How to Choose Web Application Development Company for Your Startup

Launching a startup is always about incredible ambitions and passion to your idea. You’re excited and inspired and expect your team to be dedicated for your idea as well. That’s why it’s not enough to find an ordinary web app development company that can provide you with a product.

A GOLDEN RULE: Look for more than just a software provider - look for a reliable and committed PARTNER

If you want to succeed, you need to trust the development of your web or mobile app to a team that will not only professionally do its job but also take care of your business to make it better.

So how can you find such a team? What should you pay attention to? We prepared for you the key insights on how to choose the best web application development company for your startup!

#1 What do you NEED?

At first sight, it may seem easy to answer this question. And really: it’s just at first sight. The thing is, that if you want to find a web app development company that will be ideal exactly for your business, you have to define your needs as distinctly as possible.

This trinity of questions is fundamental for every startuper:

• Who is your target audience?
• What problems of your customers can be solved by your product?
• Is there a market need for your product?

Can you answer these questions even if someone wakes you up in the middle of the deep night? Good for you:) Now try to figure out:

1. What are the core functions of your web application?
2. How should it be designed?
3. What features of your product can solve the problems of your customer and provide you with competitive advantages?
4. What is the approximate budget you ready to spend on product development?

Also, you should create a business and marketing strategy. Remember: the clearer you identify your business needs, goals, and desirable results, the better you’ll understand the abilities of the particular company to turn your idea into the product.

#2 Choose the region

First of all, we recommend you to start your searching from choosing the region, where the web app development company should be located. You may ask: “What the difference does it make? Isn’t it enough to know that a certain company is a good one?” The fact is, that each region has a mix of web development peculiarities that may ultimately become decisive factors in your cooperation with the web app development company. For example:

• the status of IT sector in the region
• the educational level of IT professionals
• cultural aspects
• the general political and economic conditions in the region
• geographical position &; time zone differences etc.

Also, one of the main factors is the average rate on software development. The infographic below will help you to compare and analyze the rates in:

• United States
• South America
• Western Europe
• Central Eastern Europe/Ukraine
• Asia

Keep in mind: low rates can be catchy. However, don’t forget about the quality level! If you want to get a well-developed multifunctional app, it’s better to choose a region with adequate rates.

#3 Where can you search for the company?

After selecting a region, you can narrow down your search to particular web application development companies. To save your time, you can use specific websites and ratings, where you can find all important information about development companies:

• Clutch
• Appfutura
• Upwork
• Extract.co
• Goodfirms.co

By the way, on these websites you can use different filters: location, rates, technology stack, rating, etc. These filters will simplify your searches and help to find the appropriate company faster.

#4 OK, what’s next?

Now you should try to estimate the level of the company’s expertness. To be frank, sometimes it’s not a simple task, especially if you are not a developer and not so good in IT technologies. What can you actually do in such situation, is to check the following: company’s website - is it well designed? Is it easy to use and navigate? Is there enough information about the company?

A website is like a face of a company and can tell a lot about its business values. If a web app development company is reliable and highly professional, its site should keep up its “good name”. After all, how can you trust the development of your web/mobile application to the company, which website looks ugly, isn’t adaptive and has a slow download speed?

• technology stack - check what web programming languages and frameworks the company uses. If a particular company is really good in web development, you will surely find in its skill set at least several from these languages & frameworks
• Web development languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, CSS/HTML, PHP, Ruby, C, C++, SQL
• Web development frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Laravel, Angular, Vue.js, Ember, Node.js
• team - check if the company has different IT experts on board: back-end developers, front-end developers, mobile app developers, designers, QA testers, project managers, business architects, marketers, etc. It’s very important if you don’t want to find out (at the most inopportune moment, as usual) that external suppliers are needed for the project implementation.
• blog - if the web application development company has its own blog, it’s a good sign for you as a client. If it’s articles are useful and interesting for you, it’s a double good sign:) The presence of expert articles on company’s website demonstrates not only the level of its awareness in the technological field, but also its desire to understand clients’ needs, fears, and pains and cover them with appropriate content.

#5 Experience

If you don’t want to waste money on the development of a poor quality product, don’t forget to check the company’s experience in web development. How can you do this?

The main indicators are:

• company’s portfolio/cases
• company’s place in ratings
• clients feedback

Moreover, a significant advantage is the company’s experience in working with the startups. You know, the work on ordinary project and a startup is not the same thing. Startups are always about innovations and sophisticated technological tasks, which need custom solutions. So make sure, that a particular web app development company can provide you with this.

#6 Complexity of the services

To avoid unpleasant surprises, find out if the web application development company can provide you with appropriate services at each cycle of your product development:

• IT consulting. Company’s IT experts can help you to create a project development strategy, provide evaluation and recommendations according to your specific needs and goals.
• MVP web software development. A company can create a high-quality Minimum Viable product, which can help you to get profound feedback from your target audience and investors.
• Custom software web development. A company can create a customized IT solution individually to your startup idea.
• Software maintenance. A company can provide you with technical support and code warranty after product launching.

#7 Organization of the development process

Even if you are a ninja of business planning, you can never be 100% sure that everything will go on as you expected. Be ready, that launching a startup is tightly connected with financial resources, constant changes, mistakes and improvements. As a startupper, you have to move fast and make wise decisions quickly. That’s why agile software development methodologies are the best solution for startups.

With the help of such methodologies, the companies can easily adopt to any changes and manage any limited resources available to them in a particular period. So you don’t need to spend a lot of time and money on the development of a full product.

You can divide this process in short sprints, at the end of which you will receive certain parts of your product. It will save you from many costly mistakes and help to сontiniue the development process even with a small budget.

We recommend you to pay attention to the web development company that uses one (or combines several) of these methodologies:

• Scrum
• Kanban
• Lean
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Crystal
• Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
• Feature-Driven Development (FDD)

#8 Prices

Speaking about startups, pricing for web product development is one of the hottest questions. Let’s face it: the development of custom software costs a solid sum of money. That’s why it’s natural that you worry about overpaying for the IT services and want to be aware of what you’re paying for.

To avoid misunderstandings with a web app development company, you should find out what pricing model the company uses.

Pricing model - is an approach, which determines how much, when and how the customer should pay the supplier for provided IT services.

There are several types of pricing models:

• Fixed price - Fixed Price;
• Time and Materials;
• FFF - Fixed time, Fix budget, Flex-scope;
• Dedicated Team;
• Milestone based model.

You can read more about the pros and cons of each model here.

#9 Reliability

In fact, all innovative approaches and sounding promises of the company worth nothing without reliable legal protection. So how should you know that the company you considered to work with is trustworthy?

А reliable company should provide you with:

• Client Agreement
• NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)
• Secure Data Storage
• Code Warranty
• Personal access to data about employees who have access to your project information

Important: all the documents should meet international standards!

#10 Special services

Most of the above-mentioned things can be offered by almost every web application development company. So to make a final decision you should pay attention to the company’s special services and competitive advantages.

For example:

• IT consulting - if you want to have a successful business, you should start to build it properly from the very foundation. The correct definition of business goals, creation of business strategy, detailed planning, evaluation of the project and technical recommendations from IT experts - without all these things your startup would unlikely to go. If the company can provide you with proper strategic and tactical planning, it will surely make your business strong and more effective (read more about IT consulting here and here).
• lifetime code warranty - sometimes even in the code written by the best developers unexpected bugs can appear. It’s not so catastrophic, nevertheless, you have to be sure that your tech partner can solve such problems in the shortest terms possible. That’s why a lifetime code warranty is so cool for your startup. Such warranty means that the web application development company is obligated to fix for free all the bugs that appear during all lifecycle of your product (read more here).
• custom software solution - it’s obvious that ready-made software solutions are not enough if you want to create something really innovative. So you should choose a company that offers custom software development. That’s how you can get a product, which meets your specific business needs and is interesting exactly for your target audience, not overpaying for the development of unnecessary functions.

IN CONCLUSION

As you can see, to find a highly professional web&mobile app development company which is ideal exactly for your startup - is not a simple, but completely solvable task.

Remember: if you want to make your business thrive, you should choose a reliable and experienced IT company, which can provide you with customized software for an adequate price.

By the way, our software development company, MassMedia Group, has not only more than 12 years of experience, but also dozens of successfully completed projects that bring business value to our clients. This is all because we not only create software for clients, we help them grow their business. So if you have an idea and want to discuss it with IT experts, we’re on our way to help you :)