In this modern-day, tech-driven age, a customer’s primary point of interaction with a business is with its digital product.

Whether that product is an app, a website, or a software program, the average consumer is likely to base their engagement (or disengagement) with an organization entirely on that product’s design—and that’s not just limited to its visual components. It includes customer experience design, workflow design, and industrial design—among others.

In whatever format, the architecting of the experience makes or breaks an organization’s interaction with its customers.

Your Willingness to Adapt or Change is Vital (Yes, You)

The return on investment can be astronomical for organizations ready to go the extra mile to produce a product with a design centered around solid business fundamentals and genuine user needs.

How many consumers will voluntarily visit a site or download an app that has fallen flat on user experience?

How many have the patience for disorganized platforms?

. But let’s not forget the importance of incorporating an empathic approach to the user’s life within and outside the context of your product’s offerings.

There are too many digital products available to consumers across every market for them to choose one that is perfunctory or could be more productive. With this inundation of choice, consumers are likely to flock to products that are not only easy to use but high-quality and solutions-oriented.

For this reason, creating a comprehensive digital product is the easiest way for a company to set itself apart in a competitive industry and increase its market and mind share.

An organization’s digital product needs to go beyond pixels and screens; it needs to be a manifestation of the company itself. Businesses can show consumers their underlying values and fundamentals between the lines of code and its visual representation. In doing so, they drive digital engagement, increasing mind share and product attention while producing more opportunities to build lifelong customer relationships.

This idea goes beyond differentiating a company from market competitors; it allows organizations like yours to show their audience precisely who they are, why they are here, and what they can provide.

The market and its needs should heavily influence product decision-making. This ensures that the final offering represents the existing demand while catering to user needs.

In my extensive experience as a lead designer at Planetary and my interests beyond day-to-day work, that implication is always best approached logically. While it may seem wise to utilize proven solutions, many of these approaches have begun to gather dust in the endlessly growing field of product development.

With intentional research and a scalable system, companies have a far better chance of establishing themselves in complex industries and creating universal products configured for success.

Planetary built its pragmatic strategy for product development and comprehensive design from exposure to a broad spectrum of industries, including real estate, private credit, and agriculture—and a personal partiality for international travel. This is just a small subset of the broad spectrum of industries we serve.

Having been personally molded by these experiences, I have developed a unique outlook on technical solutions—what problems consumers need to solve and how they will use digital solutions.

Every decision I have made in my work can be easily traced to transparent research and collected data. That practicality is something I am thrilled to bring to Planetary’s product design initiatives every day.

Fitting Business Fundamentals Into Product Design

For companies with solid fundamentals, product design becomes simple. When you present a product team with clear goals and subsequent values, those values are integrated with best practices in digital design and applied directly to the product’s creation.

As a whole, this allows a product to be built as a better reflection of your business.

It also provides an excellent opportunity for new businesses to consider how their business runs—or will run—in detail. For established companies, this process forces decision-makers to reimagine their overall purpose and go back to the drawing board to optimize user-centric goals.

This process is far more difficult when such fundamentals are lacking. Without a transparent business model, product designers will approach a design project from a removed product development standpoint, resulting in a generic solution. While simple, tested solutions are not a 

 end result, it allows more user-centric, innovative competitors to take your business.

Sure, product development teams will apply best digital design practices, but it is far less likely your product will fill the specific niche it was meant to, and consumers will undoubtedly feel it in their experience.

My advice for market newcomers and entrepreneurs? 

If there is no clear business model when your company is starting out—create one. Digital products allow companies to test strategies and challenge industry assumptions. The best digital products will evolve as your company does, and they’ll have tangible evidence to support their strategy every step of the way.

A Comprehensive Design Can Surpass Innovative Ideas

The fundamentals and goals of a company don’t have to be the most extraordinary or unique to be successful. In fact, there’s evidence that a comprehensive digital product can surpass even the most innovative ideas.

 problems to solve—it just has to solve old problems in the most innovative and engaging way for its audience.

Take any top start-up making strides within their respective industries. Often, you will see a productive twist on an age-old idea. For instance, learning a foreign language isn’t a new concept. However, 

 presents a sleek, easily-digestible product that keeps determined language learners fully engaged.

Similarly, Slack was not the first company to produce a product designed for inter-organizational communication. It was, however, able to create a comprehensive product that encouraged connection from the bottom to the top. It started gaining traction within small teams in large organizations and slowly expanded upwards, rather than the typical structure of an organization mandating a tool.

 also provides a unique productization of the age-old business of buying homes. In minutes, product users (potential sellers or buyers) can use its online platform to meet their immediate needs. For sellers, this means typing in their home addresses to receive an estimate. For buyers, this means finding their perfect home at the click of a button. OpenDoor is streamlining the home buying and selling processes by providing a user-centric product.

So whether you’re reading this and are part of a new startup, mid-level company, or a 

, your digital product doesn’t need to have the newest, shiniest ideas behind it. It just needs to be a productive reflection of your overall purpose and efficiently prioritize the user’s actual pain points.

Moral of the story: A well-thought-out, well-tested product experience will always win over an under-baked, potentially innovative concept.

Early-stage companies have an impression to make, strategies to test, and a niche to occupy. As every product-first company knows, a comprehensive digital product can make those goals far easier to reach. They are an excellent opportunity for a company to establish itself within a competitive market and provide a framework for its evolution. Developing a product with direct solutions is a company’s first step to ensuring its audience follows along.

companies that have been around the block

, however, a high-quality product design offers them a leg up on the competition. In the relentless market environment, comprehensive digital products address the existential threat of product-first startups and allow long-established, perfected business models to enter a new age of productivity.

Regardless of your company’s age or the strength of its foundation, a holistic digital product provides considerable benefits from a financial view. Whether the goal is cutting costs or building revenue, the investment into a high-quality digital product will likely pay off.

This is easy to see when comparing product-first companies to their traditional counterparts. Product-first companies have disrupted traditional industries, and successful incumbents have survived because they’ve begun investing in products as well.

Streaming networks have long since surpassed physical video stores; online shopping has become the preferred option amongst consumers. A well-designed digital platform will almost always win, even when competing against companies with noteworthy legacies.

The Opportunity For Growth Within The Digital Field

One of the most significant advantages of a product-first company model is the ease with which it can grow. Compared to brick-and-mortar alternatives, changing or expanding a digital design to fit your organization’s needs and values is simple and cost-effective.

As a product grows, the opportunity to reuse or overlap design structures increases, there’s less need for new code to be written, and the original blueprint can adapt and evolve with the business.

The potential for growth within the digital field is on an upward trajectory. As the previous hurdles and obstacles of digital development fall by the wayside, open-source technologies and accessible programming continue to increase opportunities for development teams who, only a few years ago, would have had to build products entirely from scratch.

While this accessibility and commoditization of digital development and products certainly simplify the design process, it also places further responsibility on companies to find their edge in a fast-paced, ever-evolving market.

Before taking any leap into product development and design, your team must prepare appropriately to ensure a smooth design process. This begins with providing your product developer with clear goals and ideas.

This starting point goes hand-in-hand with understanding your audience and what they genuinely want in a digital product. At the end of the day, doing your due diligence will ensure you receive a cohesive, productive product structure and, in turn, witness that product’s success in the market.

Below is a collection of fundamental questions an organization’s marketing or product team needs to answer as the first step in starting a digital product design project:

Who are your customers, or who do you think they are?

What do your customers genuinely care about?

What is your core, underlying business model? What values and fundamentals do you want to pull into a digital product?

Beyond product innovation, what is the niche you’re trying to fill? What edge does your company have that sets it apart?

How are you currently providing the value you want to see in your product? What is the best way to integrate that into the design?

What does the competitive landscape look like in your company’s respective industry? How does the solution you want your product to provide fit in?

While the product development process certainly allows for a significant amount of new research, presenting more information to a product developer will result in compounding returns. Another perk? It helps take the strategic responsibility off of the outside party and helps create a product that can compete in complex markets and industries.

Every digital development agency has a different approach to product construction and design. For our team at Planetary, our process is centered around a thorough understanding of your organization’s fundamentals.

We rely on real-time data to establish pragmatic, assertive strategies and work with newly-formed and long-established businesses to build products that reflect their intentional goals and values.

For companies still in the process of laying their foundation, our vast experience offers a singular source of support. We can make realistic assumptions across industry fields, formulate viable hypotheses, and develop the most productive way to test them.

Wherever your organization’s research may not reach, Planetary’s skillset and industry expertise build the bridge.

More than building products based on our years of experience in the digital development field, Planetary endeavors to integrate with our clients and their teams. Finding that appropriate connection relieves the pressure placed on team leads like you. It gives our developers a deeper understanding of how an organization is set up to move forward and grow.

With this integration built into our approach, we can help you develop a streamlined, holistic digital product to achieve a stronger connection with your audiences while representing your company values.

Digital Product Design: How Your Approach Can Make Or Break Your Business

Though the fundamental ideas behind DevOps have been floating around for decades, the concept wasn't fully flushed out nor the term coined until Patrick Debois founded the first devopsday conference in 2009. Since then, the idea has been embraced by major corporations like Amazon, Adobe, Netflix, and Target, and vendors have begun offering services that aligned with the concept.

DevSecOps similarly has roots that stretch back before the 21st century, but it fully emerged as an idea as an attempt to expand upon the core principles of DevOps by shining a light on security concerns as an integrated part of the software development lifecycle.

Understanding the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps can help you determine how you want to relate to safety and security during the development and deployment process. There is a great deal of overlap between DevOps and DevSecOps, so you aren't put in a position where you are throwing out the underlying principles of DevOps to produce a secure product.

At the same time, there are differences that are worth understanding. Let's do a deep dive into how these two approaches are similar and where they diverge.

A portmanteau of "development" and "operations," DevOps is the collection of tools and practices that are specifically designed to emphasize collaboration, communication, and integration between developers and IT operations. DevOps aims to improve how software developers and IT operations pros communicate and collaborate as a part of developing software.

By integrating and automating the steps involved in both software development and IT operations, DevOps can help to shorten and improve the systems and 

Though there isn't a specific definition of DevOps that academics and practitioners have agreed upon, there are a number of key principles that characterize DevOps, including:

A number of the fundamental ideas underlying DevOps practices are related to other well-known practices, including the Agile approach, the Toyota Way, Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle, and Lean manufacturing.

An augmentation of DevOps, DevSecOps allows for integrating security practices into the DevOps approach. A portmanteau of development, security, and operations, this is an approach to development that recognizes the essential role of security as a part of the entire IT and development lifecycle.

While there are important differences between DevSecOps and DevOps, it's worth understanding that there is more overlap between them than there are aspects that set them apart.

Monitoring, automation, and enforcement are all used as a part of DevSecOps to ensure security practices are upheld every step of the way. This can mean setting enforcement rules and using automated testing, but it can also include automatic code remediation when vulnerabilities are discovered.

Are you building a healthcare web app, and you're concerned about securing customer PHI properly? Make sure you 

 to learn about how to protect private data when creating a mHealth app.

Both DevOps and DevSecOps emphasize automation, team collaboration, and improving the security status of a particular project and the organization as a whole.

DevOps and DevSecOps focus on improving team collaboration so that development goals can be met effectively and efficiently.

The collaboration is primarily between developers and operations in the DevOps culture, while the DevSecOps culture emphasizes collaboration between developers and the security team.

DevOps and DevSecOps rely heavily on automation to automate routine operations by implementing scripts that can regularly run. 

This can help ensure that time and energy aren't lost performing repetitive tasks, which means that teams can turn their attention toward the most important objectives that require human effort.

Another shared notion between DevOps and DevSecOps is the necessity of active monitoring to discover any issues early in the process. 

Additionally, continuous monitoring tightens the security posture, limits the attack surface, and improves performance.

One of the primary focuses of both DevOps and DevSecOps is ensuring that development can occur as quickly and efficiently as possible without sacrificing quality or security. 

By focusing on collaboration and automation, these collaborative teams can reduce the time input, improve communication flows, and move through the life cycle more quickly without risking excellence in the final product.

The creation and management of certain resources– such as databases, networks, and servers– can be automated using a tool known as Infrastructure as Code (IAC). This allows teams to create definitions of the resources in code one time instead of repeatedly creating them manually every time they are needed.

This is a tool that is particularly useful when interacting with cloud environments, as it is simple to scale up or down when necessary depending on the current activity on your site.

Now that we've gone over the similarities between DevOps and DevSecOps, let's dive into what sets them apart.

A primary difference between DevOps and DevSecOps is the underlying philosophy. 

While the driving idea behind DevOps is to emphasize collaboration between development and operations teams in order to boost productivity, DevSecOps focuses on the collaboration between teams to make a commitment to security a shared obligation.

The primary purpose of DevSecOps is to keep security in mind when utilizing the principles of DevOps to create a quality product quickly. 

DevOps allows teams to work efficiently and effectively by reducing employee errors and improving collaboration and communication.

It can be best to look at DevSecOps as an extension of DevOps that integrates a larger focus on security testing and considerations at every stage in the process.

While DevOps focuses on bridging the communication gap between teams working on the same project, DevSecOps ensures that a focus on security isn't an afterthought in the process.

One of the major differences between DevOps and DevSecOps is when the security processes are implemented. With DevOps, security begins right after the development pipeline starts. DevSecOps, on the other hand, incorporates security as a part of the initial build process.

 about security. It takes into account every aspect of the development process, including monitoring and detection of vulnerabilities and automated remediation processes.

The point is that DevSecOps emphasizes the necessity of inviting security teams and partners right as the DevOps initiatives begin to set a plan in action for information security and security automation. Additionally, it focuses on helping developers keep security in mind while they're coding, which involves security teams sharing feedback, insights, and visibility about known threats, such as potential malware or insider threats.

This might also involve some security training for developers since more senior developers might not have focused as much on security during the traditional development process.

Many of the most common obstacles DevOps faces have to do with security, which is part of why many organizations have recently shifted from DevOps to DevSecOps.

DevSecOps emerged to help deal with growing security concerns surrounding the development and deployment process, but that doesn't mean the practice doesn't face its own challenges. Some common difficulties include a lack of AppSec tool integration, a knowledge gap in developers, developer overload, and pipeline friction.

While we're on the topic of DevOps and DevSecOps, it's worth mentioning the existence of another related concept– SecOps. A portmanteau for Security and Operations, the goal of SecOps is to make sure that cybersecurity concerns are present as a concern at every development stage. 

A collaboration between IT security and operations tools, SecOps involves processes, tools, and tech designed to ensure that an organization is safe and secure while reducing risk.

How to Transition Your Team From DevOps to DevSecOps

The transition from DevOps to DevSecOps isn't a simple process, but it can be well worth the trouble when you look at the security benefits it offers. It is essential for organizations to deliver software in an agile and streamlined way, and implementing DevSecOps in a way that seamlessly fits into the software development life cycle is a vital task. Otherwise, it can end up causing delays or adding more pressure onto DevOps teams that are already stretched thin.

When you combine automation, open standards, and zero trust as a part of the DevSecOps culture, it helps ensure that security is a priority from the beginning of the life cycle– it's basically baked right into the app from the start. This means that processes, applications, and supply chains can be sufficiently robust while there is also enough flexibility for teams to make sure that they can get their work done and deliver reliable services and apps.

Automation lies at the heart of DevSecOps, just as it does with DevOps. This means that processes can be consistent and repeatable, so all interactions between development, IT infrastructure, and security teams are simplified.

Figuring out the ideal automation structure means automating security throughout the application's entire life cycle. Security tools and checks should be brought into the development and deployment process by creating automated application pipelines. This means that team members can perform specific security checks at every step of the process, meaning that consistency and security are woven right into the fabric of your app.

Automation is absolutely key for ensuring that the added security concerns implied by DevSecOps don't slow down the process. Thanks to the power of automation, teams no longer have to send endless emails back and forth and deal with delays due to manual allocation and execution of tasks.

One of the issues that can arise with DevSecOps is that there are platforms familiar to security professionals and a language used to describe their techniques and processes that aren't immediately comprehensible to developers and IT pros. This means that, in order to successfully transition from DevOps to DevSecOps, you have to find a way for these different teams to be able to clearly communicate with one another and translate the information they're relaying in an understandable fashion.

Open standards and open-source tools can help out as a part of this process. Rather than using proprietary software, you can create standardized platforms and languages that everyone involved in 

When everyone does their work using compatible platforms in a way that is translatable between them, it can reduce the risk of errors and save time along the way.

Finally, an essential principle you'll want to use when implementing DevSecOps is a zero trust security approach. This means that implicit trust models and traditional network perimeters should be assumed to be inadequate for protecting assets, data, and workloads.

This approach leverages the ability for teams to prevent any network breaches from being exploited by automatically segmenting networks. 

 comes from the standpoint that a security environment should be built around the notions of least privilege and de-perimeterization.

When you use a zero trust approach, it means that breaches in one location are confined. Additionally, the regular workflows don't have to be disrupted because the automation allows legitimate users the access they need to continue working.

Are You Looking For the Right Partners For Your Next Project?

As the digital landscape continues to change, security becomes an increasing concern for businesses of all sizes that are developing software products. This means that it's all the more important to choose the right partners during the development process to ensure that you aren't leaving your business or your customer vulnerable to a wide range of security risks.

Are you in the beginning stages of designing an app, and you're trying to find a trustworthy and experienced partner to work with? 

 is a distributed team of experts that specializes in working with businesses of all sizes– whether you're at a Fortune 500 company or a tiny startup, we'd love to hear from you. We have more than a half-century of collective experience, have completed more than one hundred projects, and work tirelessly to help turn your idea into a reality from three different countries around the world.

For nearly a decade, we've been serving customers across the globe. If we sound like the partners you've been looking for, drop us a line and 

DevOps vs. DevSecOps: The Differences Between Them in 2023

Is your business looking to build a web app and needs someone with development expertise to hop on board? Are you beginning your own startup and looking for a tech expert to help you build the app you have in mind?

If you're finding yourself in either of these situations, you're likely faced with the question of whether you should pair up with a technical co-founder or hire a CTO.

While both of these positions have relatively similar day-to-day duties, particularly at the beginning, they differ in their investment in the idea, their stake in the company, and more.

So, which one is right for you? Let's look at what you need to know about technical co-founders and CTOs and examine some alternative options.

A technical co-founder is someone that is there from the very start of a project. This is often somebody you already know– someone just as invested in the idea of the app or project as you are. In the same way you spend your free time thinking about all of the different aspects of how to turn your idea into a reality, your minds are churning away considering all of the different avenues and potentials of the app.

Maybe this is a person you went to college with or worked with closely in the past. This is a person that you have a relationship with that goes way back, where you already have a deep understanding of what it will mean to work with them and how trustworthy they are. You don't expect to be surprised by what the actual experience of working with them on a day-to-day basis will be like.

Since a technical co-founder is someone that has put time, energy, and effort into the project since day one (or one of the days shortly thereafter,) they typically get a large portion of the company. This doesn't necessarily need to be a 50-50 split, but a division that feels fair to both parties is essential to avoid numerous problems down the road.

Essentially, a technical co-founder is simply one of the co-founders of a company that has expertise in building software and the technological aspects of the company. While you might be more of a visionary and a marketing guru, your technical co-founder is the whiz kid that is able to piece the nuts and bolts together.

Are you searching for a SaaS developer that is passionate and talented? This article goes over eight ways you can spot a 

 might sound very similar to the title of technical co-founder, they actually have a number of notable and important differences.

One of the primary differences is when a CTO joins the company. While a technical co-founder has been there since you started scratching the initial idea out on paper, a CTO is someone you search for once you already have a fully formed idea in hand. At this point, you know what you want to do and are simply looking for someone that has the necessary skills to make it happen.

While they don't hop aboard as early as a technical co-founder, a CTO is generally one of the first employees you hire, if not the very first.

Since the CTO is someone you are hiring rather than a co-founder, they will usually have a much smaller stake in the company. Though they often have a good-sized option grant, they usually aren't anywhere near equal owners in the business as you are.

A CTO is usually given a salary of some kind, but this might be below market rates because of their stake in the company. They also aren't necessarily a person that you already have a long-standing relationship with, and they usually aren't on the board in the way a technical co-founder would be.

On the other hand, there are some very strong similarities between the two roles when you actually look at their day-to-day responsibilities.

CTOs and technical co-founders help provide strategic thinking, are responsible for hiring and managing a growing team, are responsible for building the product, and are highly invested in the company's success.

If you're building a web app for your company, deciding whether to pair up with a technical co-founder or hire a CTO is only one of the many decisions you'll have to make about how to create a sleek and functional digital product out of your idea. Check out these articles to learn about whether you need both a 

Understanding the Difference Between Startup CTOs and CTOs at Larger Companies

CTO is a job title that is held at tiny startups and enormous corporations, and it's worth understanding that these are pretty different jobs in practice.

For example, a large company CTO is an executive dealing with budgets, people, and policies. They aren't banging away at the keyboard, writing code until the wee hours of the morning.

In startups, though, CTOs are often responsible for a large chunk of the technical duties at the company, just like a technical co-founder in a new, small company. At the same time, you definitely don't need to hire a CTO simply because you are looking for someone to code an app for you. As we'll discuss later on in the article, there are other ways to produce a digital product without hiring a salaried employee or giving away a huge chunk of your equity.

Do I Need a Technical Co-Founder or a CTO?

The answer to this question depends on a number of different factors specific to your startup.

The first question you'll want to ask has to do with what stage you are at in idea development. Did you just come up with this idea yesterday on your daily run, or have you developed a concept that you're simply ready to press on?

If this is a brand-new concept and you feel like you need technical guidance to move forward, you might consider bringing on a technical co-founder. However, depending on your personal network, you may or may not feel that you already know a good candidate.

Even if you do have a shortlist of people that seem like they could be good fits for the role of a technical co-founder, it's important to recognize just how much of a commitment this can be for someone. Your college buddy might have a bit too much on his plate to take on being the partial owner of a company, or they might not be able to see the vision that you have for the app in a way that impacts their ability to be fully invested.

There are some major potential pitfalls that you'll want to consider before bringing on a technical co-founder that you don't have a long-standing relationship with. One of the most glaring issues is that this individual will have an ownership stake in the company, and you'll want to think carefully about whether that's something you want to hand off to someone you've only recently met.

A CTO is likely the better option if the idea is well-developed and you're looking for someone to help build your app. They won't have an ownership stake in the company, but they will still have the motivation to help the startup succeed.

You'll also want to think about what skill sets are needed for your app project to come to life. Are they something that you could invest in learning, or is it necessary for you to enlist some help? How complex is your concept, and will you need to put together a larger team to make it a reality?

What Are the Alternatives to Hiring a CTO or Partnering With a Technical Co-Founder?

At the same time, it's possible that you don't need a technical co-founder or a CTO at all. The reality is that both a technical co-founder and a CTO are expensive team members to bring aboard. CTOs require a salary and likely a share of the company, while a technical co-founder who has been there from the beginning will probably want a sizable amount of the equity to make it worth their time.

It can be hard to find the right person to play the role of CTO or technical co-founder for your business, but there are lots of freelance developers out there for hire. When you hire freelancers, it means that you don't have to give up valuable equity and also don't have to deal with the expense and burden of having full-time employees.

Of course, there are some potential risks and drawbacks to going this route. Hiring freelancers online can be a bit of a gamble, meaning you could luck out and piece together an all-star team, or you could be running into endless obstacles and issues along the way.

You can even outsource executive tasks to freelancers, which is often cheaper than hiring staff members. Slack, for example, 

outsourced a big chunk of its design work

The reality is, though, that many freelancers are going to be less visionary and more transactional. They can often help you build a very specific product if you are able to communicate what you are looking for, but they typically won't offer a lot of strategic insight. At the end of the day, the quality of the product will likely reflect the quality and clarity of the instructions you give.

Additional issues with hiring freelancers include communicating with people in different time zones, needing to switch developers mid-project, and projects becoming 

Another option is to build an in-house team of developers for your tech needs. If you're not looking for an executive-level tech officer to manage the people that develop your code or you're struggling to find a CTO that meets your needs and your budget, you might consider bringing on some full-time developers.

Benefits of going this route include tightening feedback loops, making communication easier, and maintaining a lean team. At the same time, there are some downsides. It can be a huge time suck to manage employees, and many expenses go along with hiring employees (insurance, equipment, salary, benefits, etc.)

It can be a huge investment to recruit and train a team of people to build your product for you. Though finding talented developers might be easier than finding affordable and skilled CTOs, you'll want to weigh out the benefits versus the costs before choosing to build an in-house team.

Hire an Experienced Software Development Company

Another option you have that avoids the expense of hiring a CTO or partnering with a co-founder is to hire an experienced software development company. This way, you don't have to worry about giving away a stake in your company or dealing with the costs of hiring a salaried employee. It also means that you can maintain full control of your idea, which can be a major benefit when you clearly understand what you're looking for in the final product.

, we love working with startups of all sizes. Sure, we have plenty of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, but it's an absolute delight to help a small startup turn their idea into reality. As a distributed company, we are able to hire the absolute best of the best around the world.

Collectively, we have more than fifty years of experience and have completed more than one hundred projects for Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, small businesses, and startups. Our star-studded client list includes Amazon, Buzzfeed, Pepsi, American Express, and Univision– you can check out 

Rather than giving away half of your company to a technical co-founder or hiring a salaried CTO, why not partner with our team of designers, developers, and product experts? If you're intrigued by the proposition, 

 and tell us a bit about your project today.

Technical Co-Founder or CTO: Which Should You Hire?

Web apps can provide an ideal solution for companies that are looking to create a digital product that doesn't have the same compatibility issues, space limitations, and hefty price tag as mobile apps. As companies have been shifting from traditional models to cloud-based models, web applications have become increasingly popular to streamline operations, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

Though there are many benefits to creating web apps, that doesn't mean there can't be frustrating and costly obstacles that you run into during development.

One of the best ways that you can avoid the problems that commonly plague web app development projects is to familiarize yourself with typical issues and create plans to avoid them right from the get-go.

We've noticed that many web app development mistakes happen because of a lack of planning and a false sense that skipping steps will save money during the process. In order to stay on budget and on time with your project, it's essential to have a clear vision of the final product, a set plan, a realistic budget, and open lines of communication between all parties involved.

Additionally, it's worth taking the time to go through all of the steps, including creating prototypes, building MVPs, and performing thorough testing rather than rushing to launch. Though it might seem more expensive at the time, it ultimately saves you money in the long run.

The core set of users you expect will use your app are the single most important aspect of any digital product. Even if you carefully defined your 

 before the project began and conceived the idea behind your web app to solve a common problem, it's possible to lose sight of your audience as the process chugs along.

It's essential to keep your end customers in mind at every step when you're building a web app. You'll want to be thinking of them when determining which features and functions to include, user flow, aesthetic design, marketing, and more.

When you're creating a web app, it's easy to get ahead of yourself and want to rush to the moment when you can interact with the finished product. This eagerness, mixed with a misconception that they are taking a path that cuts costs, leads many companies to skip 

Creating a prototype is an important step in the process for a number of reasons. For one, it helps create a clearer sense of what the final product can look like while also presenting potential flaws that were difficult to see in the ideation phase.

This is also essential if you need to present your idea to investors or stakeholders, who often need to be able to view and interact with the app before pouring money into the budget.

When you create a prototype as a part of the web app building process, it also helps avoid unwelcome surprises. The last thing you want is for investors, stakeholders, or users to be unpleasantly surprised by what the actual app looks and feels like.

There is a lot of room for miscommunication when describing the intended final outcome of a web app. A prototype helps create a shared vision and reduces the chance that stakeholders will be displeased or that developers will misunderstand what is expected of the intended final product.

Though many companies try to skip the prototype stage to save money, creating a prototype can be a cost-saving effort. When there is a clear picture that is shared by everyone involved, you won't have to spend nearly as much time or money going back and fixing issues once the final product has been built.

Are you ready to build a wireframe and prototype for your web app? Make sure to check out this list of 

 (short for a minimum viable product) is a development technique that involves introducing a digital product to the market with only its most basic features. A common mistake is that companies will be encouraged by the initial positive feedback they received from both investors and trial users, leading them to want to jump ahead to full web app development.

While MVPs are often built to release to customers as an early, basic version of the app, they can also be built to show investors or a small selection of the intended user base.

Creating and testing an MVP has a long list of benefits, including:

Helping to save time and resources by ensuring that the project has a high likelihood of success.

Determining which features are appealing to users and informing decisions about the final version of the product.

Finding out how appealing the product is to its intended user base.

Reducing the cost and time investment of developing the final product.

Finding early adopters and acquiring a potential user base.

Building an MVP offers you a priceless opportunity to gather insight and data about how your users interact with the product and how intuitive they find the interface. It almost always makes sense to build an MVP before moving forward with the final development, as it's a lot cheaper and easier to go back to the drawing board at this stage if necessary.

4. Getting Carried Away With Features and Functionality

It is incredibly easy to get carried away when you start building an app– the deeper you get into the project, the more possibilities you start to see. Features and functions you never intended to be a part of the web app and that don't help fulfill the core purpose suddenly find themselves on the table.

Too many features in a web app can complicate the user flow and lead to an interface that isn't nearly as intuitive as you need it to be. This can also delay product launch, unnecessarily increase page load speeds, and make development take longer than you originally planned.

It's always possible to add new features later. When you're releasing the first iteration of a product, though, you want to focus on the features that support the core mission of the app and simplify the experience users have to engage with the interface.

More isn't always better when it comes to web app development. An overly complicated app released into the marketplace can get lost in the shuffle when users don't quite know how to interact with it. At first, you want to focus on the essential purpose– the problem that the app is solving.

There's really no getting around it– developing a web app is a hefty financial investment. Countless professionals, including designers, developers, and marketing experts, are required to turn an idea into a reality. Of course, you can choose to go the no-code route or hire only a 

 to build your app, but there are other costs to going this route rather than hiring a professional web app development company or building your own in-house team.

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