So, what is Custom Software Development?
Custom software development, in essence, is translating your users’ needs and your product’s functionalities into something a computer will understand. It entails designing, building, deploying, and maintaining software specific to your designated group of users, organizations, and functions.
The Pros and Cons of Software Development
There are plenty of pros and cons (benefits and costs) to custom software development. It takes time, effort, and capital to create everything you envision in your product. However, the finished results can be incredible and necessary solutions that users will love.
Benefits:
- Tailoring functionality and workflow to your specific set of users
- Fostering product-market fit
- Creating beautiful, relatable, and engaging designs
- Increasing conversion rates throughout your app, website, or product
- Boosting usability and value-add to users
- Building a machine of organic marketing
- Precisely solving problems and meeting today’s demand
- Overall, emotional experience with Overall, emotional experience with a product
- Optimizing the experience of your useres interacting with computer systems – one (critical) facet of UX
Costs:
- Funding: generally around a minimum of $10,000. Prices vary depending on the complexity of design and functionality and generally fall in the range of $30K – $300K. But we can walk you through this during our initial deep dive call.
- Effort and Time: this will be your project—especially with a one-time developer (rather than with experienced, long-term development partners.) That means it’ll be your determination that’ll propel its success As opposed to custom software development, pre-packaged software carries less risk and efforts will be minimal. But so might be your product-market fit and returns.
DELIVERABLES
High-Fidelity Designs
- We create a pixel-perfect blueprint of the application experience
Administrative Dashboard
- We enable you to view data, gather insights and carry out helpdesk tasks
Application & Server Codebases
- We establish your intellectual property, hosted on Github, BitBucket or GitLab
Play Store Submission
- We guide app submission & acceptance, and build your Google Play store page,
Custom Software Development for SMBs
There are plenty of reasons why an SMB should choose custom software development:
- Automating your SMB’s unique processes and increasing operational efficiency.
- Building tools that scale and adapt with you in the long-run, and that are tailored specifically to your users and their workflows.
- Baking in the vital and specialized data management and security protocols you need into your internal operations.
- Decreasing reliability on external, third-party products (and their customer support lines.)
- Boosting marketing efforts by building brand reputation, authority, and engagement.
- Staying competitive with primary, proprietary tools built for your unique needs in your larger industry.
And finally, the greatest reason of all: with custom software development for SMBs, you’re able to build essential internal tools (CRMS, ERPs, DMSs, etc.) that are customized precisely for your business’ needs and complexities, sometimes at a lesser cost of annual subscriptions or perpetual licenses of inflexible, off-the-shelf software.
Custom Software Development Best Practices
At Goji Labs, we’re big believers in combining industry best practices with our robust custom software development methodology.
Some custom software development best practices we follow are:
- Extensive planning and strategy: to know exactly what your business’ needs are, and pinpoint exactly which problems, unique to your business, you’re trying to solve.
- Use cases: to tailor our design and development processes precisely to your users.
- Competitive research: to learn from and understand how your competitors might be solving similar problems.
- Thorough UX Design process: to ensure the tools you build will make life easier for your stakeholders—not more difficult.
- Building scalably and flexibly: to make your software something that your in-house teams can adjust and maintain as you scale.
Outline your products goals & problems
Define success metrics
Challenge critical assumptions
Reduce risk
Create lasting user impact
Drive revenue