How to choose the right development company for a startup?

Why is it difficult to choose the right development company?

Firstly, now the global IT services market, having overcome the consequences of the pandemic, begins to develop more rapidly, as evidenced by Gartner’s research. So, in 2019, the overall indicator of industry development was -5.4%, and in 2021 it increased to 4%.

It contributes to the occurring on the market of an increasing number of players - software development companies and freelancers.

At first glance, most of them are so similar to each other that it is difficult to determine which one will be the ideal technical partner.

The second important factor is the risks associated with the wrong choice of a partner. So, with the wrong choice, the customer can lose funding in case of non-compliance with the investment rounds; and it also entails damage to reputation, which will affect future projects, not just the current ones.

Expertise

Expertise Is An Important Criterion in the company’s assessment to develop your product. It cannot be ignored by any means. How do you know if your potential technical partner is qualified enough to implement your business idea?

Case studies

It’s the first thing to look out for. They allow you to assess the company’s experience of working with other clients, their methodology, and how to cope with the technical challenges of projects.

You can also assess how competent the company is in developing the same or similar products to yours; or products from the same niche.

Reviews

Feedback from previous clients is the most objective source of knowledge about the quality, speed, cost of work provided by the company. From sources such as Clutch, for example, you can also learn more about previous customers, their background; take a closer look at the projects implemented by the company; get acquainted with what challenges your potential partner worked with and how he coped with them; how it ultimately affected the success of the product for the customer.

To get such data, in addition to the company’s website, you can also use resources like:

• Clutch;
• Good Firms;
• Glassdoor;
• TrustRadius;
• G2 Crowd;
• Trustpilot;
• Review.io.

WebSite and Blog

Website is the company’s face, so through it can be made important conclusions about it. For example, as we mentioned above, you can find Case Stages there, as well as reviews and blogs - which can serve as a good source of information about how to work with this team, with what problems can be encountered or vice versa - what pleasant moments and the advantages of the software development company under consideration. The client can make a holistic look and understand how much the company is experienced and expert, as well as a little closer to get acquainted with the team of specialists, personalize them and draw up the first impression.

Team

The composition of the team is important to understand whether the selected development company has a sufficiently strong team to cover the needs of the project - the composition of the team members is complete, and whether the level of qualifications of participants is sufficient.

It is obvious to pay attention to how experts are assessed. For example, at one company, the developer is considered to be a senior, having experience of 2-3 years, and in the other - 1 year. Accordingly, the nominal level of these developers is equivalent, but in fact, they are strikingly different, which will certainly affect the project.

Here you see the standard set of team members for the development and launch of the startup:

1. PM
2. QA
3. Developer(s)
4. UX/UI designer
5. DevOps

If the company offers a significantly reduced option, this may not be enough.

Techstack

It is necessary to formulate in detail the idea of ​​the startup and decide which stack of technologies to apply in the project development. So it will be easier for you to evaluate a potential partner - you will know exactly what moments to pay attention to, assessing the expertise of the company: for example, do you need experience in the development of Healthcare Niche or expertise in mobile development on React.

For example, one mobile application can be developed in 5 completely different ways using such technologies as:

1. PWA
2. ReactNative
3. Flutter
4. Native development (Swift + Kotlin)
5. Phonegap/Cordova

The same in the case of web applications - there is a minimum of 4 options for choosing product development technologies:

1. WordPress.
2. Angular
3. Vue.
4. React

So it will be better if you have at least an approximate view of the development methods by choosing a partner company.

Geography

When choosing a technical partner company, it is important to take into account where he comes from. There is a list of countries where the likelihood of finding a reliable integrity developer is significantly higher than in others. What does it depend on?

Language and education

In countries with low education, especially in the technical industry, it will be difficult for you to find a company with developers who can write proper and usable code.

Also, the knowledge of the language is also important, because it is a guarantee of productive transparent communication. If your partners do not know English, it will be very hard to come to a consensus and more items to discuss the technical features of the project.

In these aspects, for example, a good choice will be software development companies from China, Poland, Russia, Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Ukraine.

Price policy

The pricing policy in relation to the salaries of programmers is formed under the influence of numerous factors, including the economic development of the country. So the top 5 countries with the highest salaries for IT specialists include:

• USA ($106,816);
• Switzerland ($88,773);
• Norway ($60,934);
• Denmark ($66,878);
• United Kingdom ($59,072).

(You can read more about these ratings here).

It should be understood that the professionalism of specialists is not always correlated with the level of salaries. For example, Ukraine is among the first in the list of countries with the lowest rates, although the quality of remote software development services provided by Ukrainian devs is very high.

So, it is important to find the balance: save your money when it’s reasonable, but don’t get into a situation where you will pay twice.

Don’t make hasty conclusions

You can view the ratings like HackerRank, in which the lists of the countries of the best programmers are drawn up.

Evaluation is quite multifaceted and was carried out with respect to speed and accuracy, as well as relative to different tasks and programming languages. In particular, Ukraine is located in 11th place in the general list and 1st place - in IT security.

There you can find out non-obvious facts about countries such as the USA and the United Kingdom - programmers from here received very mediocre points in this evaluation system and stand in the ranking a little higher than specialists from India.

So do not rush with conclusions and do not underestimate such a factor as geography when choosing a development company.

Conclusions

What we do not really advise you to do, choosing the company for the development of your startup - is to rush.

Do not feel about choosing a technical partner frivolously - any truly outstanding steep project requires attention to detail, time, and a responsible approach - there are no fast and simple solutions.

Evaluate companies, collect information about them through sites, reviews, ratings on Clutch, and so on. Cut the round interviews, gradually sifting unsuitable candidates.

Learn more about their experience, approaches to work, company policies, customer handling culture; how transparent and convenient is communication; how they evaluate employees and build a team. All these issues are very important, and none of them can be neglected.