Why Product Development Will Make or Break Your Startup

Startups are hard. 90% of startups fail, and four out of five seed-stage startups will never raise a subsequent round. Depending on who you ask, the most common cause for failure is a lack of product/market fit, running out of cash, building an inadequate team, losing out to the competition, or some combination of all of these factors.

You can spend your time worrying about each individual risk – What are our customers saying? Are our investors happy? Is my team productive? What are our competitors doing? – or you can neutralize all of them by optimizing a single aspect of your business: product development.

This is because most common startup pitfalls are simply the result of expensive, slow-moving, development cycles. Consider:

• If you aren’t agile enough to adapt your product to the changing needs of the market … you won’t obtain product/market fit.
• If you build your product too slowly or burn through too many dev hours in the process … you will run out of cash.
• If you invest the time and money required to hire full-time developers at competitive salaries … a few bad hires can sink your entire company.
• If you don’t have on-demand resources to build new features quickly … your competitors will beat you to market with a better product.

In other words, you can avoid most early-stage challenges by optimizing your development process for flexibility, speed, and affordability.

Flexibility may be the most critical factor. The average salary of a software developer in the Bay Area is $115,000 ($150,000 including employee benefits), which represents 10% of the average seed round. To put that another way, hiring four full-time developers can jeopardize 80% of a startup’s budget in its first two years.

Here's how Crowdbotics can help

What if there was an on-demand way to build your own full-stack app without writing a line of code? What if you could scale up your development capacity without bringing on full-time staff?

Crowdbotics provides the fastest way to build business-ready apps, features, integrations and more. Early-stage startups depend on building high-quality, flexible, scalable products rapidly, and Crowdbotics offers two ways to achieve this.

1. Crowdbotics App Builder allows developers to scaffold and deploy working apps in minutes by using machine learning to identify the best packages for a given feature set, enabling users to quickly assemble, host, launch, and edit applications in GitHub – skyrocketing the ROI of new hires.
2. Managed App Development uses Crowdbotics’ own network of expert developers and product managers to work with your startups at every step of the process to get their application into production – providing startups with the flexibility to get products into the market fast without hiring developers.

By using Crowdbotics, you can improve time to market by over 30% and decrease production costs by over 60%.

Want to learn more? Schedule a free consultation here.