Why most entrepreneurial ventures need to raise money during their early life?

A great idea and a strong will to succeed are just not enough in today’s generation. If you’re an entrepreneur who’s looking to grow and scale, you might want to look into funding your startup business.

Surveys show that a lack of capital is one of the most common reasons why small businesses fail.

On the other hand, Apple, Google, and Amazon all started as small startups and grew into business giants thanks to funding.

Getting money for further business development is not “a piece of cake”. As a software development partner, we understand the difficulties. However, companies today that are in the startup phase have numerous options to get the funding they need. Venture capital, angel investing, or crowdfunding as some of the relatively new opportunities. The help is also available through startup accelerator programs.

Today, the saying “time is money” is more a reality than ever, especially in the technology sector. An entrepreneur with an idea usually needs funding to move on in no time.

So, if you’re an entrepreneur who’s taking your startup business seriously, here are five main reasons why you should get funding:

Build your startup idea on a solid base 

Developing the initial idea into a solid product often requires more money and a bigger team. It means that to make your idea alive, you’ll need to hire more employees, attract specialists in the field, invest in production costs, and keep the operations running steadily in the development phase.

Capture as much of the market in as little time as possible

When you have a breakthrough idea that is well perceived in the market, you’ll probably want to capture as much of the market as possible. To compete in the market with other dominant players, you’ll need to increase your marketing and sales efforts. This, again, can only be done on a pretty penny. However, software outsourcing can help you accelerate your efforts.

Get additional value from your investors

The first reason to contact investors is, of course, to get funding. But investors can offer more than just money. They can help you get deals with other companies with which they have connections. After all, your success in the market is in their interest as well.

Attract the attention of the market and the future investors by having business funding

If your startup is getting funding from venture capital, or another business form, signalizes that you’re positioned for the future. Funding increases your visibility and attracts the attention of the market. It adds value to your business and shows to prospective partners and customers, as well as to future investors that you are worth considering.

When you’re bigger, you can do more

Some entrepreneurs prefer having a small company that they fully own. However, if you are among those who aim for more, you need more money – to attract top talent professionals for further development of the company, to conquer the market with cutting-edge products, and to build a respectful position among other players in the field. Learn more about how our outsourced development team can help. After all, wouldn’t you rather own 1% of a billion-dollar company than own 100% of a company worth nothing at all?

Positive trends in startup business funding

The funding climate is great for the innovation sector, as shown in the U.S. Startup Outlook 2017, issued by Silicon Valley Bank.

Generally speaking, the trend is definitely positive: the survey points out that investors are doing deals, more funding options are available, and the exit market has improved.

According to the survey, venture capital is the most important source of capital: 51% of startups said that their most likely next source of funds was venture capital.

This is a good way of thinking since the Crunchbase report about the state of the global venture capital ecosystem in Q2 2017 shows that the market for startup equity is on a firmer footing than three months before.

According to the report, there has been growth in deal and dollar volume at almost all stages, rounds were growing in size, and some of the most active venture capitals have doubled their investing activities.

However, the entrepreneurs who participated in the Silicon Valley Bank Startup Outlook Survey found that fundraising became more difficult for startups: 88% of participants found the current fundraising environment extremely or somewhat challenging.

But don’t give up! Just keep on doing a great job!

Did you know that Pixar heard ”no” 45 times before Apple invested in this company, which today is the owner of the 12 animated films listed among the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time?

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September 18, 2017 / Alejandra Sandoval

Nowadays, most companies must use ICT in the development and expansion of their business. That’s why currently, it’s difficult to imagine a company that hasn’t had to implement a software development methodology, whose goals are generally to simplify, automate, and/or speed up processes according to the type of business or company.

However, software development and implementation processes can get complicated if the appropriate methodology is not applied. So what happens when these processes start to get complicated? Everything takes longer than expected, and costs surpass the initial budget, generating dissatisfaction for everyone involved. For this reason, you must understand the development methodologies and learn to identify which is most viable and most profitable for your business.

Let’s start by saying that a methodology refers to logical procedures that serve to achieve one or various objectives within a specific task. So, in the execution of software projects, the methodology represents a framework. It allows one to establish a structure and determine the project’s development process in question.

Maybe you’re thinking about what would be the appropriate methodology for that software project you need to implement at your company. Still, to do this, it’s key to understand the methodology “families” and the pros and cons of each one.

Traditional Development Methodologies, the classic ones.

Everything starts with Traditional Methodologies that develop in the software industry’s roots when projects need to be established under a logical work structure. These methodologies contain very defined and solid phases and under sturdy and thorough documentation parameters that generally make the process slow and complex.

At this point, the involvement of the client is usually limited; for example, in some traditional methodologies like the Cascade, as a client, you only participate in the first phase of the project to make your necessity clear; what it is that you want and what is the result you are hoping for.

You’ll get involved again later in the software implementation stage. But, what happens in between phases is, to some extent, unknown to you. Although it may seem trivial to ignore project phases, it might be that there are mistakes in the understanding of the needs of satisfaction (actually, it’s quite common). Thus, when implementing the product, you realize it doesn’t fully meet your expectations. Of course, this can be corrected, but it has an additional cost, and taking into account that you will have already invested considerable time and resources, the project loses profitability.

Agile Software Development Methodologies, a pragmatic vision.

Inconveniences observed in the projects developed under traditional methodologies were the reason Agile methodologies were born. The needs started to get more and more variable and dynamic.

It was no longer viable to spend so much time obtaining tangible results in each phase of the project. Plus, this approach had the additional risk of the final product not meeting expectations. Speed in execution and a loss of documentation relevance (although it doesn’t disappear) are Agile methodologies’ characteristics.

This type of methodology proposes to do what is necessary; no more, no less. In contrast to the traditional ones, Agile methodologies are flexible. Their purpose is to adapt to any necessity to achieve effective investment of time and resources to attain the desired profitability.

Within this family, some of the most used are the methodologies XP, Kamban, and Scrum. But we will go into more detail about that in a future post.

Hybrid Methodologies, a good try.

Finally, towards 2010, hybrid methodologies appeared, combining traditional methodologies and agile methodologies’ best practices. They look for documentary robustness and swiftness in the delivery of results to the clients. However, this type of methodology has not had much success in practice, so you probably won’t hear much about that.

Agile methodologies currently frame our industry, and to a lesser extent the traditional ones too. After this broad overview of development methodologies, do you have any idea which is the most appropriate for your business?

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September 18, 2017 / Alejandra Sandoval

These days, with the acceleration that the business world moves at, the software industry has had to overhaul some of its methods. Entering a stage where the agility of processes and quality of products have become more relevant than ever. A stage characterized by the Software Test Automation.

One of the practices that allow efficient contribution to the quality assurance of a software product is Test Automation. The term may be familiar to you, but it’s worthwhile answering some general questions about it:

1. What does Test Automation mean?

Special software for administering tests automatically to determine if the results obtained in the development process of a software product achieve the goals. It helps to administer more tests in less time, reduce the human error margin and execution complexity.

Considering this, automating frequently administered test cases will help to eliminate manual difficulties.

1. How are the tests designed?

Before or after the software development starts they can be designed; depending on your practices and development process.

We recommend building the tests before, if the software needs to handle the dynamic in TDD (Test-Driven Development), also for unit tests, and BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) – for acceptance tests; but we’ll talk about that in other posts. Continuing with the recommendation; the first thing to do is design the test, and then code it.

Focusing on the test design: start reading and abstracting relevant information, verifying and determining the objective of the new functionality. Afterward pose possible scenarios.

1. Does Software Test Automation eradicate the need for manual automation?

Not necessarily; sometimes we can administer both in the same Project. This depends on the client, the resources, and the project, among other variables. Moreover, elements that cannot be tested in an automated way will exist.

1. What software is used to carry out Test Automation?

Different tools exist, but once again the answer is: it depends. On the application’s project and the programing language developed for. Nevertheless, we can state some examples: Cucumber, Selenium, Jasmine, Robot Framework, etc.

1. How can your software benefit from this?

With automation, it’s easier to attend to more scenarios. If you want to automate a test case, you do it just once and then you can reuse it to automate many other cases. In turn, it gives you a much wider and more complete perspective of the software quality.

Test automation ensures better quality, since executing more test cases will allow the product to be evaluated more desirably and completely.

Furthermore, the software with test automation allows daily efficiency and functionality, and not having to wait for the regression to become aware of any need for adjustment.

Remember that repairing a defect in the software when it’s already finished can end up being enormously expensive, so what could be better than having the chance to get to know its true reach, testing it several times along the way. Ultimately test automation significantly decreases the risk, improves the software quality, and allows for more efficient management of time and resources. All these factors directly affect and influence the expenditures of your company.

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