Do you have an idea for a great app, but you are not sure where to begin for developing your idea into a viable product? Well, you are not alone. Most people who embark on an entrepreneurial journey for the first time face a similar mix of confusion and anxiety regarding where to begin. In this article, I am going to outline a generic road map to help first-time entrepreneurs start working on their great idea.

Define Your Idea

So, you have this great idea in your mind that you want to work on. The first thing you need is to define your product. Describe what your product is, what features it will have and who is the target market for it.

This is a crucial stage of your product development journey. It will help you iron out many important details of your idea, and it will also allow you to see if there are any potential gaps in it that you need to address. Once you finish writing the first draft of your product description, it will become easier for you to share your idea with others as you will notice that your own understanding of your idea would have become clearer, and also, having the idea written down makes it easier to share it with others.

Initial Research

After you have your product description, you need to run that by a few people who have some experience working in the industry related to your product. Even if you are experienced and knowledgeable about the industry, it’s still a good idea to run it by a few people. Getting other people’s perspectives will help you see critical aspects of your idea that you might have missed initially. Once you receive feedback from the people in the industry, incorporate that feedback and finalize your product description for the next stage.

The Prototype

A prototype is the first real-world iteration of an idea that only existed in your mind. Prototypes are used for initial testing and evaluation and are also sometimes used as a proof of concept of an idea.

If you are not a programmer yourself, then the best course of action would be to hire a software development agency that has extensive experience in developing a diverse range of apps.

Testing and Market Research

After the initial prototype has been developed, on the next page, the first thing that you will do is to conduct extensive testing on the product and discover as many flaws and bugs as possible.

Once a refined form of the prototype is developed, it can then be used to conduct initial market research. There are two goals of this market research. First, we will test how much demand is there for our product in the market. Second, for the demand that exists, what price are our prospective customers willing to pay for our product?

Final Prototype

Now, you will develop a final prototype of your product based on the findings from the R&D done in the previous step. You will also create presentations and sales material to present your product to potential seed or pre-seed investors. The difference between a pre-seed and a seed investment depends on the phase of your product development.

Pre-seed investment is for the products that do not have a customer base at the time of funding. Whereas, seed funding is for the products that already have at least a few users in the market. Aside from reaching out to Angel investors, you can also seek funding from your family and/or friends.

MVP and Launch

MVP (aka Minimal viable product) is the most basic form of a product that is ready for its initial launch in the market. There is a possibility that the final prototype you created is already an MVP that is ready for launch. If that’s not the case then based on the feedback you got in step 5 you can further improve your product to develop an MVP.

Moving Forward

Once you launch your MVP, it’s not the end of the road. For MVPs, the first few customers are acquired at heavily discounted prices. The reason is that your products still need a lot of development to reach the level of a mature product. And your initial customers will not only generate revenue that you can use for further development of your product, but this development will also cause inconvenience for your users. So until your product reaches maturity, you need to work closely with your initial clients and rapidly develop your product until it is ready to compete with the more established competitors in the market.

Since the 1970s, the momentum with which technology is making advances is increasing manifolds every next decade. About a decade ago we were hearing about digital adoption and how the companies that would not digitize their businesses soon would be left behind their competition. Now there is hardly any business left that has not adopted digital solutions to at least some degree. Digital adoption is not a topic we hear about a lot now. In the world of IT and Technology, people are now really talking about the subjects of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Quantum computing and what impact they will have on businesses in the near future. However, even now, there are still many businesses that are only in the early stages of adopting a digital business model. While there are also those businesses that initially made a significant investment in digitizing their businesses, but are not making the level of investment in adopting newer technologies as is necessary for their businesses to compete effectively in the market in the near future.

As many breakthrough technologies are disrupting markets at a breakneck speed, in this article, I am going to discuss the reasons why businesses need to continuously invest in new technologies, what impact these new technologies are having on the businesses and how they would affect companies that would fail to make the necessary investments in this field.

Interaction with customers

Customers are always the most crucial stakeholders for any business. Without customers, there is no business to generate profits. That is why every successful business strives to adopt a customer-centric business model. For this, many new products and technologies have recently emerged that are taking the quality of interaction between a business and its customers to a new level. These include tools and software programmes leveraging AI and ML for marketing automation, automated customer service and data curation and management tools. The latest data curation tools help companies get a 360-degree view of their customers using first, second and third party data. The accuracy with which these tools can now predict the likelihood of a customer making a purchase has increased manifolds as a result.

Automation

Automation is another field currently seeing rapid growth. From software development to sales and marketing to manufacturing operations, there are solutions available to automate most of the repetitive and Manual tasks in every department of a business. This is impacting businesses in three major ways. First, the most highly skilled employees of a company can now automate mundane and repetitive tasks and are able to focus more time on tasks that have strategic implications. Second, as more and more tasks are being automated, the number of employees a company needs to run their operations has decreased significantly. In addition, as repetitive tasks are taken over by computers, human errors are greatly reduced, resulting in greater efficiency.

Data

According to Clive Humby, a British mathematician and marketing expert, ‘Data is the new oil.’ With machine learning and big data, it’s now possible to store and process an unprecedented amount of data and gain insights that would not have been possible to gain before. Businesses that lag behind in this area will have a very hard time competing in the market against firms that are investing in collecting and retaining data and developing capabilities in technologies such as data warehousing and machine learning.

Security

Cyber security is another field that is becoming essential for any business to survive. Every machine within a company is now connected to a network, and companies are gathering and storing more and more data about their customers and their own businesses. The value of information a malicious hacker can now access by breaking into a company’s network has increased significantly. Therefore, we are witnessing an exponential increase in cyber security attacks every year, and the sophistication of these attacks has also increased due to the new technologies and more incentives to steal corporate data. People are also storing more crucial information in their digital devices, like their credit card details, and a major data breach that can compromise people’s personal information or security credentials has now become a mistake that can potentially shut down a business immediately.

Employee Retention

Keeping and retaining key employees is a critical issue for any business. Many studies have shown that once an employee leaves a company, depending on their skills and position, it could cost a company somewhere between two to four years’ worth of that employee’s wages after they leave. With big data and machine learning, new technologies are helping managers and organizations predict the level of employee satisfaction and burnout within their companies. Allowing them to make critical decisions before the employee churn rate can cause significant damage. In addition, automation reduces the amount of workload on employees allowing them to concentrate on their personal development and increasing their job satisfaction. Therefore, companies are able to maintain a healthy retention rate by managing the well-being of their employees.

Conclusion

As new technologies emerge at a rapid pace, organizations can accomplish their goals much more efficiently, which enables them to expand their business and grow rapidly. Organizations that do not adequately invest in these new technologies and the related capabilities will be left behind so far that they will not be able to compete in the market in the near future.

There are more than 26 million eCommerce websites worldwide selling more than $4 trillion worth of products and services every year. In addition to the low barrier to entry into the eCommerce sector, the operating costs of running an eCommerce business are much lower than running a brick-and-mortar retail store, since you don’t need expensive storefronts or multiple warehouses to consistently supply different stores as your business grows. There are many recent examples of eCommerce businesses giving much more established brands a run for their money.

But as the eCommerce industry boomed and competition increased, the failure rate also increased exponentially. As of 2021, 90% of the eCommerce brands fail within the first four months of their operations according to Forbes. But why do so many eCommerce businesses fail?

If you google ‘why eCommerce businesses fail you will see that most of the sources will list reasons related to poor user experience and poor online marketing in the top 5 most common reasons for eCommerce ventures to fail. And this is where a website built in React can help businesses provide their users with the most updated eCommerce experience to date.

So, what is React? How does it improve the user experience of an eCommerce buyer?

React is a JavaScript library that was developed and is still maintained by Meta (formerly Facebook) as well as a large community of other companies and independent developers. It allows developers to build user interfaces for Single Page Applications (SPA). A SPA is a web-based application or a website that dynamically rewrites a single page with the new data from the server rather than the conventional method of reloading the browser pages. This makes faster reloading of the individual components and a much smoother user experience.

There are three main advantages of building your website’s frontend in React:

Website Performance

React uses modules called Document Object Model (DOM) to represent a web page in form of a tree. Html is written as a form of a node to this tree. With JavaScript, the style and attributes of each DOM can be updated without having to reload the whole page. This approach to selective update to a webpage area gives a notable boost to a website’s performance as compared to any other framework. Even when applied to a smaller website it shows a significant boost in performance but for large complex projects, the amount of time saved for a user to navigate the website becomes particularly large.

Speed to Market

This component-based approach to web app development allows developers to reuse code snippets not only across one app but across multiple apps as well. This speeds up the process of developing and launching new features as well as modifying or debugging the existing ones.

Developers

As mentioned earlier the technology is supported by not only Meta but also a vast community of other firms and developers. This means that the available libraries are constantly growing and getting updated. It is easier for developers to learn the technology, moreover due to the ease of maintaining React.js projects developers love it. Due to these reasons, there is already a large community of developers available in the market to hire.

If I already have a working website, do I need to rebuild my whole website?

The short answer is no, you will only need to rebuild the front end on React using the already existing backend. If you have a WordPress website you can create a website with a headless CMS using Rest APIs and React framework. Headless CMS is the latest CMS architecture that allows you to manage all the content in one place and deploy it across any frontend you need to. The advantage of a headless CMS is that, as React decreases the loading time by reducing the need to upload the whole webpage in the browser, headless CMS reduces the processing time in the backend. In addition, headless CMS will also give web developers much more flexibility in designing web pages and apps.

With the fear of a looming recession, many technology companies are looking to recalibrate their workforce without impacting their projects. Even large-size technology companies like Twitter and Facebook are restricting their tech teams and outsourcing some of their work to South Asia-based technology firms to help them manage their cost centers. Although technology outsourcing is a familiar term to Western technology companies, a few nuances of technology outsourcing are alien to many software-focused companies. Frankly, it’s not that easy to go online and select the first technology outsourcing company that shows on the search results. This process requires careful evaluation of every aspect of sending out the work while managing all quality protocols.

Here, we will list four crucial challenges companies face when outsourcing their technology solutions overseas.

Know your needs

You cannot outsource all your projects to a third party. First, you must carefully evaluate your project and itemize the workload that can be comfortably branched out to overseas technology companies. Once you complete the evaluation, you may only need to outsource your quality assurance or maybe just the design work. Sometimes, it’s better to outsource the complete project to help manage your tight budget. Once you know your outsourcing needs, you can start your search for the right fit.

Finding the Right Fit

One size fit all doesn’t work in tech outsourcing. A simple Google search would reveal countless companies professing their expertise in various technology sectors. While doing your initial research, it can be challenging to pick a company that stands out from the rest. To overcome this issue, you should look into their core competencies and see their customer feedback. It should give you a better insight into your prospective technology partner. You may incline towards betting on a relatively newer company, and there is nothing wrong with that but start with a smaller project to properly gauge their work quality. Once you are satisfied with your finding, you can then embark on a relationship with your new technology partner.

Clearly Outline the Scope of Work

It’s imperative that you put the scope of work in writing along with its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and read it through before handing it down to your outsourcing partner. Quantifiable scope of work and its deliverables would help you in getting better output from a third-party tech company.

Constant Communication is the Key

Effective and constant communication before, during, and after the project would help you get better output from your technology partner. This technique would also lay the foundation of a lasting relationship with your technology team situated thousands of miles away from your headquarters.

Start with a small project, make yourself comfortable, and then grow your relationship with your overseas technology partner over time. Companies like TGI that have more than a decade-long experience working with the government as well as private companies and have delivered projects ranging from small apps to large ERP solutions can be a great partner for your technology needs.

Technology has been rapidly evolving at a pace where most organizations are struggling to keep up with the consistent change occurring in the industries, they operate in. While all these technologies help us save time & costs, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of businesses. Technology at one point was a way to gain an edge over the competition but now inability to rapidly adapt to the changing tech landscape is a fatal flaw for any business, small or large. The last two decades have been especially critical in this regard when we saw quite a few long-established behemoths of the brands going bankrupt due to failure at keeping up with the technological advancement, their much smaller competitors brought to the industry. Nokia, Toys ‘R’ Us and Debenhams are just a few fairly recent examples.

Nevertheless, technological advancement also comes with costs associated with it. The two most important of which are monetary and human resources. It’s difficult for companies to spend monetary resources to modernize tools and processes in every department besides incurring the regular operating costs of their businesses. Moreover, not only do businesses need experts to build and deploy new technologies but a lot they also need to spend a significant amount of their time training the rest of their personnel on how to effectively use and leverage those technologies.

And the reality is that many businesses just do not have the resources to be able to consistently invest in new technology. Every problem has a solution and the solution for this problem is outsourcing. In recent years it has become increasingly common for large corporations, SMEs, and startups alike to outsource a lot of their IT and tech needs to other organizations so that can focus most of their resources and energy on running their core business.

So, in this article, we will have a brief look at everything a company needs to know about outsourcing.

Types of Outsourcing: Geography

As more companies move towards outsourcing, multiple outsourcing strategies have emerged. Below we will have a look at the different outsourcing strategies.

Onshore Outsourcing

Onshore outsourcing (a.k.a. domestic outsourcing) is the strategy of obtaining services from a firm within your own country. Onshore outsourcing is usually more common if the personnel of the firm, to which the services were outsourced, are needed to be on the premises at least once, e.g., to deploy hardware, or when cultural differences or communication gaps can hurt the project.

Nearshore Outsourcing

Nearshore outsourcing is the practice of obtaining services from firms from neighboring countries. Nearshore outsourcing has some benefits of both, onshore and offshore outsourcing. For example, in Europe, a western European country can outsource its processes or projects to a company in central Europe. They will be able to get relatively cheaper pricing for the project yet the issues regarding cultural differences and time zone will be minimal relative to offshore outsourcing.

Offshore Outsourcing

Offshore outsourcing refers to the strategy of obtaining services from firms based in distant countries. Primarily the countries chosen for offshore outsourcing are the ones where the cost advantage of choosing a firm there is massive as compared to nearshore or onshore companies.

Strategic Considerations

When deciding whether you should choose an onshore, nearshore, or offshore company to outsource your projects or processes, you make the following strategical considerations:

1. Language Barrier

You should contemplate whether good communication is a critical factor for the success of your project. While communication is a key to successful business operations, it tends to be less critical for certain projects as compared to others.

2. Cultural Differences

Another key consideration is cultural differences between your firm and the outsourcing firm. There are certain industries, products, and projects where culture plays a central role. For example, ethnicity-centric businesses, culturally sensitive products, and projects. Outsourcing such a project to a country where cultural differences can cause critical issues in the execution of the project can result in losses in the long run that will outweigh the benefits of outsourcing.

3. Legal Issues

For certain products and in certain industries local laws and regulations are crucial and failure to meet these regulations can have serious consequences for the firm. A few examples of industries with stringent regulations include financial services, healthcare, and defense.

All of the above considerations do not necessarily mean that if you have such limitations, then you are limited to only onshore outsourcing firms. There are many offshore or nearshore companies that specialize in providing services to certain countries or regions and are equipped with the necessary tools, techniques, and knowledge to effectively deliver the required projects that meet all the needs of the clients in those regions and countries. Just make sure that you do due diligence and make sure they have all the required capabilities to deliver quality services before you hire them for their services.

Types of Outsourcing: Type of Work

The second difference in outsourcing comes from the type of work that is being outsourced. There are three options available for you to consider:

1. Project-Based Outsourcing

With this type of outsourcing, companies hire offshoring firms to overtake a certain project. This is common when a new tool or technology needs to be deployed and the internal resources have either insufficient or non-existent capabilities to execute the project. In this case, an outsourcing firm will execute the project and will also usually provide necessary training to the internal staff to effectively manage and use the product before handing it over to the hiring firm. Often the outsourcing firm continues to provide support and technical assistance for the product or tool long after they have delivered the original project.

2. Outsourcing of Processes

In this type of outsourcing a firm hires another firm to take over certain processes of the hiring firm. This is usually more common in SMEs or startups where the management wants to concentrate their already scarce resources on the development and expansion of their core business functions and outsource less critical processes to other firms. The most common functions outsourced to other firms include manufacturing, financial services, and HR services.

3. Staffing

Staffing is a type of outsourcing where a company temporarily hires individual employees of a staffing firm. This is common when the required skillset is rare in the local job market, or the cost of hiring and retaining employees with a particular skill set is either too costly or unnecessary in the long run.

To Outsource or Not to Outsource?

When deciding to outsource a project or process, it’s necessary to ask whether it would benefit the firm’s overall strategic goals or be counterproductive.

If a project is related to the core of a business or is central to the long-term success of the firm, then it’s always better to develop the required capabilities for the execution and running of that function within the firm. Whereas if a function is only supplementary to the core business, then outsourcing it can help the firm to realign its major resources towards more critical jobs and functions and outsource such supplementary jobs to other firms.