Founder Friday is a weekly guest post written by a founder who is based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie. Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. December’s topic is outside development.
About the authors: Andrea Hansen and Jerod Mollenhauer are the co-founders of Venuefox, a startup based in Des Moines.
We launched Venuefox in September after a year in development with eWay Corporation. My co-founder and I are first-time entrepreneurs who came to the table with limited funds and even more limitations when it came to building a website, so we had no choice but to outsource the development of our site.
This was the most economical way for us to move forward with our concept, but there are certainly pros and cons to this approach.The biggest limitation for us so far has been effectively communicating our vision to the developer. Outsourcing requires clearly communicating your vision and trusting your developer to execute it accordingly.
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Anything less than clarity can lead to costly missteps, and when you’re bootstrapping, there isn’t much room to test or guess what features people will utilize and find value in.
At our developer’s request, we spent weeks creating wireframes. For people new to building a website, this was a valuable experience for us because we literally drew out every button and every user and vendor experience on paper before going into full development.
This process, while time consuming, was beneficial because we were able test our values, sharpen our focus and hone in on what features were most important for us to launch first.
Even with this wireframing exercise, we found there were still big decision points in the site we hadn’t foreseen. In the end, we were able to get our first version of Venuefox out, but our budget forced us to table several features for future iterations and, in hindsight, several features cost more than we anticipated.
The team of developers assigned to working on Venuefox were certainly invested in our project and asked good, clarifying questions. But at the end of the day, they are working for us, not with us and there is a difference between the two.
In-house development has a stake in the end product and the company’s success while outsourced development does not. Had our developers been employees there may have been better opportunities for richer conversations throughout the development process to discuss and weigh what we wanted to build and how best to build it.
Since outsourcing development is essentially work for hire, our development team did not deviate much from what was requested of them. That means it was on us to communicate and drive the vision. There is no blame here. We have a good working relationship with our developer. However, as new founders, our inexperience in web development is a weaker point in our team but it doesn’t have to be one that is insurmountable.
Credits: Photos courtesy of Venuefox.
