Why partner with a custom software development company?

You're probably wondering whether to partner with a custom software development company and how this can benefit you and your organization. To help you out, 6 fellow founders/executives will share what their reasons to build such a partnership were and what is the value they get from it:

1. Necessity and no additional worries about how to motivate people

You can’t find any decent people to hire internally. This is often the case in big tech centres like San Francisco, London, Dublin, Amsterdam or Zurich where you compete for talents with many well-funded startups and companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. It’s hard for a small or medium enterprise like yours to attract the brightest and in the quantities, you need in order to build and deliver on time. Another important aspect is that you will not have to worry about things like the team’s morale & motivation. “It was more of a necessity as we couldn’t find any decent people in the Netherlands but I would definitely not change it even if we could find people because I really like that I don’t have to worry too much about all the stuff about how to keep people motivated, etc ” - Martijn Burger, Co-founder Paston

2. Having an offshore partner as an option to scale up, having a hard time recruiting talent in big cities and avoiding cost inefficiency by not keeping top talent in house

In Dublin, it’s not cost-efficient for smaller companies to keep their best people long term because the big banks, Facebook, Apple, etc. are recruiting them by offering twice the payment amount you can. Irish top talent is working for giant enterprises so smaller companies are forced to hire foreign people from Spain, Brazil, India, etc. “Due to competition from the big banks, Google, FB, etc, smaller companies in Ireland can’t keep their top employees long term. The topengineers are hired by these big companies right after college. Having a talented offshore office is a good way to go in order to scale up.” George O’Shea, Director at MyComplianceOffice

3.Improvement of working practices & culture, additional expertise, decreased time to market and increased capacity

Your current team may have skills in certain technologies and aspects but you may need to build something completely new or to modernize the current product. In that case, you may want to partner with an external custom software development company to help you out. One decent case is if you have built your product using certain technologies that are becoming obsolete and you want it redeveloped using a modern tech stack. Then, you partner with an external company that has the needed expertise and which will also train your current people in the desired technology. Additionally, you may need to focus your resources on tasks that are of highest importance but still have to deliver these other 2-3 projects which leads you to partner with an external company. “We needed skills that we didn’t have internally so we decided to partner with a custom software development company. Moreover, we needed to prioritize on the delivery and didn’t have the capacity to do all and on time. At last but not least we wanted to improve our working practices & culture, and having someone external with the needed know-how helps a lot” Vladimir Goranov Executive Director, Head R&D Fadata

4. Helping with a temporary peak in workload, providing balance in headcount growth and making development capitalization clearer

You may want to boost the delivery but this may provide an impossible challenge to your recruitment so you need a partner that can help. This will also balance the growth of your internal team. Moreover, if the project can be estimated well enough by using an external team you will be able to better plan your financials and time to delivery. “I have led a number of technology companies over the last 20 years and they have a habit of always wanting to self-deliver. While this behaviour is understandable and sometimes leads to a greater understanding of technologies it can on many occasions lead to lost opportunities due to poor speed of delivery. Having partner technology companies including ‘custom software delivery’ gives a business more choices and can be particularly useful when the outsource provider can:

• Allow a known price and timescale for delivery which can make capitalisation of development clearer
• Provides additional scale to allow delivery of a product or project earlier than could be accomplished with your own resource
• Provide a balance of in house and external resource which enables a smoother growth pattern of permanent team members
• Provide a specialized skill set outside the competence of your own team Choose carefully and it can also be an enjoyable experience which can extend the skill set of your team and improve your ability to collaborate.” George Webb, Ex- CEO Mutual Vision

5.Having a choice and greater flexibility

An external partner enables you to choose from a bigger pool of developers. It offers you the flexibility to adapt quickly based on your current business needs. “We are not experts at engineering and we love that by partnering with a software development company we have access to many talented people to choose from depending on our needs. Second, there is flexibility when hiring a company. If our needs change then the development company will know how to adapt. And lastly, experience. We love that everyone on our team has a lot of experience in different areas of development, this makes them better suited to suggest resolutions that maybe no one else would think of.“ Sascha Scheider, CEO Plotaverse

6.Gaining subject matter knowledge that isn’t core to your company and faster ramp-up of team

Sometimes you need expertise in some areas that may not be core for your business but is core for the successful delivery of your current project and there is no economic sense of hiring internally. Moreover, partnering with a custom software development company will allow you to ramp up the needed team a lot faster. "Subject matter knowledge that isn’t core for the RGB team to keep in the company but is important for the successful release of our product. Also, for those features, you can ramp up your team faster than a direct hire" Lynton Auld, VP Engineering RGB Spectrum   Hope you found something that resonated with you. In brief, the right partner can bring you tremendous value and that’s why my next post will be on how to select the right custom software development company. If interested, subscribe here to get the next article as soon as it comes out. Link to the article with the pic!