The Benefit Of Cheap App Development

The logic behind cheap app development is to buy more time. Since the startup has difficult time taking their first product to market, it only makes sense to hire app developers overseas. That’s what we call outsourcing for the wrong reasons.

In this article, we’ll share a little secret of how we choose between bootstrapping and venture capital when it comes to building software products.

The Benefit Of Venture Capital

While taking money from investors takes away your full control, it’s probably better than bringing co-founders, as you will lose less equity. Obviously, it can feel lonely and a job in itself to report to investors. At least you give away 10-20% not 50, 66, or 75.

The big benefit of Venture Capital is it allows you to focus on the long-term. Having the capital upfront, allows you to hire, not partner, the people that will make your product a success. The difference is your revenue will seem to decline over time, and that can be quite stressful.

If Venture Capital is what you’re after, you should focus on developing your funding assets – register a company, hire a reputable agency to create your business plan and valuation, develop risk mitigation clauses for investors. In our opinion, the big upside of having Venture Capital is your company will be valued higher when you want to sell it later.

Cheap App Development Benefits

In reality, it doesn’t really matter how much you’ve spent on development. What matters is how much you’ve spent on research. And research is not a big deal at all but often neglected by developers. And you know the best way to research an idea? Put it online and drive some traffic to it, see if it generates any sales. If it does, you’re onto a winner!

For that reason, cheap app development is surprisingly powerful tool to validate your ideas. Here’s the mindset you should have:”All ideas are bad, and I want to prove that this idea of mine is bad too”. Then you look for the most budgeted options to put together a prototype of your idea.

Once you have something to show, ask your friends, colleagues and just about anyone, who can use smartphone or laptop to use your prototype. Don’t tell them how, just observe patiently, watch for the expectations and frustrations, keep watching and you might start to understand what the problem to be solved is. Just make sure to pay their lunch/coffee for helping you out, and explain you’re not testing them but your prototype.

Remember, your prototype is serving the purpose of validating that the idea you had was bad. And if it doesn’t, then your idea makes sense, in which case you should focus on improving the prototype by tweaking the parts that frustrate your users and repeating the process, until you have usable and valuable product. When you do, the users will ask you for early access. Ironically, people will pay you for scrappy solution they find valuable but won’t pay for quality product that’s only usable but boring.

Cheap App Development: Pros and Cons

Let’s summarize the trade-off of choosing cheap app development rather than investing ton of money in development.

You might be thinking, investing money in development makes sense, because we want to build a good reputation. Well, we don’t recommend using your prototype in production. Conversely, all too often, startups burn through their seed funding chasing solutions that fail miserably on the market. This can be easily prevented by using cheap app development tactics to test the waters before you jump head on.

Once you have the certainty you discovered a valuable and usable product, instead of deploying it, go and hire a top-notch software developers to re-create your product using your prototype as a living documentation of how the final product should be. Only this time built much better.

And yes, working with the top-notch digital agencies from the start will allow you to leverage their expertise. We wouldn’t rely on that expertise ourselves, more than we rely on the actual user reactions, as you let them user your software products. It’s all to easy to get biased about what the users are, especially when someone has ton of experience in the field. The users are not like anything!