Hi, we are AppUnite, we take care of the businesses from a tech perspective. We build products and teams around them enabling our clients to bring the difference to the world.

We believe in knowledge sharing and software as a tool to improve companies and peoples’ lives. We take lessons from our daily challenges and share that experience and knowledge to help you build better products. 

Let’s talk about products, businesses, and software development!

Starting with numbers about IT engineers around the world. [A report made in 2021](https://evansdata.com/reports/viewRelease.php?reportID=9) presents the change of developer population growth, with the US having the largest number of developers. In Europe the highest numbers are in Germany, UK and France. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts, *Employment of software developers, QA analysts, and testers is projected to grow 22% from 2019 to 2029, much faster than the average for all occupations.* The data from Statista, chart shown below, shows that the global developer population will reach around 28.7 million people by 2024, 3.2 million more than in 2020. 

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*Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/627312/worldwide-developer-population/*

## Is it only a small company problem?

We need to remember that there are limited industries that are excluded from the need of IT workers. Since the demand for developers is bigger than the talent pool, hiring is highly competitive. In this fast-changing environment, companies feel the pressure to develop their products faster, while at the same time having troubles finding the human resources to do it. The strong rivalry for talents isn’t a good situation, this includes larger companies. The reason is that It causes a high employee rotation index and delay in the delivery of projects. 

## Why should you choose devshop as your CTO?

When it comes to choosing between hiring your own tech team and outsourcing, what you will find to be the right solution is partnership with a company that can become your CTO. This kind of partnership is the sweet spot between the standard two ways of creating a successful product. When working with a software house, you will gain needed technical support, as well as receive not only a technical partner but also a business partner that will take ownership of your project and lead you through the entire product development process. With the right moves you could also profit from their know-how, which they obtain from similar projects. At AppUnite, we’re capable of building a product team within 4 weeks. This provides you with an ease of mind and faster start to launching your product. 

If you want to read more about this type of partnership, check out [this article](https://appunite.com/blog/devshop-vs-tech-co-founder-which-one-to-choose-for-product-development). 

## Why choose to work with a software house?

**Transfer of skills in teams**

There are situations where developers don't know the solution to a problem that appears during coding. The bigger the circle they have around them, the easier and faster finding the solution to the problem will be. This is a great financial benefit to the client as it allows for faster work and saves time during realization of the project. 

**Avoiding long recruitment processes**

Hiring an experienced IT engineer is taking the long route. It usually takes around a month, which is an optimistic outlook. It’s important to remember that's just the time it takes for the hiring process. Having to create a job offer, collecting CVs and finally finding some fitting candidates can make this time twice as long. As you can see, delegating this process to a partner could save you a lot of time which can be put into making your project go live, earlier than anticipated.

**Transfer of responsibility**

It’s not hard to create a team where processes go on smoothly. If you have a project that needs to be done and you make it with your own team you are the one who is responsible for the outcome. If something goes wrong, for example, someone leaves your team or is unproductive, it’s on your shoulders. When you partner with a software house it’s their responsibility to answer to the challenges and changes during the development process, allowing you to focus on what you do best. 

**Verified knowledge**

There are situations whereby, despite going through a successful recruitment process and meeting the desired requirements, the person that gets employed does not meet the set expectations. By employing an experienced team, from a software house, you can be sure that the employees are verified. At Appunite, we have experts who have worked on many projects, gaining a lot of market knowledge and experience, which comes in as added value to your workforce. 

**Flexibility of scaling**

Even if  the perfectly sized team has been formed for the start of your project, you’ll need to keep in mind that this number will change with the fluctuation of demands. If your project kicks off, there will be a need to react fast to the number of people working on it. It’s not only about having more developers on board, you may need some new roles like project managers, QA or designers. If something goes wrong and you need to have your team temporarily smaller. It’s easier from the perspective of outsourcing, as you will not need to worry about hiring and letting go of different numbers of people as a result of dynamic changes. 


## Conclusions

The current market situation in which we find ourselves affects all of us. Companies creating products have a huge problem fulfilling their teams needs and software houses are experiencing high rotation and need to adjust to the rapidly changing business environment. Partnering with a product development company will help you not only with their experience, but also optimizing your processes. Having access to the expertise of a software house and being flexible with your team is crucial in today's current market. 

As the Chinese proverb goes - *a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step* - [contact us](https://appunite.com/briefs) and see how we are able to help you in developing your project. 


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Curious why partnering with a product development company can help you during a software engineer shortage

Why partnering with a software house is the right decision during a software engineer shortage?

## Design before Development

Whenever a designer and developers start their work at the same time, this may lead to a bottleneck situation. It’s not like the developers need the whole design on day one, on the contrary, it’s great when they can participate in the designing phase. A lot of them have good ideas, they are looking at different things, but they can also quickly validate designer ideas. If you want to release the application as soon as possible, spending an extra day or weeks on some custom UI may not be the best approach. Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to get rid of all the fireworks, but more like the balance between UI/UX and time. If the development doesn’t end after releasing version 1.0.0, you can add improvements after that and you know what - users love updates to see that someone is working on improvements. On the other hand, the situation might be totally different and UI or flow might need full rework and then again, you saved some time by not implementing time-consuming custom UI.

Do not get me wrong here - I’m not saying that all of the designs must be done before developers even start to work, it’s not like that. What I’m trying to say is to let designers start a bit sooner i.e. 2 weeks, so that they can prepare white frames, the initial concept, some screens, and so on, because then, before developers set up their environment, it gives more time to the designer and developers to work closer.

Another benefit of having designs sooner than later is that the estimates can be more accurate. With such constraints as a lack of designs, estimates are mostly based on experience, but with designs, developers can plan their work on a specific situation.

## Is this feature really a “must-have”?

Ask yourself a question if a feature is really a “must-have” and should be an easy one while you are building an MVP. If a user can live without something, the answer should be “no”... but it’s never that easy and some features might seem to be necessary.
In the beginning, let’s clarify why we even have to think about it. The reason is simple: we are building a minimum viable product.
For example, you are building a new e-commerce platform to exchange some goods or services. And you want to buy a printer, so you get 1234 results, but you want a pink printer so what do you do? You go to filters and select only pink color, that’s obvious. Or you want to hire a plumber, and you get 1234 available plumbers in your area, but who wants to hire a plumber rated 2.3 stars?  So you go to filters and select 4.0+ stars, that’s obvious. Now, return to your product, are there going to be 1234 printers or plumbers available on the launch day? Probably not, most likely you’d be delighted if there was 10 of them.

So are Filters a “must-have” when users will get just a few results? I would say “no”, that’s not the problem of day one of a product life and that’s why MVP shouldn’t solve user problems that can appear a month or months after launch, because there will be a month or months to face those problems.

*MVP should solve the primary problem, not the secondary ones.*

In the example, the primary problem is that a user wants to buy a printer or hire a plumber while having too many results is the secondary problem. That’s why you should build your startup MVP as simple as possible and not include features that will delay the launch and can easily be added later.
You can use the [RAT](https://medium.com/mindsea-development-inc/why-your-rat-riskiest-assumption-test-is-the-real-mvp-177d66cde3e1) (Riskiest Assumption Test) approach to test ideas and validate your assumptions without implementing them.

## Marketing, marketing, and one more time marketing

There are three kinds of marketing: no marketing, some marketing, and marketing.
“No marketing” is when you do nothing, literally nothing. That can only lead to a situation when your product will die a natural death because no one will ever hear of it. So, unless you just want to waste your money, or waste the time of people who will build the product, don’t go for it.
“Some marketing” is when you spend on marketing as little as possible, maybe because someone told you that you need “marketing” and the conversion rate tends to zero and it’s not zero only because you click on it. Even if you get a few users, most likely they won’t even pay off the infrastructure cost. So close to “No marketing”.

Did you name your startup after you? Or maybe you came up with the original name? Unless your last name is “Wonka” or “Musk” or the name is “Big Kahuna Burger”, you need marketing. Actually, you need “the marketing”, that’s the way people begin to know your product exists or is being created. It doesn’t matter how great, innovative, and helpful your business idea is, how much work and money you put into it, how cool your designs are, or how many features you have. If there are NO users, no one will have a chance to realize that your product is something they needed their whole life, no one will admire designs, no one will use all the “must-have” features you just decided you must have. People must hear of the product and if you don’t tell them about it, there is no magic spell that will just make them know about it. The other thing is, if they will remember it, that’s why the product must be remarkable.

## Choose the suitable tools

When it comes to building startup MVP, time is what costs you the most, because, before launch, you’re not guaranteed your product will be successful and every month before launch is you being in the red. What can help to release sooner rather than later is choosing the most efficient tools that will do their job.
As a mobile developer, I’m going to refer to mobile development, but it’s applicable to every kind of development where you have a choice. In mobile development, basically, you have to choose between building native or cross-platform applications. As I have years of experience with Android native and Flutter development, I’m going to take these two as an example.

If you want to build exactly the same-looking apps, with some fancy custom UI for both Android and iOS, I would say go Flutter, building UI in Flutter is much easier and quicker.
If you want to build high-performance with complicated calculations or lightweight applications, I would say go native, when something is universal, it has to weigh more and be less efficient. If you want to build a hardware-based application i.e. a camera app, where you want to allow users to draw, put stickers, or apply filters on the photo or video, I would say go native. In Flutter, you can merge a cross-platform and native, so maybe a particular feature can be native and the rest of the app be Flutter.

Every product is somehow different and each needs an individual approach, like with cars: Ferrari is great and on track but good luck with moving. The same is with development. There is no golden rule for which one is better because it depends on the product, its needs, and who will build it. The key here is to choose a framework/toolset which will better suit the requirements and features because that will speed up the work.

## Manage your budget

Do you have unlimited money to invest? I doubt if at least one person answered “yes”. So if there is some line, you have to manage your budget. Maybe you have the potential for new investors or maybe your investors will invest more when they see progress, but still, you will need more money at some point.

To all who answer “no”, there is a golden rule, something that can make your budget theoretically “unlimited”: 

*Your product has to start validating as soon as possible.*

Okay, but what does it mean? It means that it has to start making a profit, that’s why there is a concept of MVP, a product with the minimum viable features, something that will allow you to make any income or growth user base. That’s the reason why we were thinking if all those features your product will have are necessary or not.

In my opinion, while considering the budget, the most important decision to make is if we are going to stop development or not, once MVP is released. Both approaches have negative consequences such as: cost and product is not yet profitable, lack of work - no users, no feedback, and if everything from the scope is done. If development stopped, there might not be anyone to fix potential bugs, even when maintenance reaction will be slower. If there are a few months’ breaks and the team falls apart, rebuilding the same squad after a few months might be impossible, so there are new people onboard, people without domain knowledge.
So maybe the approach should be different? Let’s assume you have a budget for 5 months of work and the estimate says 5 months. This doesn’t look promising, the estimate is just an estimate, it can take less time, but it can also take more. What if the scope for MVP was smaller? For example, 3 months, would it mean there would be a budget for extra 2 months of work post-launch? There would be a team with project insight, they wouldn’t be bored because of lack of work, and they would be able to address feedback or fix bugs quickly. There would be time to validate a product.
This situation can be compared to buying a car, you need a car and you have 100K in your bank account, what are you doing? Are you buying a car for 100K? Most likely not, that’s irresponsible. The approach to MVP shouldn’t be different from buying a car.

While building MVP you will face a lot of challenges, but by avoiding these 5 mistakes you’ll increase the chances of success.
Stay tuned for the second part!

Maybe you are just facing challenges after an MVP phase? Check out [this article about scaling a startup](https://appunite.com/blog/scaling-a-startup-post-mvp-challanges-we-have-launched-an-mvp-and-now-what).

Maybe you’re seeking a partner in designing and building MVP or other products? [Let us know!](https://appunite.com/briefs)



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Do you want to have a successful MVP? Avoid these mistakes to increase your chances of success. Make them and be doomed to failure.

Kamil Zieliński

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