aforementioned “funds” reason. At one extreme, you price your products out of most customer’s reach. At the other extreme, you’re spending five dollars to make two dollars. There’s also the risk of not delivering a product or service commensurate with the price. The business made a user-unfriendly product- 17%. This cause, although not at the top of the list, also includes startups not scaling software properly, which kills startups that specialize in software. If a business can’t adjust its software’s functionalities and capacities according to user demand, they are sunk.
A Way to Get Around the Need for a Technically Proficient Co-Founder Is your software startup lacking the tech experience needed for a strong kickoff? Hire it, then!
Okay, so maybe your tech startup’s founding team doesn’t include a Swiss-army CEO. No one person who can create sound business plans, draft a compelling proposal for venture capitalists, assemble the perfect staff, be familiar with every technological concept, and whip up a mean charcuterie board at a moment’s notice. However, there is still a workaround.
Companies whose founding leadership doesn’t have that crucial tech experience can hire that expertise by bringing consultants on board. Experienced consultants like Remote Cloud Consulting know the nuts and bolts of tech-driven companies that produce deliverables such as software applications or cloud-based services. If you hire professional consultants to help launch your company, you stand a better chance of avoiding the pitfalls common to new businesses.
It’s a short-term expense with long-term benefits. It’s far more convenient and cost-effective to recruit experienced professionals to assist in your company’s birth than to bring in a team to diagnose and cure the problems that inevitably arise from an improper launch. Remote Cloud Consulting, for instance, has experience working with tech startups, and you can leverage their expertise to ensure a successful launch for your startup.