Michele Cimmino
Aug 18, 2021 • 6 min read
The role of a custom software development firm in the modern world is invaluable. They are crucial to the success of any startup or small business, and without their support, it would be very difficult to succeed. A custom software development company provides many different kinds of services and will work with you to find a solution that is perfect for your company, because it’s in their interest to satisfy your requirements, your needs, and make sure the collaboration keeps going and stays up, eventually scaling.
Developing custom software for your business is a smart step towards success and after finding the right partner there are several good reasons why you should take it into account, the object of this article is to analyze some of them and compare them with possible alternatives.
A software built from scratch by a custom software development firm is easier to customize as it is built for a specific need.
The code-base is an open book to your development team, they know everything about it and the addition or extension of a module can follow an already structured, well-known process, from the components you would use in Figma on the UI/UX side, to the API new endpoints addition or the components you’ll reuse front-end wise.
It’s faster, it’s cleaner and when it comes to SaaS platforms it’s definitely a good way to provide your final users with a solution out of the box that is perfectly tailored around your user base needs.
This kind of approach might be more expensive in the short term, but is definitely more cost-effective once the system or platform starts to grow, since you won’t spend any more time in understanding how to integrate with something, but you could just build your own solution at a fraction of the time.
Custom software also gives you the option of modifying its functionality without the need for any changes at either end of the wire.
Custom software is unique in many ways and can be tailored to your specifications. The alternative on the market is to go for pre-existing similar solutions, but they are usually only used for MVP and fast prototyping - who really wants a premade solution in the long term?
Software created from scratch is more user-friendly and generally speaking has a better user experience, because it is supposed you built it ad hoc for your customers.
There are indeed some drawbacks to software developed from scratch. For example, it can be time-consuming and expensive, but the benefits of developing software from scratch outweigh the drawbacks, especially after the first 3-6 months of the product life.
Software development can be done in-house or outsourced, which has its own advantages and disadvantages. If you choose to outsource your project, you need to make sure that the company you hired can do it well enough for your project but also has an adequate team size for your needs.
A turnkey solution definitely involved the following skills:
This is exactly how you can build a superior UX, how you can build a luxury solution tailored to your users' needs; in an agile environment where this goal is taken extremely seriously, the user journey, experience, onboarding, loyalty would cross every teammate effort, becoming kind of directly proportional to the time spent by product owners, UI designers, quality assurance engineers and developers finding easiest and most intuitive solutions for the final user.
In Lasting Dynamics we built a lot of SaaS platforms from scratch and we learned down the road that quality is a mindset, it starts from the requirements analysis, goes into UIUX, binds pretty well with MVP-oriented approaches followed by developers, project managers, and product owners, lands into quality assurance hands before being consumed by a final user.
We truly believe “quality” is the number one priority for any company that wants to succeed in this competitive world. The level of quality largely depends on a company’s experience in the industry and the efficiency of its processes.
Software development firms are not different. They should have a high level of quality to provide customer satisfaction, maintain their reputation, and keep attracting new clients.
Small-medium enterprises even have to compete against titans, so be sure they will have to keep learning and innovate to provide competitive solutions against big actors' service proposals.
Furthermore, a custom software development firm is well trained in several directions, they might range between different skills in many different industries, ready and trained to apply already learnt technology or quickly ramp up the acquisition of a new one.
In Lasting Dynamics, for example, we worked with a wide range of tech stacks, all of them quite innovative and/or in step with times at least, crossing industries such as neuroscience, rocket science, constructions, human resourcing, social media networks, workflow management, automotive, developing from simple APIs to innovative UI, machine learning and AI solutions.
A genuine and self-responsible firm would be fine signing a strict contract that introduces damages clauses in case of failure and/or provides you with a 12 months software warranty as Lasting Dynamics already does.
The alternative to a custom software development firm is to search for someone with the dedicated skills you require for months and months or engage third parties to try to recruit someone with proven experience, or hire in-house resources that might end up being much less educated to the development process, could spend a lot of time to build their own team-work practices and/or just take much longer to find a solution - and as we know, enterprise definitely means also education, but it due to business times and needs might require immediately a group of experienced problem solvers.
Historically, many companies that have created software from scratch required updating the software to integrate with third-party tools. This is not always an easy task. The needs of the user must be taken into consideration and often it can take a lot of time to make the connections between different systems.
Actually, in a SaaS platform lifetime, the second year is where product owners usually start to integrate, pretty wildly, with many third-party tools, API, services, and solutions.
Engineers do it by first reading the documentation, then testing the connection, later implementing the set of required functionality to bridge across the two platforms.
How hard would it become to do all of this, but on a platform that was not designed and developed by you?
If you integrate third-party tools from the beginning of a project, it will save time and money in the long run - especially if your team happens to outgrow your system's functionality at some point, that definitely means to have an open API with well-documented endpoints and safe authentication process: with a well-designed API, building these integrations is not only possible but also easier than in the other cases.
You can definitely decide to outsource some of your development projects to a custom development firm, to focus on your core competencies.
There is no need to hire in-house developers: people used to do it as the opposite way to go when they were not happy with their service providers.
A logical alternative would be to just find a better provider, that provides you with transparency on the whole process and accepts to continuously demonstrate all deadlines would be met, the quality is at a state of art, long story short, the result is granted.
There are many reasons why outsourcing is better than in-house development: you will not need to spend time and money on recruiting a new developer every time you have a project, which could literally take months; outsourcing provides the ability for any size company to get access to more educated developers, that already worked with several teams, on different software solutions, eventually even using several different technologies;
If you succeed in hiring the right team, the right company, the custom software development cost would be very effective and will increase your ROI.
Investing money and time in foolish investigations, usually timid attempts of saving up some money, in this industry, almost certainly lead to waste resources and get burnt.
We gave you 5 good reasons to start working with a custom software development firm, focusing our analysis on costs, skills and quality, but we love the idea as a digital entrepreneur you could make your own conclusions - in case you might still have some doubts we would definitely suggest you read also more about how Quality Assurance strongly impacts this kind of business, and what we think about software outsourcing in 2021.
Michele Cimmino
I believe in hard work and daily commitment as the only way to get results. I feel an inexplicable attraction for the quality and when it comes to the software this is the motivation that makes me and my team have a strong grip on Agile practices and continuous process evaluations. I have a strong competitive attitude to whatever I approach - in the way that I don't stop working, until I reach the TOP of it, and once I'm there, I start to work to keep the position.
