How to create a successful software company?

software company

A Software company develops and distributes computer software that can be used to learn, teach, test, evaluate, calculate, entertain or perform an enormous number of tasks.

To start a software company, it’s necessary to have financial resources, programming knowledge, marketing experience and technical support skills. These enterprises operate under a variety of business models, such as charging a licensing fee, offering subscriptions or transaction fees.

When a software company offers products for free, profits can be made through advertising sources or by charging for related services, for example, training or technical support. In the fast-paced and rapidly changing world of software development, it is important to keep up with the times. There are many options to choose from when deciding which program tools to use in your daily tasks at work.

Steps to grow your software company

Master marketing and sales

In a software development company, a developer with marketing skills can create products and earn revenue far beyond his skills as a programmer.

Let’s say that only 20% to 40% of the success of a software company depends directly on the activity of developing the program. A developer with excellent code and complete software but no customers is just a simple programmer, not a business or a company.

An entrepreneur with many potential clients but no software/product will be present in the market.

The brand, reputation and intellectual property is as valuable as any software or technical achievement.

It’s important to know that programs and technical work cannot be the foundation of the business, because someone can come along and clone the product after the hard work of introducing innovative copy and establishing/educating the market has been done.

If another product has only half the functionality of yours, but more effective marketing, it is more than enough to make it more successful.

Understand customers

Most companies fail because they build something that no one wants.

Knowing well who you are selling to and what problem you are solving for them before you develop something is essential. Forget the code, find the market first. Talk to your customers.

The ideal is that you try to solve with software a problem of your own that is recurrent in the market. In other words, you create a software that solves a problem for which you are the target market along with many others.

If you are not the target market of the product you are going to create, you need to find and hire a product manager who knows the problem to be solved in depth before creating the MVP (minimum viable product).

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Do not be seduced by technology

Sometimes, in a custom software company, developers don’t realize that the hardest parts of starting and growing a business have nothing to do with the code or the technology stack you choose.

Marketing and Sales, getting and retaining customers and everything else in between is much harder to sustain in the medium term than writing code.

Customers don’t care if your new technology is shiny and new, what matters to them is that it solves their problem.

Often, many developer-entrepreneurs will argue that it is much easier to do it with an old and proven technology (there are many cases in the market of obsolete technologies that are still being used for new developments), because the new ones change quickly, are less stable and have fewer learning resources and fewer developers.

The important thing here is to focus on being differential and offer competitive advantages to the target audience, being as standard as possible in everything else (cloud, multi-platform, multi-device, etc.).

Learning to delegate

Time spent on a task is valuable, this is time that you can’t spend on something else. So focus on doing the processes that you are best at and outperform everyone else.

Determine exactly what tasks there are in running your business that you are not an expert at, such as accounting, sales or administration and hire people to do those parts for you.

Set income objectives

Set goals, plan for profitability and be realistic about whether you are achieving them successfully. If you are not making the desired profit, you may have a good personal project on your hands, but not a viable business.

A target often used in the software industry as a guide to whether a company is going to be profitable in the medium term is a monthly revenue of $10,000 within three months of launch (this is basically a break-even limit for a small team of 2-4 people, plus a little extra money to reinvest in the business).

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If that profitability can be achieved, then either the product, the target market or the team needs to be overhauled. It’s not a hard target, but it’s a great way to economically frame the product launch by forcing yourself to ask hard questions about what you’re doing.

It’s also useful as a pricing criteria from the beginning. If you have very few customers, they would have to pay enough to get you to $10,000 in 90 days. If your product is not worth that much, then you need to expand or improve it. It is better to overcome this pitfall from the start.

Following all these steps above, the software company you set out to create from scratch will have a greater chance to influence people’s lives in a very positive way and will become a reference in the technological world.

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