How can Non-Technical People Start a Software Company?
Planning to start your own software company?
We wish you best of luck and hope that you succeed in bringing your idea to life.
However, have you ever thought that your insight or idea is feasible or not? How are you going to lay the foundation of your business empire (hopefully) without large sums of money and experience?
Have you ever thought how would you oversee all operations without being a developer yourself? – This is the scenario that troubled me the most.
How would you hire a competitive team? Tell you what the list of questions and doubts circling you must be unending, and there must be fears as well. But overcoming fears and succeeding when all the odds are against you is the biggest whole mark of world business leaders.
Are you ready to take the leap forward even without a solid exposure to modern software technologies and extensive funding (like me)? Follow the instructions that I have compiled for you to establish a software development.
Find the Best Talent
All leading entrepreneurs around the world love to be surrounded by brainiacs. This is what you need to do. Put together the right team, and they will make the job easy for you. It’s a complete team game. You won’t be able to do it on your own, no matter how good you are!
Finding the right mix of talent, skills and experience will turn your idea into reality. Let me tell you my example. I had a solid idea in my mind to bridge the gap between the service providers and the service seekers. My idea was to provide all services (especially beauty services) at the comfort of people’s homes without them moving an inch.
I conveyed my idea to my team, and thankfully everyone understood it and started playing their part in implementing whatever I had in my mind. They worked day in and out in making FindanExpert (our main product) a success.
Setup Legal and Business Foundation
Now that your initial team is on board (you can expand whenever the need arises) start looking after all legal and business requirements. Focus on setting up accounting systems, operating agreements and choosing the right legal entity. All these things and related ones may not be easy, but you got to do it.
If you want a viable software product that is lucrative, you need to get done with the legal chores as early as possible. This way, you can fully focus on your operations. Having a strong legal foundation allows you to scale faster with no or extremely fewer chances of crumbling.
For all legal requirements, you may need the services of accountants and business lawyers. They will perform all legal formalities on your behalf. This is important to accomplish before the development or launch of your software product.
Make Sure You Focus on People’s Pain Point
Your software must be something that people want, and it actually solves their problem. This is one of the main things that acts as a decisive factor for your business.
You need to stand out from the crowd. You must have done thorough market research of exactly what people want and what problems are bothering them.
Give them a solution against their pain problems. And don’t get distracted from what you had in mind in the initial phases to what you have integrated into your app. Our app, FindanExpert, makes it easy for all people around the UK to book the service with just a few taps, select the time of their choice and location where they want to get the service.
We never swerved from our path and thanks to God, we are doing great with what we had planned earlier. We have made the lives of our customers easier, and this was our main purpose.
Take Help from Right Online Resources and Tools
If you are a startup, just like we were, you won’t be hiring too many employees and understandably so. But, this doesn’t mean you will be doing most of the things on your own. You can’t be an octopus. A lot of startup owners make such mistakes and end up ruining their personal lives and business setups too.
If you aren’t well versed with the technologies and technicalities (just like me) like software development, coding, graphics design, testing and marketing, etc., then you ought to take help from the internet. I admit that you cannot be a master of everything, but at least you can know the basics of everything through the right tools and resources.
Take help from the internet, and you will find a lot of helping tools that will make your life easy. You can learn digital marketing and testing to some extent. You can get an idea of how graphics work etc. You also need to outsource some tasks as well.
Some online tools that will help you a great deal and which made my life easy are:
Waydev
It is a brilliant and very simple to use tool for non-technical entrepreneurs that help them oversee the work of developers. It allows you to access detailed reports on your smartphone or any device and allows you to see what work has been done and what remains.
Waydev is best for those who want to keep track of developers’ progress and project without even knowing the intricacies of coding.
Fiverr
You may be aware of this Israeli developed freelance marketplace. It will help you find all sorts of freelance professionals for different projects. As discussed earlier, you may not be able to hire an extravagant team in the initial phases so, Fiverr can be of great help for you.
Here, you can search and hire graphics designers, content writers, digital marketers, in affordable budgets, starting from $5 only. You can also see their portfolios and the reviews given by their earlier clients.
Upwork
Another freelance marketplace is best known for its superior coders. If you don’t have a complete team of developers and want the services of an experienced resource, Upwork is the place to go. Upwork is quite the same as Fiverr, but here, you set the project budget first and then freelance people bid on your project.
If your financial position doesn’t allow you to hire fulltime developers, you can easily get super talented ones from here. By going through their bio and reviews, you can select whichever suits your needs.
It’s a professionals’ connecting point and known as one of the powerful networking platforms. Linkedin helps you to connect with other professionals like you, and you can also hire personnel from here by going through their profiles. It is a place full of advisers and motivators.
It allows you to connect with the best like-minded people, startup owners and entrepreneurs who are always willing to give their insight and help you at any stage. I suggest you make business connections on LinkedIn as they will help you in the wrong run.
Test your App, Analyse it and Repeat.
No one gets the job done perfectly the first time and you may also experience it. Your app may have a lot of flaws and weaknesses in the start, just like we had in FindanExpert app. To climb the stairs of perfection, your testers need to test it rigorously on realistic grounds.
No need to get afraid as you may face a lot of mistakes in the initial phases. The best thing is all failures can be resurrected, with continuous testing, analysing and repeating the process all over again. Each iteration will bring you one step closer to what exactly you want in your app. Remember, no failure is permanent.
Conclusion
If you want to be like many successful startups, you will need to struggle, persist and be determined that success will be yours, one day. As long as you are providing your target audience with the perfect solutions to their problems, no one can hold you back.
Before the start of our project, our aim was to ease people’s lives and make them live a better life. And thankfully our operations are underway, and till now we have benefitted thousands of lives in the UK and raring to do it for millions of others in Europe and North America in the near future.