Why Should a Startup Outsource their Software Development
Mar 16, 2016
10 min read
To start your own company it is really not necessary that you should have a technical background, it is a challenge these days to find a technical co-founder for many companies or finding some good talent to turn a fantastic idea into a reality. This the reason, many founders or visionaries just stop ideating at this point and we believe that’s where they are making a huge mistake!
In B-Schools around the world mentors tell the first time founders:
“ Focus on your idea and let the things you’re not good at in the hands of the experts in this field. But be sure to be able to monitor the progress of their work.”
One very popular example of a company with non-technical co-founders: Airbnb: Brian Chesky
Brian chesky earned a B.F.A in industrial design, from the Rhode Island School Of Design where he met Joe Gebbia who later became the co-founder at the firm and CHief Product Officer of Airbnb. As of March 2015, Airbnb had raised a new round of funding which brought the company’s valuation at around $20 billion dollars. As is evident both were non-technical founders and sure did outsource their software development work to concentrate on rather core operations of the company.
It is indeed a common opinion that having a good tech person in the company assures that a startup can have a successful exit. But, besides knowing how to code, founders should rather concentrate on other tasks like marketing and sales to excel in the industry. To find out about the best practices of outsourcing your IT services.
We’ll give you some convincing reasons why a startup should outsource their IT resources development:
Reduced Cost
The stage when you have an idea in your head and money to bootstrap, you are able to find some professional engineers who you can contract per agreed price. In the case of outsourcing you do not need to dive into the pool of talent or even worry about additional expenses like: staff insurance, admin costs or payroll taxes. It is also a well known fact that sometimes by outsourcing the development work you might attract more skilled pros at a much lower rate.
Freed Up Time
By documenting the contracts of IT development, strict deadlines are already agreed upon and a lot of time is freed for founders to concentrate on more core areas. All you need to do is control those dates and monitor the work being done by individuals or by the agency. More core areas left to concentrate upon are to spread the word about your product in the market and promotions.
IT Consultation
While outsourcing your software development work, you get to meet people like business analysts, who might take a closer look at your product and suggest the best way to complete your task(better logics that were thought about before, approach, tools etc.). They might be able to add up an improvised revenue model to your existing project.
Testing Services Included
Hiring a team of software engineers might and expect them to deliver a robust software project as well as test it requires too much overheads and a lot of work for the same team. While outsourcing the same job to an agency ensures that project is delivered on time, works seamlessly and you do not have a headache of testing it ‘n’ number of times before a perfect product is delivered to you.
Technology partner for life
It is very difficult for a company to find a techie who understands your company’s objectives and goals , is reliable and dedicated. Having been in a contract with your firm for maintenance services, the outsourced firm has to be responsible for providing the software upgrades as and when required and the expertise you can trust.
Getting access to exclusive tools
Hiring engineers is not enough, but there is also a cost associated with providing your in-house team with appropriate tools, which by the way can be really expensive. Why would you buy such tools that you know, are going to be used once in the life-cycle of your software product. While outsourcing the project not only did you save the cost on not hiring engineers in-house but also got access to the best tools used in the IT industry to develop a software.
As we saw that not only did we save the cost by outsourcing our IT project, but hiring that extra engineer force and the cost overheads that came along with it were avoided. So it is clearly understandable that to be a successful founder of tech startup, we neither need to be technically equipped nor do we require the help of a technically sound co-founder. All that is required is the right idea and to transform it into a reality.
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Marketing And Artificial Intelligence: How The Combination Is Taking The Industry By Storm?
Marketing has always been desired when your business cares to promote trade, acquire more market share, or be recognized with its brand’s name. It is a basic act of attracting people to show interest in your product line so you can convert them into customers and achieve short-term or long-term organizational goals accordingly. Every business’s prime objective is to earn a profit, and fruitful or effective marketing plays a significant role in driving sales and generating revenues. Therefore, it is imperative to focus on a constructive marketing approach, be it traditional or conventional; the idea should be to promote the business and invite trade opportunities. Nowadays, marketing has helped businesses make strong connections with the customers and maintain a relationship that completely spins around what they aspire from your business. The approach is known for its ability to persuade people because, with rising consumerism levels, companies must strengthen their customer base and gradually expand it. Artificial Intelligence In Marketing Factors like technological advancements, the need for effective communication, and rising competition have simulated many businesses to look after their marketing and advertising strategies so they can survive in the cut-throat race and continue to keep their brand image. Technology, in specific Artificial Intelligence, has lately become a part of strategic marketing. Since technology guarantees speed and error-free computations, hard-core marketers make use of Artificial Intelligence to collect and observe piles of customer-centric data, which includes classifying the needs of a group of people, analyzing the buying trends, and collating factual information about the impact of various marketing methods used in the overall industry. This enables them to distinguish between a particular set of observations and comprehend the pros and cons of each marketing method applied to them. Once this is done, businesses get a better insight into individual wants and what marketing approach it is affected by the most. AI marketing is the talk of the town and has brought a positive impact on the existing traditional marketing approaches, making ways simpler and better. The prime reason to include AI techniques to cater to business marketing needs is that with the rising consumerism, it is hard to manage data trends, customer behavior graphs, and important stats which is essential for a business. AI tools effectively manage to collate such details and provide decisive arguments, where required, to save time and speed up the overall process. If you observe any traditional marketing approach, it involves different ways of targeting and retargeting the customers at various points of time to ensure brand loyalty. On the other hand, with the much-needed introduction of AI methodologies, your business can come up with automated yet monitored ways to reach out to the customer and complete the marketing procedure as proposed by your business. Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence In Marketing Technology and marketing, if used in a synchronized way bring fruitful results for a business, and for that to happen, enterprises have to work on how they invest their time and efforts in understanding the impact of AI on business development tools, including marketing. The following are some of the plus points that a business enjoys while incorporating Artificial Intelligence into marketing strategies: Monitors Overview Of The Process Since it is considered that customer reaction is an impact of the business activities, the disposable behavior of a customer is based on what your business offers to them, in terms of product/service, after-sales services, attracting via alluring advertising programs, the price of the product, etc. These factors are precisely taken into consideration in order to predict customer behavior and anticipate future sales. This analysis and segmentation of customer behavior and related trends allow a business to get an overall perspective of the suitable marketing approach which seems promising and ensures back results. Machined And Skillful Work Technology itself sends a reminder to be better than what it is now, in simpler terms, using AI for marketing practices allows your process to strategically understand the situation and learn from the experience to provide necessary improvisations to the existing approach. It is a continuous process that includes AI to repeatedly search for data trends and bring relatable content for the customers. As a business, it allows you to focus on other operations and initiate a self-driven marketing approach. Avoids Excessive Revenue Reduction Customer retention is a skill that every business strives to be good at and losing loyal customers to your competitor surely wouldn’t be a good thing for your business. Understanding and fulfilling the customer-needs ensure brand loyalty thus helps in preventing the need for disinterest. AI plays an important role in comprehending this data so your business can completely know what your loyal customers require. Collating this information gives the control to draw outline marketing programs and drive sales campaigns quickly. Reduced Manual Marketing and Increased Bot Support Hiring marketing experts sure can suffice the process requirements at many levels, however, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, you can initiate proactive advertising drives and run campaigns that are run by bots and automated chat programs. This change from manual marketing techniques to tech marketing allows your business to run perpetual campaigns that don’t require much human intervention. By allowing AI to take over customer support via chat help, you can ensure your business to revert to customer queries in less time, which is a great approach to customer satisfaction. Add A Personalized Touch To Your Approach It is observed that advertising mails and promotional offers that are sent out for the target audience often seem redundant and lack a human touch. Well, AI helps a business to build automated responses that have a personalized message, basis the customer behavior and concern. It could be emails, upcoming future campaigns, social media information, anything that attracts customer attention in a better and improved way. Personalized messages can be well programmed by accumulating customer’s anticipated behavior and buying trends so that they feel worthwhile trading with you. If your business requires assistance in maintaining marketing and AI together and fails to fulfill the task due to a lack of competence or path guidance, you can consider industry experts such as SaffronEdge, where you can amplify your business development pace and include technology in an organized and precise way. We are SaffronEdge industry insights to build personalized marketing plans that tackle the trading situations and ease up advertising and promotional practices done to escalate revenue graphs. ...
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5 Things you must do on Facebook for your Dental Practice
For decades, dentists built their practice by relying exclusively on reputation and word of mouth marketing. But today, most of their audience is on social media platforms. Facebook alone hosts billions of users. PEW research suggests that 70 percent of the Facebook users visit the site on a daily basis, which is why it has become an important platform for many marketers. Source: Pewinternet The dental industry is predicted to be worth around $36.8 billion by 2021. If your practice wants a share in the profit, it must include Facebook in its marketing plan. There are various ways to attract, retain and ultimately market to your patients on Facebook. This article will help dentists who need a little push in their Facebook marketing efforts. Let’s get started! Why Does Facebook Marketing matter for Dentists? Facebook is the most popular social channel for marketers. It alone drives nearly 25 percent of social media referral traffic. Here is why you should focus on Facebook for your dental practice. Facebook helps in earning patients’ trust: Since the boom of social networking sites, many dental practices are rightly seeing the power of being active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Dentists are in a different position than many other industries when it comes to marketing on Facebook. Dentists have to build trust and earn a patient’s confidence to convince them for an appointment. Facebook offers the ultimate way to build relationships with your potential customers. Helps you remove stigmas associated with dental visits: There is a certain fear and anxiety associated with dental visits, and Facebook can be used to convince your patients that you deliver a pain-free experience. You can remove the stigma around visiting a dentist through light-hearted Facebook content. Facebook gives you the platform you need to connect with prospects and remind them that you are all about people, not just teeth. It helps people find you online: Imagine a potential new patient looking for a new dentist in your area. He checks your Facebook page with convincing photos and testimonials that compels them to head to your website. Facebook makes it a lot easier for people to find you online. The quality content instills confidence in new patients and helps old ones to stay in touch with your practice. 5 things to do on Facebook for successful dental practice: Getting the most out of Facebook for your practice can be challenging. But don’t worry. Here we present the 5 things that you must do to get yourself on the right track with Facebook. Create a Facebook page: Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with billions of active users. For dentists, it is easily one of the most important social media platforms to grow their practice. Every dentist needs a Facebook page to connect with their patients, prospects, and fans. Here is everything you need to know to make and optimize your Facebook page for your practice. Building a Facebook page: Setting up a Facebook page for your practice is a free and simple process. If you have just started, all you need to do is follow these four steps to create your Facebook dental page. Go to the Facebook page creation page. Choose the right option for your dental practice on that page. Enter your business category and contact information. Upload an appropriate profile picture and cover photo for your Facebook page. Add a short description of your practice Optimize your page: After setting up your practice Facebook page, you need to include all the elements and additional tips on the page to get the most out of it. Verify your Facebook page: Verification adds a small gray checkmark to your Facebook name. It tells people that you are an authentic business. It also improves your page ranking in Facebook search results. Here’s how to verify your page: Go to Settings at the top of your page Click Page Verification from General Click ‘Verify this Page,’ and then click Get Started Click ‘Verify this Page with documents.’ You can also verify your page by entering your business phone number, your country, and language. Get a verification code by clicking Call Me Now Enter the verification code and click Continue Fill out your About section: Enter information about your practice in the About section of your Facebook page. Include your business contact number, address, website URL and business hours. Try to provide your location on Google Map if possible. This makes it easier for new patients to locate you. Add a call to action: The call to action button appears next to your page’s Like button. Facebook allows businesses to choose from a variety of call to action buttons, including options such as ‘Call now’ and ‘Book now.’ This makes it easier for prospects to call you directly from their mobile devices or schedule an appointment with a few clicks. Post good content: Posting quality content regularly is a challenging task and requires a lot of dedication. Facebook is a community-oriented platform where users will engage with valuable information if it is presented in an easy-to-digest manner. Keep patients educated about dental health: People appreciate posts that provide valuable information and tips on maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Engage your patients and prospects through education posts about dental health. Stir their interest through content that not only promotes your expertise but shows that you care about the overall well-being of your patients. Post about your office team members: Since Facebook is a social networking site, people love to connect with others and learn their personal bits of information. Try to share details about your practice, your dental office, and team members. Sharing posts about your team members remove patient’s anxiety and bring them closer to your practice. Engage with fun facts: Take the time to look for fun dental facts that will engage your followers. Content that put a smile on your patient’s face is also helpful in building loyalty. Sharing a fun dental fact, a quirky tip or anything that your patients find interesting compels them to share it with their own community and provides you the opportunity to reach to a wide range of audience and gain new patients. This can be an effective way to widen your customer base. Set a posting schedule you can follow: Following a posting schedule is easily said than done. Posting content regularly is important when it comes to engaging prospects on Facebook. As a dentist, your time is valuable. You will be busy helping your patients and running your practice. Make sure you plan a reasonable Facebook posting schedule and commit to it. Showcase your services: Don’t just ask people to buy your product or services on Facebook. Instead, show them the value your services have provided to patients. Promote and showcase your services by highlighting the people using it to show real-life results. Share about recently completed successful cases and post ‘before and after’ pictures, so that prospects can see your work. It is the best way to promote yourself on Facebook without pushing people away. Promote your involvement in community events: If you are doing some good work for your community, share it with your followers on Facebook. Let them know about your involvement in community events. It provides your patients and prospects an opportunity to connect with you through a common cause. You also build a good reputation when people see the work you do beyond your practice. Run Facebook ads: Facebook allows dentists to post highly targeted ads about their practice. Ads published on Facebook has the potential to reach thousands of active users. There are over 4 million advertisers currently cashing in on Facebook’s ad network to reach their target audience. Facebook has access to personal information about users and knows more about them than any other social media network. They know their age, location, income, interests, family status, etc. which make Facebook ads highly successful. To create successful ads on Facebook, make sure you follow these important steps. Improve your message: Before starting a Facebook ad campaign, be sure your content has an objective. Tailor your Facebook ads according to the interests of your target audience. Know who to target and what you have to say. A Facebook ad campaign for a dental practice should focus on: Spreading awareness about your dental practice Showing potential patients what makes your practice unique from others Introducing a new dentist or another team member Talking about the value that your service provides to patients Highlighting the patient’s testimonials Promoting a specific dental procedure Sharing a business milestone If you know the purpose of your ad, you will be in a better position to decide your target audience and what to say to convince people to take a specific action. Improve your ad targeting: After you know the purpose of your ad, it is time to decide your target audience. Target your ad to people who will likely resonate with the message and take action. The following tips will help you in targeting the right people to achieve your goals. Target lookalike audience: If building awareness about your dental practice is your goal, you might want to target an audience whose interests are similar to your current patient population. Target current patients: If your aim is to fill spots left open by last-minute cancellation, target your current patient population. Because they are more likely to respond to the ad, as they already know your practice’s culture. A better practice to lure patients into an appointment is by offering a discount or a free upgraded service to the first person who responds. Target retired people: If you are advertising dental savings plans, targeting retired people will be your first bet. These people no longer have any dental insurance and will likely take action Retargeting: If you want to get maximum people into your sales funnel, the best people to target are the ones who have been to your website. Target them with an ad that gives them a call to action to download free content or a free consult based on their interests they’ve shown on your website. Improve your visuals: Photos and videos engage and drive more traffic to your website and result in more actions. Once you know the purpose of your Facebook ad and your target audience, you can try different versions your copy and check which version looks best. This can be done by creating a split test in Facebook’s ad manager. Split-testing ads is a powerful way to improve your results and lower your advertising costs. The split-testing ad makes it possible to know what words or visuals will resonate at a given time. To split-test an ad, you need to create an ad and duplicate it. Then you need to replace the text, image, or video, and submit it. Create Facebook groups Facebook groups are a great way for engaging your prospects and past patients. It also allows you to connect with peers, potential partners, and customers. Create a private Facebook group for regular patients: Create a private Facebook group and offer access to your patients as part of a program. Regular patients would like to work more closely with you and connect with the like-minded people in a similar position. People must buy and request to join. Create a public Facebook group for subscribers: Allow people to access this group by signing up to your newsletter or email list. Promote this group as much as possible to attract new people. It is important to engage the members regularly if you want to turn them into customers. Convince the members by showing you’re your work first hand. The people on your email list are considered a higher quality leads and are likely the prospects to take action. Analyze the insights: An important and powerful tool that allows you to measure the performance of your business page is Facebook Insights. Facebook analytics enable you to understand who your most engaged audience is and what type of content is driving the most traffic to your page. Unfortunately, most dentists overlook it because they don’t know which metrics they need to pay attention to. To better understand Facebook insights, go to your dental page and click insights. You will end up on your dashboard with many sections. These sections include: Overview: It gives you a view of everything that has happened on your page in the last. The three important measures you should focus here are page likes, post reach, and engagement. Source: Hootsuite Visits: This section allows you to see how many people are visiting your page and where they are coming from. The important metrics in this section are the Page and Tab visits and External Referrers. Posts: This section provides you data about your page followers and when they are online. It also helps you to analyze how your posts are performing based on average reach and engagement. Another important metric to focus on in this section is the Top posts from the pages you like. It is a great way to keep track of your competitors and how they are reaching the audience. Source: Hootsuite People: This tab on your dashboard lets you get to know your audience better by looking at three important metrics. They include Your Fans (who is liking your page, their age, location, gender, language, etc.), People Reached, and People Engaged. Facebook analytics tips: Once you have a good understanding of Facebook page insights, these tips will help you get the most out of it. Check back often Download the Facebook Pages Manager app Request an easy-to-find page URL Update relevant info Download your data These tips will allow you to track the success of your dental practice marketing on Facebook easily and efficiently. ...
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Why is Headless Commerce the future for Brands and Retailers
With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the eCommerce industry saw a massive rise in terms of sales. Since COVID-19 had shut down retail stores, the online eCommerce world saw a significant transformation. The global lockdown led to an increase in global retail sales. According to Statista, the expected eCommerce growth will reach an industry worth $26.7 trillion by 2022. Increase of $23.6 trillion from 2018! With more and more online shopping options, customers have found different channels to purchase products. Today, there are numerous devices they can shop from: mobile, computers, and intelligent devices. According to a study conducted by Microsoft, around 58% of the shoppers don't prefer buying from an online shop that offers a poor customer experience. Offering seamless, fast, and intuitive user experiences throughout the shopping process are challenging for many eCommerce businesses. Do you know that Headless commerce can create a significant impact on enhancing user experiences? Today, headless commerce is transforming the eCommerce world by offering customer-focused technology that enables online businesses to develop future-proof shopping experiences. If eCommerce brands and retailers want to scale their digital channels, they need a robust technology like headless commerce. Let's understand the concept of headless commerce and how it can offer a future-proof eCommerce solution to online businesses. What is Headless Commerce? Before we jump onto the concept of headless eCommerce, let's find out the features that traditional eCommerce platforms lack. Conventional eCommerce platforms like Magento are developed on a monolithic architecture. It is tightly coupled with the back-end and front-end. It allows businesses to sell their products via a web-based shopping experience. However, customer demands and behavior are changing. Shopping behaviors have changed drastically. With the growth of smartphone users worldwide, more customers tend to purchase or surf across the web through their smart devices. The demand for smartphones is quite evident if we see the figures. According to Gartner, the worldwide growth in sales for smartphones went up by 26% in the first quarter of 2021. Therefore, eCommerce businesses have a multi-channel approach. They need to provide personalized shopping experiences to match the prevailing level of customer satisfaction. If brands and retailers want to keep up with the evolving customer expectations, they'll need a flexible and agile eCommerce solution. The answer to that is headless eCommerce! An eCommerce business with a headless commerce setup will fully decouple the front-end and back-end. They communicate via APIs (the acronym for Application Programming Interface). Headless eCommerce has different features too. It utilizes headless CMS and a headless eCommerce platform to run various operations. These features enable eCommerce businesses to simplify product logistics, inventory management, marketing, etc. They can distribute content through APIs across various devices and channels with just a push button. These features allow businesses to streamline content easily. It will enable them to offer a seamless shopping experience across all devices. Why Should You Consider Headless Commerce? How Does It Make Them Future-Ready? Headless commerce can help eCommerce businesses meet modern market demands. They allow online companies to gain an omnichannel approach and offer personalized experiences. Many small businesses can quickly meet small customer demands through their small online shop and a website. However, the problems start rising when their business scales or expands to new platforms. Comparing headless CMS and traditional CMS The most significant advantage of headless commerce is that it allows businesses to create content once and utilize it across all channels. With traditional content management, eCommerce businesses were not allowed to do so. Headless eCommerce setup will enable enterprises to: Handle storefronts across multiple channels. Offer enticing UI and apply visual editing. Use technology to boost performance & security. Develop flexible, customized storefronts. Focus on customer solutions The Key Benefits Of headless commerce 1. Improved user experiences As mentioned above, the headless setup allows eCommerce businesses to manage content using two critical components. These components enable your business to maximize users' experience and integrate a headless CMS with your eCommerce platform. Once you integrate your content with your headless CMS, you can quickly deliver the same content across multiple channels. Therefore, your brand will be able to provide an omnichannel experience. Source: Unsplash You also get a centralized content management system that is very helpful in creating multilingual content to internationalize your offerings. You get to modernize your CMS by adding social media services with an API. How does that benefit you? With an omnichannel approach, marketers use language as a marketing tool to engage new audiences from new markets without spending loads of money on a translation team. 2. E-commerce Personalization E-commerce personalization can help your eCommerce business to cater to individual needs. You can offer services that align with your customer's intent. It also allows companies to provide context to different customers from various other channels. 3. Enhanced security and performance Stores developed on the top of a headless architecture tend to load faster than traditional architectures. They also offer a greater level of security. How do these things affect customer experience? A fast-loading website that is responsive to its viewers has a more significant influence on them. Source: Unsplash When a website loads quickly, it adds up to the user experience and boosts the organic and SEO performance of the website. Today, many eCommerce storefronts are developed using statically-generated sites. These websites have increased efficiency because a headless configuration works relentlessly to reduce the website's loading time and boost performance. As loading time decreases, businesses offer a better user experience that improves quality scores and decreases ad spend. 4. Flexibility and faster deployments The headless architecture offers high flexibility and complete control to front-end developers. Developers can curate user experiences from scratch as per their customer demands and help you meet your eCommerce store needs. Front-end developers working with headless don't have to worry about back-end limitations because they cab fetch enough data from an API call. When we talk about smaller-to-larger changes, a front-end developer can operate independently via any back-end system. How Does that help your business? It allows you to make efficient storefront updates. 5. Quick time to market Unlike the traditional architectures, a headless commerce setup is entirely indifferent to the kind of technology you are using. The headless commerce setup shall remain independent of any future changes too. Due to this reason, developers get a lot of freedom regarding their decisions related to technology. How will that benefit your team? When developers get the space to make decisions, your marketing team has more time to take new initiatives and create new marketing campaigns. Hence, your marketing team has more time to work across multiple channels across various devices. 6. How do you decide when to go headless? Many businesses struggle to find the best time to shift to headless. It can be difficult for your business to realize the best time. If you have a custom eCommerce platform or eCommerce solutions like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Adobe Experience Manager, having a headless architecture can make your business more manageable, efficient, and profitable. A CMS/eCommerce solution is very reliable compared to the above cases. There are a few questions that you must ask yourself before implementing your headless eCommerce architecture. What are your targeted devices? What technology do you want to use? Do you expect redesigning at some point in time? These questions are critical to ask before taking your first step towards headless commerce. Conclusion Do you think you want to implement headless eCommerce for accelerated growth? If you are planning to do so, wait no more! With the propelling rise of eCommerce adoption among customers, brands and retailers need to provide their shoppers with a notch higher online shopping experience. Headless commerce allows you to deliver an enhanced shopping experience and increase eCommerce efficiency at scale. At Saffron Edge, we can help your business adopt necessary technological changes. We have built over dozen custom-field types with headless eCommerce. Get in touch with our experts and initiate your practice towards a future-proof eCommerce business. ...
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