6 Ways to Reduce Software Development Costs in Your Startup

Your startup is already dealing with challenges like limited resources, validating your business idea, hiring the right team, and attracting buyers/investors. 

You realize to gain a competitive advantage, and you need custom software developed. You know, it will be an expensive undertaking because everything needs to be built from scratch, and there is nothing like this off-the-shelf.

You would have followed the do-it-yourself strategy if this had been anything else like hiring, selling, marketing, or finance. 

It would help if you had expertise in many moving parts, be it backend development, frontend development, UI/UX design, network, security, architecture, project management, etc. There is not enough time to learn and implement all these. You cannot spread yourself thin on development activities and not focus on the core business.

You also read the study by McKinsey that 66% of software development projects have cost overruns. If it happens in your case, this will jeopardize your business planning.

What are your options?

Here are some tips and tricks that will help you smartly manage and reduce the software development cost: –

Sell It Before You Build It

You can sell your software offering before you have even got it developed. You present your concept in front of the investors. Take the investment and spend it on software development process. Once the product is developed, you launch it for everyone.

Your product is developed without you spending anything from your pocket.

You would be asking; getting an investment by sharing an idea would be very hard, and you are correct. 

It is the best way to validate your product idea. Whenever you don’t get an investment, you get insights into what is going right and what needs to be improved.

Rember, if you can’t sell the idea, it would be tough to sell the product.

Minimum Viable Product

When entrepreneurs start with a software project, they want to release a fully functional product for version 1 of the application due to excitement. First, it consumes a lot of time and budget getting these nice-to-have features developed. And because of this, stakeholders miss getting the feedback to validate their core offering. They neglect to map the solution with the evolving market and consumer needs. The realization comes when adaptability is impacted due to either low consumer usage or feedback that the market demand has shifted.

To avoid all this hassle, make sure you only develop the essential features for version 1. Please understand that a complete solution may take multiple versions to be released when it comes to software product development.

When you release your application with a few critical features, test it in the live environment, validate your offering with market needs, collect and implement early adopter’s feedback. It reduces the development cost significantly. You also get further insights into how the customers are using your product and what else they need to have a better experience. It helps you plan the following feature set to be developed and how it will improve the application.

Adopting agile methodology can be an insurance policy for MVP development. Your project remains flexible as per the changing market needs.

Write Detailed Requirements

You know what problems your product solves for your customer and how it solves it. You want to make sure your development team is apparent on what is in and out of scope.

It is sensible to write a detailed requirement document covering the project scope. The more detailed and specific the requirement document is, the better it is—any ambiguity in scope results in bad design, improper functionality, and time and budget overruns.  

How does it help?

An explicit requirement document helps the development team estimate and plan development better. It helps in the selection of technology stack, frameworks, and tools. It facilitates communication, eliminates misunderstanding and the introduction of bugs.

Outsource Software Development

As a startup, you need to be meticulous about spending your resources—having a development team in-house is a big commitment. You don’t hire a team; you need to engage all the support functions like HR, Finance, and Housekeeping. You need infrastructure, computer hardware, software, etc.

When you are already struggling with resources, this could be a business-shattering expense.

When you outsource your software development, you have the flexibility to engage with companies based on your evaluation of technical expertise or cost. There are no geographic boundaries. If a company doesn’t prove to be what you thought, taking an exit is easy.

Please don’t get confused with the recommendation; I don’t mean that outsourcing is better than having an in-house team. On the contrary, the reverse is true. However, this recommendation holds true in the context of startups, which are just starting and are looking to reduce cost.

Communicate Well

Setting up an efficient communication process is a guarantee of reducing software development costs. You should have a straightforward approach to communicate transparently. You need to ensure that the entire team understands project scope, modules, features, users, user stories, use cases, deliverables, constraints, and every assumption added to the project plan.

Start with daily standups, weekly project sync up, biweekly sprint reviews, monthly project retros, and quarterly project roadmap review. All the discussions are adequately documented, and respective tasks are assigned, keeping individual accountability.

Deviation from the project roadmap due to communication gap results in time and cost overruns. Proper communication ensures transparent development and avoids any silos or guesswork.

Quality Assurance

It would help if you involved quality assurance as a fundamental practice in workflow from the initiation of the software development lifecycle. Application quality testing avoids the accumulation of errors and bugs from the design phase, ensuring a superior quality solution.

As a rule of thumb, bugs discovered during the software release mean redesign, redevelopment, and eventually additional costs. It may delay the application release or a lot of customer dissatisfaction if the application is released. Bad user experiences, especially in the earlier days, can cost you a lot in the longer term.

If you involve a quality assurance team and do rigorous testing, many potential issues can be resolved before they surface. It also helps you deliver some functionalities that you didn’t think of in the planning phase and could prove essential for smooth application performance.

To Sum It All Up

Software development can be affordable than most startups realize. Improper planning, documentation, communication gap, not knowing what you need, and a do-it-yourself mindset can be a more prominent contributors to cost than actual design and development expenses.

I also briefly touched on how outsourcing software development projects to an experienced engineering team can help you accelerate your development timeline. And how quality focus from the start can help you avoid performance and scalability issues in the future.  

Suppose you want to reduce your software development cost without compromising on quality. Our experienced team at Taazaa Inc can help you balance price and quality by implementing solid development principles. Get in touch with Taazaa Inc to get your custom software development services.