10 SaaS startups that can cut months off your runway

As a LEAN+Agile dev house dedicated to building apps and websites for our clients, we are always advising our clients to buy functionality where they can instead of building it.

We are as aware of their runway as they are. And we’re dedicated to getting them to launch with the best MVP possible. And when speed counts and budgets are limited, and even when they’re not, we always go for buy over build.

Our clients are often surprised by not just the quality but the depth of functionality that is now available to be integrated via APIs from thousands of providers. 

Here’s a list of some of the more useful and powerful integrations you should be considering. Note – this isn’t a survey. We’re not providing options or reviews. Think of it more as a proof of existence and a starting point for doing your own dive into the SaaS options out there. 

 

Feed as a Service – stream

A news feed or activity feed with the rich interactions we’re all accustomed to – likes, tagging friends, etc – drives engagement. Feeds aren’t just for social sites. They’re for marketplaces, ecommerce, any app or website that involves events happening in realtime that someone somewhere wants to see. If you have a database its contents can probably be presented as an infinite scrolling feed to your users to like and share.

All that rich interactivity is complex and time-consuming to implement. Then there’s the technical difficulties involved in delivering the feed to all your users so they have a smooth, hiccup-free experience. You’re looking at 1000s of programmer hours whether you sit down and do it right and eat the delay, or launch with the basics working and iterate towards the complete solution.

stream provides APIs for client and server feed management as well SDKs for building apps and websites that integrate their feeds.

 

Authentication as a Service – Auth0

How many ways are there for potential customers to login and access your product? Email address + password? Social logins? Magic email link? SMS link? Let them use it anonymously and authenticate later? Multi-factor authentication using a code sent via SMS, voice, a one-time password app, a hardware key or biometrics? 

It depends, doesn’t it. But security is one of the hardest things to get right. A home-rolled solution will be enough for the early stages of development, but once you’re live on the internet your vulnerability is related to how much money, time and expertise you can spend on security.

Or you can use a provider such as Auth0 who is solely focused on secure authentication.  

 

Fraud Detection as a Service – Sift Science

As the pandemic created a surge in internet usage and online purchases, it also created a surge in digital fraud across both true fraud and friendly fraud categories. If you haven’t heard of friendly fraud, it mainly manifests as chargeback fraud – customers claiming they never received their order. 

Digital fraud requires cooperation and huge datasets to detect and defeat. It’s not something you can do on your own. Services like Stripe Payments and Sift Science integrate thousands of data feeds and signals – such as device fingerprints, transaction histories – to predict and mitigate fraud.

Should you be using their services? If you’re not sure, your accountant can probably tell you.  

 

Images as a service – imgix

Images have a huge impact on your users’ perception of your app or site. They can make it look more engaging, but due to their size loading them can also slow it down. If you rely on user-generated content, like a restaurant recommendation app would, or a marketplace, or you have your own deep catalogue of product images, then handling images and handling them well is an absolute necessity.

But manipulating images is technically challenging and delivering them quickly to your users takes planning and infrastructure.

Services like imgix save you from having to develop inhouse image editing and management expertise. It provides an API that can crop, resize and compress images, and a CDN for caching and delivering them to your users. 

You might say there are open source libraries for manipulating images and Amazon has a CDN, so why? You can ask the same question for every service in this article. The answer is time. Time now, as you move towards launch as quickly as you can, and time later, when you lose feature development hours to maintaining and debugging the code you wrote in house.  

 

Recommendations as a service – Algolia

You have an online store. It would be nice to increase Average Order Value by surfacing appropriate products for your customers. Where do you even start on that? Do your developers need to know statistics? Machine learning? Can you afford developers that already have the skills?

Even with a feature that will deliver a positive ROI it may end up being too expensive, again in time as well as money, to implement or just impossible. A lot of the modern user experience is pretty close to rocket science. But not everyone can hire rocket scientists.

But a service like Algolia lets you access that rocket science through an API that is easily integrated and with pricing that is easy to sign off on.

 

User Comms as a Service – twilio

There are dozens of services that will help you put a chatbox on your site or in your app. Making it easy for a customer to talk to a rep to help boost conversions is a strategy that is growing in popularity as it gets easier to implement.

A text chat today might lead later to a call to support after purchase or an email with warranty information or a newsletter with your latest offers.

We’re highlighting twilio for this category because their service offers APIs that allow you to integrate chat, voice and email comms with your customers. On top of the comms, it allows you to unify all your interactions with each customer to streamline engagement and allow you to personalise their interactions with your business.

This is the kind of feature you don’t even dream of being able to build for yourself. You use theirs and you’re grateful you can leverage it to your advantage.     

 

Payments as a Service

This is a no-brainer. There is no question you are going to use a third party payments API. You’re trying to launch here, not reinvent online banking. The question you have to answer is which one, or which ones, are you going to integrate?

And are you going to stick to straight payments through a service like Stripe or are you going to integrate a Buy Now Pay Later service like Afterpay or Klarna? 

 

Onboarding as a Service – Pendo

For an app or site of any complexity one of the biggest challenges is onboarding new users so they can use your powerful features, recognise the value of your product, and become long term customers.

This onboarding is handled by tours using on-screen pop-ups and overlays. The value is in the tour, not in the code that animates the tour.  

The advantage of integrating a service like Pendo is that their implementation of product tours has advanced to the point where it offers authoring tools. This frees your developers from having to dedicate time to what is intrinsically a marketing function. 

Pendo also collects data so you can see which features are being used, allowing you to continuously improve your onboarding experience and profit from it.

 

Shipping as a Service – ShipEngine

If your business deals in physical items then you’re going to be dealing with the headaches of shipping. It’s a time sink that cuts into the profits of every transaction.

Services like ShipEngine let you use a single integration to hook into a network of delivery and logistics companies, allowing you to optimise your costs and helping quickly and painlessly arrange local, national or international deliveries.

Security as a Service – Wazuh

Your business is online. You have a server. Perhaps multiple servers. They’re all connected to that hive of scum and villainy that is the modern internet. What are you doing to keep your business secure? How much time and how many developers and devops can you dedicate to security? 

Staying current with threats and mitigations is a full-time job for a team. Being able to lean on the smarts of a large, dedicated security team through services like Wazuh reduces the risk of you being knocked offline or worse. 

Are you going to buy or build?

Software is a different kind of business. And if you have a website or an app make no mistake, you are in the software business. Pick almost any portion of an app or service and a deep expertise is either necessary or provides a huge advantage. 

This is what makes SaaS such a pervasive model. It’s the expense of expertise distributed across hundreds of customers. This business model is creating the re-usable modularity of functionality that software businesses have been wishing for since the 80s.

Any app can now launch with top-tier features in a fraction of the time and the fraction of the budget that was possible just five years ago.

You might worry about lock-in, and seeing money going out the door to other services might cause you physical pain, but that’s a problem that can be solved down the road when you are big enough for it to matter. 

For launching a new website or app, a strategic set of SaaS services can get you impressing customers and pulling in revenue faster than you can imagine, no matter how many developers you have.

If you want to talk to us about your own buy vs build challenges or you’re looking for extended team members to help you build, get in contact with us. We’d be happy to discuss the options open to you.

3 stats that prove mobile-first is a must for ecommerce sites

We’ve also thrown in a bonus 4th statistic at the end of the article on why you should care about mobile-first ecommerce. It’s a bit of a kicker. If you’re about to start on your own ecommerce website development project, this will convince you how important a consideration mobile is.  

Before we get to the mobile ecommerce stats, lets recap what happened over the last couple of year.

Due to lockdowns, brick and mortar stores had to face the reality of customers never setting a foot in their premises. There was a rush by businesses to establish an online presence.

Throw up a store. Anywhere. By anyone.  

This strategy saw mixed success. Having to compete online against giant retailers (ahem, Amazon), smaller businesses had to bring their best game. That game had to be focused on mobile. It often wasn’t. Newsflash – your ecommerce strategy still needs to have a mobile first approach.

What is mobile first?

Mobile first means your website it designed to look good and perform smoothly on phones from the beginning, and then adapted to also look good on the desktop. Phones aren’t as powerful as laptops and desktops. So if it performs well on phones you don’t need to worry about the rest. So you want your a mobile first website and you want to be a mobile first business.

Stat Number 4 demonstrates why this is important. But first, Stat Number 1.

Stat Number 1 – Page Views On Mobile

55% of page views come from mobile phones.

More than half the traffic to a business’s online store could be originating from mobile. Of course this changes from industry to industry, but the number is only going to get bigger for everyone.

With over half the traffic coming from mobile, businesses need to ask, did half of their design budget, their coding budget, go towards building their mobile experience? These are not second rate citizens you slap on a responsive design and hope it boosts sales a few percentage points.

On average, this 55% of pageviews will end up being almost 50% of revenues (as will be revealed below). 

If businesses don’t build their online stores mobile-first, they can miss out on those revenues. 

Mobile-first means more than a design that fits into the vertical format of a phone screen. Performance is a huge part of the experience. Due to bandwidth and CPU constraints, an ecommerce store that looks slick and performs well on the desktop can look good on mobile but be too slow to load and too sluggish to use.

Google Pagespeed Insights uses a simulated mid-tier mobile phone on a mobile network to measure site performance. It uses the results when deciding how high up to rank sites in their search results. 

A mobile-first approach takes performance on mobile as well as design into the overall UX process.

Stat Number 2 – The Purchase Process

 

46% of consumers complete their entire purchase process
(from research to payment) on mobile.

This statistic, more than any of the others, points to how important mobile is becoming. It is a snowball effect. More powerful phones with bigger displays have made shopping online via a phone more pleasant. The constant growth of mobile traffic has led to new websites always launching mobile capable (if not mobile-first) in order to capture that traffic. And with websites always growing more enjoyable to use on mobile, mobile traffic is capturing more and more of the purchase funnel.

One of the most important ease–of-use changes is the introduction of one-click payments. Digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, as well as payment service providers like Stripe and Adyen, are creating a new class of customers who are comfortable making online purchases on their mobile phone. One-click payment options remove most of the hurdles to completing payments.

Stat Number 3 – Closing the sale

58% of all multi-device purchases use mobile to close the sale.

There are different ways to interpret this big number. It could be that the digital wallet integration in mobile phones makes completing a purchase on that device the easiest option. It could be that people research purchases on a laptop or desktop, but make the final decision and complete the purchase somewhere more comfortable and conducive to decision making.

There’s probably dozens of scenarios that lead to this result. But they all point to the importance of streamlining the purchase process on your website. It probably means integrating more payment options. It definitely means making sure your website works smoothly across a range of handsets.

On a more technical level, making it easy to share a shopping cart between desktop and mobile experiences will help land more multi-device purchases. This can be by having a very simple sign-up process or being able to capture or send QR codes to access the transaction on another device.

The Kicker Stat – Customers are picky

40% of users will go to the competitor after a bad mobile experience.

That pretty much says it all. More than half your traffic will come via mobile. You can lose almost half of it, or about 25% of your total potential traffic and revenue, if the mobile experience of your website isn’t good enough.

The biggest problem, the one that sends most people away, is websites loading slowly on mobile. Those beautiful hero images that fill your desktop browser window don’t load as fast on a phone. Maybe they do on your iPhone 13 Pro Max. On wifi. But that’s not going to be your mobile audience. It’s also a symptom of building your website desktop-first instead of mobile-first.

How to build mobile-first to maximise mobile revenues

There are no big secrets. It’s a mix of careful design, strategic coding, and backend resources. The two most popular starting points for our clients’ ecommerce websites are WooCommerce and Shopify. They both provide strong options for delivering a mobile experience to your customers.

Shopify is easy to get up and running, and with a careful design and use of resources can be quite performant. But there are limits to what you can tweak. While the ease-of-use makes getting your business online in a reduced time frame possible, you might find the lack of control of the backend keeps you from maximising your customers’ experience. 

WooCommerce is infinitely tweakable. As it is built on the open source WordPress CMS you are in control of the entire stack including the backend. This gives you many more choices in optimising delivery of your website to mobile. It does require more of an initial investment, but many clients feel the control and the power on tap it provides is worth it.

Taking your online business mobile-first

If your current ecommerce website isn’t mobile-first, it is always possible to make the necessary frontend changes to fix that. Making changes to the backend will depend on how your site is being hosted.

If you are setting out on creating a new ecommerce website, then you are in the perfect position to ensure that mobile-first informs your tech choices, your design choices and your overall strategy.

If you have any questions about how your business can make the move to mobile-first or how you should build for mobile-first, drop us an email and we’ll get in touch for a chat.

The big $$$ questions about app development answered

We see the same questions about app development coming up again and again. It’s no surprise. More and more businesses are recognising that they need apps. Developing apps is a complex and opaque process. They’re big ticket items where unscrupulous operators don’t want to share numbers until they can guess how much you have to spend.

We’re going to fix that. By answering your questions. Many of them are of the “how long is a piece of string” variety. We can’t tell you how long a piece of string is, but in our answers we do give some recommendations on how you should be thinking about your string. Or, for this article, how to think about your app and how you’re going to get it built.

Q: How much does app development cost?

Short answer: Under $50,000 for a simple app. Under $150,000 for a basic app. Over $150,000 for a complex app.

Long answer:

You need to be comfortable with spending 5 and 6 figure sums if you want to build a competitive app. If you don’t think you’re going to earn the money back then now might not be the right time to start the process. Maybe start with a basic website.

The cost at each tier comes down to complexity. That complexity is a combination of frontend features, backend/admin features, third party integrations, the amount of business logic that needs to be encoded (after being documented!), and the variety and volume of traffic and transactions your app needs to handle.

A short discussion with us about your app, your market, and the features you want would enable us to tell you which range your app would fall into.

Q: Why does app development cost so much?

Short answer: Details x Time x Expertise

Long answer:

We understand this question. Unless you have worked as a developer on multiple similar projects it can be impossible to look at the screens of an app and see where 5 and 6 figure sums were spent. Hint: a lot doesn’t show up in the user interface.

App development costs what it does for two main reasons: it requires expertise and it takes time. And then there are the details. Building software is all about managing a mind-boggling number of details. It is not unlike building an actual sized house out of Lego bricks. Individually positioning all those little pieces adds up to a lot of time. And you need people who know how all the pieces fit together.

When looking at the cost it helps to remember app development is an investment. You invest in an app to generate revenue. Much as you might buy a machine for a factory, or pay to rent, fit-out and stock a brick and mortar retail store. You expect your big investment to give you more in return.

Of course you’re cost conscious. You spend your money wisely. That is why SoftwareSeni provides full transparency during the entire app development process. You can see the time spent at each stage of app development and even for each feature. Also for all the code that doesn’t touch the screen – the integrations with other services, the code that talks to the database, the code that creates the backend that your business will use.

Q: How long does app development take?

Short answer: At least a couple of months to launch. Then months to polish. Then years to grow.

Long answer:

Our business philosophy combines Lean and Agile methodologies. Under Lean, businesses want to be launching an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) as soon as possible to verify their idea, start gaining users, and start generating revenue.

This is done by implementing features in two-week work blocks called sprints under Agile. You won’t be launching your MVP app after 1 sprint, but 4 isn’t impossible, and 6 is feasible. All depending on your feature set and how far advanced your product conception is, of course.

And once launched, new features continue to be added using two-week sprints, along with addressing any user feedback received along the way.

This process results in lower upfront costs, puts a working Android app or iOS app, or both, in front of your customers sooner, and enables you to start generating revenue sooner.

Q: How big a team do you need for app development?

Short answer: 3-5 depending on the stage of development.

Long answer:

The app stores are filled with apps built by a single developer. So is that all you need?

Maybe? But there is only so much a single developer can do in a week. Or a month. There are only so many facets of app development a single developer can be an expert at. And how many developers are also experts at graphic design or UX or at running user testing?

And the big issue with a single developer – it only takes a single accident, or a single personal crisis, for your app development or app support to grind to a halt. What business wants to take on that risk profile?

A serious app, with a sensible launch schedule, that looks good, that works well and continues to work, requires a team. The size of that team depends on the app, its features, and how the development can be scheduled. But we find that, on average, at any particular stage of the app development process, you need about 3-5 people contributing.

It is a truism of software development that the best way to slow down a project is to throw more people at it. At SoftwareSeni we have launched enough apps, and our teams have collaborated on enough of these apps, that we’re pretty good at putting together the optimal team for creating your app.

Q: Should I develop an app?

Short answer: If you have to ask then you should develop a website first.

Long answer:

An app is a major investment. Are you sure you’re going to get a return on that investment? If you’re not sure, if you don’t have a ready market or an eager customer base, then it will be wiser to test your business idea using a website first.

A modern website, designed to be mobile-first, can approach the user experience of a dedicated native app with a lower upfront investment while providing you access to the entire global marketplace across all devices, not just phones.

Q: Should I develop an Android app or an iPhone/iOS app?

Short answer: Android if you want market reach, iPhone/iOS if you want to charge a premium.

Long answer:

In most of the world Android is the dominant mobile operating system, holding about 75% of the global market. But in some markets, like the US, UK, Canada and Australia, iOS holds more than half of the market.

This difference in market share, and user base, leads to a non-intuitive result. Global non-game app revenue in 2020 was $32.1 billion. Despite its smaller global market share, at about 25%, iOS apps captured $24.7 billion, or 77%, of that revenue.

The decision to develop an Android app or an iPhone app comes down to knowing where your audience is and what your goal is.

For markets like Australia, USA, UK and Canada, where the market is almost evenly split, it’s lucky that there are frameworks like React Native that make developing apps for both platforms financially feasible. But still we would recommend focusing on your iOS app first, because that platform will likely provide most of your revenues.

Q: How long does it take for an app to earn back its development cost? Also: How long does it take for an app to cover its running costs?

Short answer: If you read the first question you already know the answer.

Long answer:

This question is looking at app development backwards. You should not be spending money on developing an app, or purchasing any asset, without forecasting or modeling costs and revenue.

The real question should be: given my forecast revenue and current budget, can I build an app with the planned feature set, keep it running, and market it?

(You don’t want to forget your marketing budget. Expecting enough people to simply stumble across your app is not a path to success.)

If the answer to the real question is no, you don’t have enough money to do all that, then you are left with three options:

1. Don’t develop an app. Put your money towards another revenue generating project.
2. Reduce the scope of your app. Will a simpler, less expensive app bring in enough revenue to fund further development?
3. Build a website instead.  A Web app or a dedicated ecommerce website development is a faster way to reach an even larger market. Websites can have app-quality interaction (at a price). This approach can allow you to invest even less up front and still have a foundation you can extend as revenue grows. With proper planning, converting it to an app when revenue allows can be quite cost effective.

Still have questions about that app you want developed?

Hopefully by answering the big questions about app development we’ve helped you think strategically about getting your app developed.

If you find you have more detailed questions on costs and starting app development then get in contact with us. We’re always up for a chat and we love finding revenue-focused solutions to app creation.

Now, if you feel like you want a little more background on app development before talking to us, we have written a series of short, easy-to-read articles on the process:

A quick guide to Agile for businesses and start-ups
What is product conception and how to do it
How to prototype your app
Business rules and the business logic that drives your app
How the app development process works

Also, here are two articles that will help with your decision making:

Should you build an app or a website?
Fixed price contract vs Agile for app development

Contact us here for any questions you still need answered.

Should you build an app or a website?

The title might strike you as a dumb question. App vs website? We’re deep in the 2020s. You probably already have a website. But if you’re launching a new product or service or ecommerce play, or you’re finding competition is eating into your revenue, then the question is one you’re already asking yourself – go down the path of, say, ecommerce app development, or down the path of ecommerce website development? 

This article is going to help you make that decision. It’s going to start with a quick tech review, followed by a short discussion of the trade-offs between the two options, then it will jump into the surprise “have your cake and eat it too” twist.  

Let’s start with the tech.

There are only three types of websites

That’s right. Only 3. We’re talking under the hood, not content. Here they are:

Static

Static websites serve visitors pre-generated pages of content. This is how websites worked when the internet was born. It’s had a resurgence in popularity recently due to its speed and security. This tech is best used for sites that don’t change often – blogs, documentation, and brochureware sites.

Dynamic

Dynamic websites serve visitors pages that include content pulled from a database or generated by code. This is called server-side rendering, as the layout and content is assembled by the server delivering the page. It’s more complicated than that, but we’re keeping things simple. 

If a website isn’t static then it’s dynamic. This includes the millions of WordPress sites in existence along with every other site on the internet. The term “dynamic” is now more of an umbrella term, as there are many different ways to build a dynamic website. Web apps represent a relatively recent strategy for building dynamic websites.

Web App

You might have seen this style referred to by a couple of acronyms: “SPA” / “PWA”. “Web app” is simpler. and they all mean a website built to behave like an application. Instead of responding to user interaction by following clicked links to new pages rendered by a web server, web apps pull data off the server and redraw the contents of the current page to display it. This is faster than requesting and loading new pages and creates that “app” feel.

The biggest difference between a web app and web site is web apps are more complex than server-side dynamic websites due to the added complexities of marshalling content on and off the page and the richer interactions they tend to implement.

Twitter is an example of a web app that features the kind of detailed interface and high level of interactivity that used to be only associated with dedicated apps.

If a website looks like an app and acts like an app, is it an app?

No. While you can build a website with an app-level user experience, when it is visited from a handset it will not have the integrations into the handset operating system a native app will enjoy. It will also lack the look and feel of a native app, placing it visually in a lower tier.

Performance in some areas will also suffer. The biggest one is smooth scrolling. Despite the power of modern handsets, the complexities of displaying rich content in a browser window is still not as smooth and efficient as within a native app. 

Is it easier to build an app or a website?

A modern website built from scratch instead of on top of an existing platform like WordPress or Ghost can be as complicated as an app. When you have things like user authentication, a database for storing data, a way to send emails, an admin interface for tracking metrics and providing customer service features, as well as a professional user interface, you are looking at a lot of code just as you would with an app. With features comes code. There is no avoiding it.

However, there are some tools out there that will make an app from a website. Really, it is just a an app that only displays your website. But users can already access your website on their phone, as we discuss below, so why go this route?

Keeping the killer feature of websites

Websites have one killer feature that apps don’t have – they run everywhere. They run on desktops. They run on phones, no matter who makes them. They can even run on smart TVs. 

When you are deciding between an app and a website you need to understand where your users are and how they are going to interact with you.

It’s a balancing act between audience, features that you need, features that will appeal to the audience, and cost. 

The cost of websites vs apps

A native app with similar functionality to a website is going to cost more than the website. The main reason is simple economics. The number of app developers is much, much smaller than the number of website developers and demand for their services remains strong.

As each of the two major platforms, Android and iOS, have different development environments, releasing your app on both platforms can (roughly) double your costs.

Another cost apps must pay is time. Getting approval for your app from each platform app store takes time, sometimes weeks, with any problems potentially causing long delays. No-one can stop you from launching a website whenever you want.

Each option has its benefits. But you should know there is a strategy that can get you the best of both worlds – the lower cost and lower time to market of a website, and the power and polish of a native app – while spreading out your risk.

The app that starts out as a website

This is our favourite strategy for creating a new product or service. It combines the rapid development and deployment of a website, while at the same time it lays the groundwork for the heavy lifting required to create an app.

This strategy is based on React Native. React Native is a spin-off of ReactJS, one of the world’s most popular JavaScript frameworks. If you’ve never heard about React Native you might want to read Everything you need to know about React Native apps – the business side. 

By building a web app using ReactJS it takes much less effort to convert it to a native app using React Native. 

By starting with a web app you can prove the business model of your product or service with a lower investment than going straight to a native app. Once the business model is proven, moving from web app to native app is straightforward. 

How straightforward depends on including this path in your strategy. And why wouldn’t you? Your app will use the same backend as your website. Your UX has been tested and proven. If you built your web app on ReactJS it becomes a matter of changing code that would tell a web browser to draw a form to React Native code that displays a native form on a handset.

And the same React Native code works on Android and iOS. You don’t need a separate team for each platform.

The final answer to the app or website question

So, the final answer to whether you should build an app or a website is you should build the website first. A website designed to be a web app. And if you use ReactJS that website will take you 80-90% of the way towards your app.

When the website shows you have a foothold in the market, it is simply a matter of converting the website into a native app.

If you want to know more about this strategy and how it could work with your business, get in contact with us and we can discuss the details with you.

Making it real – the software development process behind your app

This article is going to go into details on the software development process at SoftwareSeni. The target audience is our clients and potential clients. If you’re thinking about getting an app or a site built some day, then you will find it interesting to understand how these processes are run.

The article is a follow on from similar articles on product conception, prototyping, and business rules. 

With all the above completed, the software development can now start. If you’re curious about the cost of software development, we recommend reading our article on Fixed Price Contract vs Agile Development. 

SoftwareSeni is an Agile house. Software development under Agile has a definite beginning, but it doesn’t really have a middle or an end. This is due to the iterative nature of Agile development. One of the early iterations will see the launch of your product. But once it is live each iteration after that will be launching new features and capabilities. 

The beginning of the software development process

At SoftwareSeni we divide the beginning into two phases: Preparation and Kick-off.

In the Preparation phase we take the wireframes and business rules and use them to create the product backlog.

The product backlog is an Agile thing. It is the single source for everything that the dev team needs to work on. So it includes the features of your app that need to be implemented, but it will also contain bug fixes, setting up hosting infrastructure and any changes it needs — anything and everything the dev team needs to complete your app and keep it running.

Using the product backlog, work is prioritised based on impact and effort. The business rules you documented earlier are broken down into epics. The epics are broken down into stories and those are finally broken down into tasks. All of these go into the product backlog.

Because the product backlog is used to prioritise work it is not a static list. Everything that needs to be done gets added to the backlog as it pops up. This requires the product backlog to be regularly updated and re-prioritised. This is part of the Agile process.

Along with the product backlog, the preparation phase involves:

• a sprint plan
• the confirmed timeline and milestones
• a demo plan (both internal and for you)
• establishing development environments (typically separate Dev, Staging and Production systems)
• a QA Strategy and Plan that covers automation, test plans, test scripts, test data, and resource planning.
• a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) plan covering the application security checklist and penetration testing

Kick-off

The kick-off for your project is carried out in two meetings. For you, it’s a briefing where we communicate how the software development will proceed and we all confirm we are in agreement on project goals, deliverables and timelines.

The team runs through the same information in their own meeting. This is also the point where the final structure of the team — headcount and skillset — is settled.

After this, the development begins.

The Agile development of your product

Agile operates as a series of sprints. Don’t imagine a roomful of people pounding at keyboards. Programming is a slow and thoughtful process. Agile packages that process into short, often two week long, periods of focus: the sprint.

If you’re new to Agile you might want to read Agile basics for small businesses and start-ups.

The first series of sprints are focused on getting your MVP in front of customers. Once your app or site is live subsequent iterations make it easy to adapt focus and schedules based on app usage and revealed needs. 

A sprint is divided up into multiple stages that can be summarised as: 

• planning what to work on
• doing the work
• reviewing the work

The result is a two-weekly cycle that runs like this:

Keeping you in the loop

The beauty of Agile is the regular feedback on progress that is available. You will have opportunities to review work to date and current progress at multiple stages through the project. This will be via weekly or fortnightly Work In Progress (WIP) meetings. This is on top of the weekly reports and updates that we send you.

These meetings are essential to ensure your vision of the app is being correctly interpreted by the team. This might sound surprising, but every product is the sum of thousands of tiny decisions. Being involved in the process, supplying clear and concise feedback, ensures your vision is fulfilled as efficiently as possible.

Development never runs issue-free. There are always issues related to usability or functionality that could not be foreseen from wireframes and business rules alone. These are the kinds of things that more documentation can’t fix. They can only be discovered during the building and testing. 

But this is exactly what the Agile process is designed to cope with. Any issues revealed get added to the product backlog and prioritised and the project keeps moving forward.

Sometimes these issues will impact product scope or your preferred timeline. Agile lets us catch these early and our regular reporting to you ensures you have time to act quickly on them.

Demo day

As you know, software development is often divided between front end — the UI and UX your customers will interact with, and back end — all the code that interfaces with your business, talks to databases, handles logins, etc. 

Once the sprints covering both facets of your app reach a mature enough state fortnightly demos begin. These are yet another opportunity to keep development aligned with your vision, to spot any issues and to just enjoy seeing your product coming to life. It’s an exciting part of the process.

Rushing towards launch

Once the demo days start you are closing in on the launch of your MVP. While you are preparing your marketing push for the big day, the SoftwareSeni team is running QA on your app, hunting down and squashing bugs. They are also preparing for the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to ensure that your app, and your users, will be secure. 

The first launch is just the beginning. It’s definitely memorable, but you will be launching a new version with new features and new fixes every two weeks as your user base grows and your product’s functionality grows with them. This process will become part of your business’s day-to-day workflow.

The new normal

The Silicon Valley phrase is “Software is eating the world”. Once your product is live, whatever your business is, it is now in part a software business. And as long as you’re in business, SoftwareSeni will be there to help you with insight, strategy, tech talent, and raw people power.

If you’re ready to transform your business into a software business with an app or website, get in contact and let’s get the process started.

If you’re new to the process, we recommend starting with our article on product conception – bringing your business idea to life.

After the wireframes – the rules at the heart of your app

If you have been reading our series of articles on the app development process, this is where the hard work begins.

If you’ve stumbled upon this article, it follows on from our previous article on prototyping your app. You might want to start on the first article in this series: Product Conception – Bringing your business idea to life.

At this point in the process your wireframes are a beautiful representation of how your app will look. Your clickable prototype is an accurate representation of how some of the features will work. Together they give you a real feel of how it will be to use your app. User-testing with this early stage prototype has shown the people get it and want it.

App development has been fun so far. Your vision has taken form. The process has been visual, iterative and the challenges have been a joy to solve.

Now it’s time for the hard work. If we knew what you were wearing we’d tell you this is the point where you start rolling up your shirt sleeves. Maybe make the first of many strong cups of coffee.

The hard work is producing the business rules for your app. Business rules will be the core of the technical specifications for your app.

Business rules – the core of your app

The business rules detail exactly how each button, each slider, each interface element will work. It will detail how actions taken by your users through your app’s interface will interact with your business processes, third party services, and your backend.

It’s all about the details, details, details, and thinking them through and getting them right. This is why it is hard work. And why it’s important work. Getting your business rules right the first time saves you money and time.

As the core of your app’s technical specification, they will enable the developers to work out the infrastructure you will need to run your app. Things like:

• where your backend will live
• how the backend is structured for scaling and redundancy
• what services you need to run yourself
• what third party services you will contract with

If your business already has technical infrastructure the effort will instead be spent on how to integrate it with your existing set-up.

But those big decisions are things we work on with you. We’re here to give you the benefit of our experience across hundreds of client jobs during every step of the process, including advice on writing the business rules.

What business rules look like

There is no standard format for business rules. Some clients have presented us with complete technical specification documents. Others have used a spreadsheet to list out how they want their app to function. A popular option is laying out the screens created during the wireframe stage alongside the details of how the interface elements on the screens will work. That’s what we’re going to do here.

For this example we are going to pretend that we are building a mobile app for dining recommendations. Let’s call our imaginary app Bancwit. That name needs a few more iterations, but it will work fine for us.

We’re going to specify the business rules for the main screen of Bancwit. This screen is where they start the selection process for a dining destination. It provides access to all the venues registered with Bancwit as well as directing users to venues in their immediate vicinity.

Some of the functionality is obvious, but as you can see below there is some business logic that can’t be derived from looking at the prototype. This can all be done within Google Docs for easy collaboration. Below we use a simple two column table with the screen on the left and the relevant business rules on the right. It helps to work from the top down.

What business rules aren’t

Business rules are purely about what needs to happen, not how it will happen. The how will be handled by the developers once your business rules are complete. That process will be covered in a future article.

Business rules are not flexible. And they are not vague. The business rules need to be simple and clear enough that a developer can code them without the need to hit you with questions. This is another opportunity to save you time and money. Meeting this level of clarity takes practice. We’ve had the practice and it’s one of the many things SoftwareSeni can assist you with on the path to launching your app.

Let the programming commence

That’s it for this short introduction to business rules. Unless your app has some particularly tricky tech that needs implementing and testing, completing the business rules brings the prototyping phase of your app’s development to an end.

The next step in the process is software development. We will cover how SoftwareSeni handles building your app, and your role in the process, in a future article. Until then, if you have an app or a web site of your own that needs work, or if one of our extended teams will help you hit your goals, get in contact.

Turning your idea into action – the how and why of prototyping

Following on from our article on product conception (you might want to read that first), this article is about bridging the next gap in the development process.

That gap is the one between having a solidly documented idea and knowing what to build. This is where prototyping takes place.

When you’re prototyping you want to choose the methods and the tools that let you move the fastest, explore the most alternatives, and make the best decisions in the limited time available.

Read on as we cover the prototyping process.

Who are you prototyping for?

From the Lean Canvas that you would have completed as part of your product conception, you will know who your audience is, and within that audience, who your early adopters are.

Your early adopters are the group you’re prototyping for. And who are they? That’s where personas come in.

A persona represents the ideal member of your audience and is based on data gathered by interviewing your potential customers. It is used to direct high level decision making on product features. Instead of asking “What do we do next?”, personas enable you to ask “What would this customer want us to do next?”, reinforcing a focus on delivering value.

You can read more about personas and how to build them in this article and this article.

Personas are a mix of demographics — age, gender, socio-economic status, etc — and needs. Those needs are the ones your product is being built to meet. How your product fulfils those needs are customer journeys.

Customer journeys – trips through your app

A customer journey can be at its simplest the steps a customer goes through to use a feature of your app. For them, it might be finding their dream holiday. For your app, this might involve performing a search, scrolling through options, and tapping a heart icon.

Customer journeys map transactions, transactions that might be essential or emotionally important to your users, to the functional features of your app. This resonance, this emotional value, that is inherent and intrinsic to the use of your app can become invisible to you as cast it into interface elements and interactions. But it is vital to keep your user personas in focus and the needs that drive them to use your app.

From customer journey to screen flow

Finally the sketching can begin! Screen flows are paths touching multiple screens that users will take to complete their journeys. Each required screen needs to be sketched, considered, and re-sketched. The interface elements — displaying information and providing interaction — need to be selected and arranged. It is an iterative cycle of refinement and feedback. You don’t need to invent a new visual language. The more you follow best practices the faster you can move forward.

Finding best practices for your UX

Dribbble.com is a creative community where top designers from around the world share their work. You can check out current trends and best practices in product design and UX for inspiration right here.

A portion of your customer journey, and thus your screen flows, is going to be product hygiene — the basic features common across apps and expected by users. This includes things like authentication, notifications, etc. We discuss product hygiene in more detail in our article How thinking like Frankenstein will help your MVP.

Don’t be afraid to save time and headspace by finding designs that lay out these standard features and cribbing from them. Definitely don’t waste time “re-imagining” them. Save that for your core features.

Building your screen flows

Don’t jump onto the computer too fast. You can move faster sketching wireframes using pen and paper. It’s called paper prototyping. You can do it with blank paper and a pen or you can sketch in device templates you’ve printed out. But don’t go too far down the path of paper kits and cut-outs, etc. You want to sketch enough that you have stopped scratching your head when you think about how a particular feature will operate.

The bonus is that these paper sketches can be used as part of your initial user testing. Grab anyone unfamiliar with your screen layouts. Ask them to point where they would click, get them to tell you what they would do and what they think would happen. Use these tests to iterate on your sketches — you can redraw on the spot — and improve your design before taking it to the computer.

From paper to screen to interactive

Our tool of choice for building wireframes is Figma. It is a web-based, collaborative design and prototyping tool. The way it enables a fluid conversation between designers, users and programmers makes it an essential part of our recommended process.

Figma provides features that allow you to iterate on your UX. You can quickly throw together wireframes with active elements to create a clickable prototype. You use these along with your test users to refine the screen flows that represent your customer journeys.

At the same time, Figma provides the detailed control your designers need to create the branding and polish that will make new users want to download your app.

The design details — sizes, positions, colours — are all communicated cleanly by Figma from the designers to your developers. So when you’re ready to start coding your app it can happen as quickly as possibly.

Iterate, then iterate, then iterate some more

Figma’s ease of use and shareable prototypes means you can be reaching out for feedback as often as your users can stand it.

You’ve already chosen the key feature set your MVP will be launching with. You’ve got your product hygiene features locked down. The more you can test and troubleshoot and streamline your key features before launch the more you reduce the risk at launch.

Time to start building

You’ll know when your customer journeys are ready for the next step. There will be a shared clarity between you, the designers and the users you introduce to your clickable prototypes.

It’s an exciting point to reach. The end feels so close. You can see how your app will look. You have a taste of how it will function. You have users that want it. All that needs to be done now is the coding.

That’s a big step. Too big for this article. We’ll cover it next when we look at Agile development and the MVP.

Until then, if you have some napkin sketches of an idea you want to turn into a prototype, contact us to have a chat.

If you’re not at that stage yet, but you have a business idea, you might like to check out our article on product conception.

Fixed price contract vs Agile for product development

Software is expensive to build. Throwing around the kind of money it costs to build a new product — whether it’s an app or web site — should make you nervous.

And if you’re not familiar with software development, starting down the product path might feel like you’re rolling the dice and hoping for an eleven.

If that captures how you feel, then this article is here to show you that you do have control. Success is never guaranteed, but there are processes and strategies that enable you to move systematically towards the best outcome. Any decent development partner will have these in place.

“Insert cash, get app” is the wrong model

Commissioning a new product is not a transaction. It’s the start of (cue cliché) a journey. It’s going to change your business. You’ll need to onboard new responsibilities. You might need to create new roles.

The first step in taking control is to look at your future product as an investment in a long term process. This opens up opportunities to move your product forward based on new cash flows it will bring in. Which brings us to the biggest decision you’re going to make, and one that our team at SoftwareSeni has strong opinions on.

Fixed price vs Agile

Some people will not give up the “Insert cash, get app” model. This model’s real name is “Fixed price contract” and it drags software development back to the 70s when the Waterfall Methodology was the only option.

Don’t go commissioning waterfalls

For a fixed price contract to avoid cost overruns you need to first scope and price every single thing that needs to be done. This feat of excessive documentation is the start of the Waterfall Methodology. It’s followed by first doing A as described in the documentation, then B, and years later you might be up to L. Forget about Z.

No matter how much documentation is done, scoping and defining a complex project in advance will never get everything right. Issues, oversights, and moving targets will only show up once the project is underway. This inevitability requires budgets to be drawn up that will cover contingency costs. These can increase the final cost by anywhere from 20% to 100%.

That’s right. Your software developer, even SoftwareSeni, will add 20% to 100% to a fixed price contract to protect themselves. And you. You don’t want your software developer going out of business just before your product is finished, do you?

It gets worse. Creating all that documentation delays the start of development. Then there are more delays as developers meet the documentation for the first time and try to understand it. This is slow. It gives the project plenty of time to shift out of sync with the business and the market.

Changing course, which will happen for the reasons given above, requires making changes to the fixed cost plan. Which means more documentation and more time and more billable hours taken to price out the cost variations to catch up with the status quo. And another 20% – 100% on top. It’s a lot of money and none of it is being used to add value for the customers.

Move quickly, be Agile

At SoftwareSeni we find our clients get the best outcomes using an Agile methodology. If this is all new to you we suggest you read this quick introduction on Agile. When using the Agile methodology product development starts with a high level estimate based on an hourly rate.

The high level estimate

To arrive at a high level estimate, at SoftwareSeni we go through an initial review of the product with you. We look at proposed functionality, third party services it will interface with (such as payments, authentication, booking and inventory systems, CRM, etc), admin requirements, and more.

Out of this we can provide you with an initial estimated price range. It can be a wide range, with a 50% spread or even more. That’s why the next step is to tighten that range, but at this point it’s your first opportunity to commit to the project or delay it.

Narrowing the range

The next step is the scoping stage. Even with Agile you cannot escape some documentation. But in Agile we document to understand rather than to determine implementation.

In the scoping stage we work to capture all the key items the product needs. Depending on the complexity of the product this can cost $5k-$15k.

Take something universal like user accounts. How are users going to log in? Will social logins be allowed? Email and password? Both? Decisions like this will have design and technical impacts.

From feature decisions like this we build a high level overview of the product and the project to build it.

The output from this stage is a set of wireframes. They look like cartoon versions of the product, but they document visually the features of the product and how they will interact. They are really a visual documentation of the requirements. They are much easier to understand and to grasp than a shelf of ring-binders full of written documentation.

From the features documented in the wireframes a tighter estimate is derived. Now comes the time where you decide how to allocate your budget.

Strategising your spend

With a more detailed estimate that breaks out the key costs, you can make decisions on which features to start with and which features to delay.

Under Agile and Lean Business methodology, these decisions are best made by focusing on achieving product-market fit. How do you know you have product-market fit? Users spend money on your product.

How do you get there? Iteration.

Iterate to focus your spend

Following Agile and Lean Business, you’re going to hit the market with an MVP — a Minimal Viable Product. This is the product that requires the least time and money to build but still delivers value to the users.

How do you know it delivers value before launch? You will have run user tests with your wireframes, or invested in a clickable prototype based on those wireframes. You won’t be launching blind into the marketplace.

But the market might not match your expectations. In fact, it probably won’t. But because you’re following Agile, you’re prepared for this. You watch the response to your launch and plan your next iteration.

That next iteration will be a new version of your product. Because you’re following Agile, it will go live in 2 to 4 weeks. It might have new features. It might be a tweak of the design. You will get more useful feedback to use in the next iteration.

By working with your development team you can direct your spend for each iteration, targeting resources at the areas that will deliver the highest returns.

If you do it right, if you find that product-market fit, revenue generated by your product will enable it to become self-supporting and fund its own subsequent iterations before you have burned through the initial estimate.

How do you know you’re finished?

After several iterations you will come to realise one of the truths about software based products — they are never finished.

You might stop adding features, but your product runs within, and is powered by, a complex network of services, code libraries, programming languages and technical standards. There is no escaping your product’s dependence on these. When they change, and they do, your product may need to be updated in order to keep working.

Keeping your product working, as well as keeping it available via hosting and monitoring, is an ongoing cost. When you include the costs of third party integrations, it may cost as much as 20% of your initial development budget per year to keep your product alive.

Agile for the win

The costs outlined above are the final reason why launching with an MVP and iterating as fast as you can to generate revenue, the Agile methodology, brings better outcomes than the Waterfall methodology aka Fixed Price Contract.

There is one place where a fixed price contract makes sense, but why would you want to go there? That place is when a category of product or app or web site is so well-established and well understood that there are white label solutions available. Those markets exist and they are saturated. Why launch into one of those?

Given that caveat, we would always advise you to choose the control, flexibility, and velocity of Agile methodology and pricing over fixed price contracts. Leave those to the businesses breaking into overcrowded markets, while you launch your new product into a market that’s still wide open.

If you’d like to take the first step in getting your app started, get in contact and we’ll get started on those estimates.

The simple secrets to making your extended team work

This guide will touch on engaging an extended development team and what processes you need to have in place. Following that will be tips on how to bridge the gap between local and remote workers and how to keep the team working smoothly. All the information comes out of our years of experience helping clients make the most of their SoftwareSeni extended development team.

If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, this article on the extended development team model and what you need to know might be a good start. If you’re after a quick, general summary read the FAQ on the extended development team model.

If you’re still undecided about engaging an extended team you might want to read this article on how a team extension can help you do everything you want but can’t. The information is useful for anyone looking to engage an extended development team or has an extended development team and could use some pointers. If that last one describes you, some of this information might be arriving just in time. Building a cohesive, high-performing hybrid local/extended team starts from day one, but it is an ongoing process that can always be improved.

 

Covid radically changed experience and expectations

At the beginning of 2019 experience with remote workers was rare. Now it’s almost universal. But there is a difference between managing a remote team member and integrating a remote team member with a local team. Software development veers between an independent and collaborative process. Your processes need to be able to support both types of working while maintaining cohesion across an extended team.

We have seen the greatest success with remote teams from start-ups and scale-ups that have a mature Agile process in place. This maturity might be due to the business having a history with Agile or its developers bringing that experience. The Agile methodology works great with remote teams. And all the developers in the SoftwareSeni extended team pool are experienced in Agile.

The burden of hiring is on us

Hiring a new developer can take months. Assembling a full team — it doesn’t bear thinking about. At SoftwareSeni we’ve already handled the time-consuming part of the process — vetting, testing and interviewing. We operate in a market where we can be selective and our in-house culture has created high retention rates. This means the developers in our extended talent pool are capable, experienced and have helped multiple clients successfully complete their projects.

For you, our hiring process and experienced developers means selecting your preferred team members, conducting confirmation interviews, and commencing onboarding can be completed in days instead of weeks.

Making it work from day 1

Having a streamlined onboarding process for your extended team members can save a lot of headaches. We supply your extended team with workspace, a development machine and all the support they need. On the software side, which is your territory, the best practices we regularly see use an automatic process to set up the tools and repositories the developers need to start working. These processes have made use of scripts, Puppet, Ansible, and docker.

The worst practice is a specialised development environment with poor documentation that takes a developer days to get up and running. Don’t make the mistake of treating onboarding as a technical test.

Provide multiple avenues for communication

Think of onboarding as the time from a developer accepting their role and being able to complete sprints independently. At this point they are familiar with your business, the code they are working on, and how your team operates.

They’re professionals. They’ll get there, but how long it takes to get there can be shortened by providing rapid feedback in the early stages. This is when they are learning their way around your codebase. A tool like Slack, with a channel monitored by a team leader for this purpose, will let them quickly get answers they need to skip over any roadblocks. Issues that require more than a few lines of chat can jump over to Zoom or Google Meet or other video conferencing with screen sharing to move rapidly to a solution.

Video conferencing, for stand-ups, code reviews, and even virtual team gatherings for social occasions, is vital for building the familiarity that bonds hybrid core and extended teams together and keeps them moving towards the common goal — your success.

The message here is to not treat your extended development team as a black box – instructions in, code out. Integrating them fully into your team is key to achieving the benefits of investing in an extended team.

What happens if the extended team isn’t perfect?

Just like any team, there is a chance issues might develop within your extended team. SoftwareSeni has fully documented processes in place to resolve these. These processes remind us that we are dealing with people, not programming machines, and provide an ethical and supportive path to a solution.

If a problem with an extended team member becomes apparent in the first two weeks of working with you, we will work with you to find a solution. Sometimes the solution is to release the team member and engage another. In this case we don’t charge you for the hours already worked.

If a problem arises after the initial two weeks, we will put more effort into finding a working solution. This will be in consultation with you and will include clearly specified milestones and dates. Our goal is always to keep you on track. In the event our shared plan does not deliver the results you need, we’ll begin a new team member selection process.

This process is explained in more detail in our Performance Management Policy document that we share with our potential clients. Get in touch if you’d like to see it.

In the end it’s about the team

In-house team or in-house plus extended development team, the collection of people still needs to be a team. Each member needs to feel a part of the team. They need to know where they fit in. They need to know their work is appreciated. They need to understand that they are part of your success. This comes from working together, overcoming challenges together, and celebrating the wins together.

It takes discipline and practice to achieve the cohesion of a purely in-house team when you move to an extended development team model. By being prepared with your onboarding and focusing on regular, responsive and consistent communication, by being inclusive, and by addressing issues as soon as they appear, an extended team can expand what you thought was possible to achieve.

If you’re ready to achieve more, contact us to start building your extended team. Team extensions  are one of our core offerings. We’ve helped startups, scale-ups and SMBs punch above their weight in the marketplace with flexible, on-demand technical expertise.