“Building software is easy.”
Of course, there is a nuance to the statement above. But oftentimes the hard bits are the easier bits, but the seemingly straightforward and uncomplicated stuff is where success and failure are determined.
End of the day software business is business, and it comes with its own risks and rewards.
But building software is easy.
This is coming from a company and a team that has been building complex software for discrete and numerous industries.
And with the iteration of software product building, we realized that building software was something we had effectively mastered, it was the specific industry knowledge that was more often than not, the deciding factor.
Above all it takes balls, good ole cojones, that is it.
And there is no softer way of saying it.
Does not matter how much knowledge or lack thereof, you have about computer systems, programming, and software development.
This is as material as knowing the chemical formula of gasoline if you own a petroleum refinery.
In today's world, while building a business that runs primarily on software, building the software is the easiest bit. There are arguments and counter-arguments to that statement, and it may not apply everywhere but bear with me here.
There are IT Challenges and there are non-IT challenges.
IT challenges and software problems are easier to solve, as over the last decade a massive amount of funds have been thrown at this industry, and a lot of smart people have dedicated themselves to writing software, and probably for the right reason that it pays well.
This also makes software expensive, and good software more so.
Here is one way of building software,
you may go to a marketplace and get yourself a decent programmer and he or she would write the program.
You can get yourself a content writer and he or she will write your content.
You can also get a network administrator and the administrator shall administer your network.
so on and so forth.
You will also be able to get yourself a project manager off the shelf.
…or you hire our team here to do all of the above but that comes later
First cometh the idea
Protect your idea with all your life, all your might and all the intelligence that you can muster.
Some of the most successful ideas sounded 'stupid' and unintelligent to begin with, till they succeeded.
Uber started with the premise of users getting into cars of the strangers.
Airbnb went even further, and you checked into the houses of strangers.
Everything sounds absurd initially. Alexander conquered more than half of the known world in his time but for a 17-year-old kid from Macedonia that aspiration sounds preposterous, laughable even.
I am not asking you to slaughter men, women, and children from Greece to Indus.
What I am saying is that today, there are better ways of conquering the world, and you do not need anyone's permission to do it or an army of nation behind you.
// Without Their Permission by Alexis Ohanian is one book you should read to understand and view the possibilities that the world offers today.
Once you have decided to venture forward, and take that step found a company. As a founder, you have to remember certain things.
You could be the first one to come up with the idea, but you will not be the last one.
You are going to get your nose bloody.
It is a problem if you have to explain yourself to anyone. Conviction is needed. There could be a lot of stakeholders but only one decider.
Products are not built by democracy.
The leader leads, sometimes he falters, but we all do. In fact, those who have failed in life, have a higher chance of building something meaningful and profitable than those who have never experienced failure.
See it through , for better or for worse.
The longer you keep your product live, the more value it would accrue
You need to keep the costs low of course, but apart from that, set it up to work.
We have a few products that are live, with payments and sporadic development that happens as needed. Automation helps but is subjective to what you are trying to achieve.
There is always a lot going on under the hood.
Emails, communications, taxes, compliances, shipping, payments, et al.
The software ecosystem runs on rails provided by other software companies, a typical system is an amalgamation of various technologies.
Stripe to manage payments.
Twilio for your communications.
Mailchimp for marketing.
For each process, you would have myriad options to choose from as well. You could go with Adyen, PayPal, Razorpay, or Authorize.net, and there are countless more including Amazon Pay.
There are choices galore and each works well, is reliable and more often than not provides you with proven technology to power your software.
Building momentum for your idea and product
Software business is lucrative with huge margins, as you can cater to multiple geographies and large swathe of demographics.
But as they say, ‘there are lots of lips between the cup and the lips.’
Success requires hard work, no less amount of luck and most importantly, a clear understanding of the industry you are catering to.
If you are building an Uber, you understand how taxi operates. If you are building an OLX, you understand classifieds.
Our success with Machine Dalal came with our understanding of the print industry, and not through our prowess with software, although that was the prime driver of customer engagement, retention and revenue.
But the product worked only when we understood the people and the market sufficiently.
Users are good people.
More forgiving and encouraging.
But you need to have a feedback mechanism.
One simple way to do this is to simply write to them, talk to them and understand them and that usually helps.
They will give you pointers on that as well.
Once you talk to your users, you shall unlock immense value for your product.
"I will need to find the source but Brian Chesky, of Airbnb, talks about a person who handed them a notebook of problems that the gentleman had compiled over a decade of leasing out his apartment to guests."
Power users are important. The enterprising users constantly look for opportunities in new ideas and products and are often ahead of the game.
Users who speak with their wallets i.e. who nonchalantly pay for half-baked products are sources of learning and their experience will be highly valuable.
Marketing your product
If you have less funds or if you want to spend less on initial marketing.
Leverage social media, bombard a little, and get a bit creative.
Do this even before your product is totally complete, as the user input would be of immense value.
Again, this depends on what you are doing. If you are selling bedsheets and that is all there is to it, it makes sense to have a somewhat complete product.
But if you are building a marketplace for industrial machinery, you might want to start sooner, go slow and involve as many end users as possible.
Start with supply side.
Fortunately, I watched some of the seminal products start with solving the supply side problem. I was a student in an American college when Facebook came about and coincidently Tinder's supply side / cold start problem was addressed in the same college.
There is an excellent book on it by Andrew Chen - Cold Start Problem .
It discusses at great length about how some of the successful software product companies solved their supply side problems, during their initial years.
Marketing should happen only after you have sufficiently solved the supply side problem.
This is not an advice for people with huge budgets and teams.
This is for entrepreneurs who are more pragmatic in their approach and are at the stage where they are using their own funds.
Creating a network effect for your product and services.
This happens over a period of time, or if you are able to push your services with a bigger marketing budget. It is again not really easy to do it, as you would always be competing with similar products and shortening attention span.
Hence a deep wedge is necessary.
Go after a super sub-set of users. Identify their problems and build on it.
Amazon is a great, probably the greatest, example of this. They started with books and now they are selling cars. It's Hyundai but still.
We did something similar with Machine Dalal, we started with Offset machines and then built the ecosystem for more print products and services. It is a global platform now and so far our total marketing budget has been near zero.
Do not rent your audience!
Sometimes growth can be hacked, sometimes you have to pay for advertising and marketing. We have done both.
But we seldom suggest being totally dependent on Facebook and Google, and lately Amazon.
We believe in first party data and build the first part data infrastructure from the very first day.
For users there is a friction involved but stickiness increases due to that.
You can always reduce friction and reward activity.
Whereas when we pursue a higher-friction model, we are not just acquiring temporary users who will jump to the next low-friction replacement; we are acquiring loyalists who will stick around for longer.
Friction in software products is a contentious subject. Tinder had a lower friction model with a Facebook only login. It made excellent sense as well. Since people tend to put their best face for profile pictures. Additionally, stickiness is not required for Tinder as users want to find a partner and log out, delete the account.
Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, etc. followed a high friction model.
Apple probably has a model with highest friction during onboarding, and the high costs of their products and probably the highest stickiness...behind google perhaps.
Microsoft is another example of high friction and stickiness from business software point of view.
These are academic conversations and they teach us a lot but most of it does not apply to someone launching a new product or service.
Then there are some technology questions.
Which tech stack is the best?
What programming language should be used?
Azure, Aws, Google, Rackspace or GoDaddy for that matter.
What framework to use?
And should you even use framework?
These are but some of the most challenging technical questions to which there is one logistical answer.
Always work in the technology for which proficient and experienced software engineers are readily and abundantly available.
The key is proficiency and availability.
Software industry had one of the highest rates of attrition and you can never build a software without software professionals. Even with all the modern tools available, you will need a team of reliable engineers to string it together, loosely speaking.
Choose Wisely Why Hashbrown to build your product?
Here comes the part where we tell you why you should work with us, but we won't.
You need to be the judge of that. But if you are in the market looking to hire a team of experienced professionals to build a software for you, we would like to be in the contention.
Of course, we are not the best, but we are not the worst either.
You will find better more equipped teams.
And you will definitely find cheaper teams.
But you will be hard pressed to find a software team in the world that is as diverse and as reliable as ours.
Why hire us if not for the fact that we would have a working product out of our stable in the shortest possible time.
We have customers from around the world and we leverage the power of cloud for greater efficiency and farther reach, from Machine Trading to Stock Trading , you will find us building software products for diverse industries and doing this we have built a substantial institutional memory that brings the necessary tools, techniques and means to work on new problems in efficient and creative ways.
I can go on and on, and pontificate on our strengths and virtues but the better way would be to take a look at this presentation , view our portfolio and contact us or schedule an appointment to further explore your idea and its feasibility.
Final Word.
The thought behind the article was not to trivialize the technology, or the serious engineering that goes behind each process. The idea here is to understand that software is just a tool, and the tool is useless if the outcome is undesirable. Software will make your world efficient and business profitable, but it requires great deal of understanding.
Without thorough introspection we could fail or succeed in building solutions in search of problems.
Maybe it will help avoid those pitfalls.
