Written by: Ilia Kiselevich, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The dynamic startup landscape dictates its rules: trends come and go in the blink of an eye, competition is fierce, and the quickest time to market determines your startup's fate. In such circumstances, it’s vital to set the right priorities to pave the way for long-term success.
Selecting the right technologies from the outset is one of the most crucial considerations that can prevent costly mistakes in the future.
For example, one of our recent clients came to us to scale their MVP developed by another vendor but ended up rebuilding it from scratch. The reason lay in the outdated technologies at its core, which didn’t support the required changes. Though we saved the project, the company had to increase the initial product development budget by 30%.
Further in the article, I’ll provide my vision of how technology choices can either empower or wreck your business. Hopefully, it will help you not get into a miserable situation.
1. Time to market
Time to market often shapes a startup’s ability to gain a competitive edge. The longer it takes to launch, the greater the risk of losing potential clients to competitors.
Early market entry also establishes brand recognition and credibility, as well as provides a valuable opportunity to test the idea on the real market, gather feedback, and iterate faster.
What technology choices empower faster time-to-market?
Speaking of the tech choices to help you bring your app to the market sooner, you should look towards cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native.
These tools provide a wealth of pre-built components and libraries and enable you to develop a single codebase that works on iOS and Android. This significantly reduces development time and effort.
Lately, our clients are increasingly opting for Flutter due to its simplicity and growing capabilities. Such popularity emphasizes its relevance for various domains, as our team has already implemented. Flutter projects in healthcare, social media, business, and more.
2. Budget
Tight budgets are a significant challenge for startups as they leave little room for errors. Plus, it’s not enough to just develop an application—you need to properly promote it so that it starts to pay off and make a profit.
So, choosing the most beneficial development approach within your budget is critical. What’s more, it should also be aligned with other criteria, such as quality or security, not to pay twice in case of a mistake.
A cost-effective technology choice
As I mentioned earlier, developing a cross-platform app requires a single codebase for iOS and Android. It saves time and reduces resources for coding, testing, and maintenance.
With fewer resources needed, startups substantially cut development costs while still delivering a high-quality, native-like user experience on multiple platforms. In our calculations, a Flutter app typically costs 30%-40% less than a native app.
3. Quality
Prioritizing product quality lays the foundation for the product’s competitiveness in the market. While initial versions of your app may lack some extra features, the core functionality should perform flawlessly to make a positive impression and win users.
What technologies let you build the best apps in terms of quality?
In developer circles, native development is considered the standard of the highest quality. Native programming languages like Swift and Kotlin indeed excel at delivering top-notch experiences.
What if your budget is limited?
Native apps usually come at higher costs, which are not always affordable for startups. At this point, you must honestly evaluate your startup’s financial capabilities to make the right decision. For example, Flutter has stepped far forward in terms of app stability and bug-free performance while being more budget-friendly than native app development approaches.
Start with an MVP
I recommend starting gradually and developing an MVP first. This approach makes you pay attention only to the key features and deliver a robust foundation before adding complexity, resulting in a more stable and refined final product.
4. User experience (UX)
A well-designed, intuitive UX not only enhances user engagement but also increases the likelihood of word-of-mouth recommendations and positive reviews. All these factors can help your startup build a solid user base and establish brand loyalty. Moreover, a positive UX encourages users to explore the app's full functionality and, ultimately, generate more revenue.
Technologies for a great app UX
If you prioritize outstanding UX for your future app, I recommend you pay attention to modern front-end frameworks like React and Vue.js. Compared to outdated technologies, these tools enhance page loading speed and provide smooth in-app interactions, ensuring users are not frustrated by sluggish performance.
5. Scalability and adaptability
Startups often begin with modest user bases, but their goal is potential growth. As such, developers should consider scalability options in the early stages of app development to ensure that the increasing numbers of users, transactions, or data won’t cause a significant drop in app performance.
Adaptability is no less essential because startups need to be agile and responsive to changes in user preferences, market dynamics, and technological advancements. The ability to introduce new features or enhancements quickly makes your app stay relevant.
How to ensure the app’s seamless growth with your technology choices?
As a startup owner, opt for modern technologies that facilitate scalability and adaptability. Outdated technologies are poorly supported by communities and become costly to maintain over time.
For example, modern scalable NoSQL database systems like MongoDB offer robust knowledge bases and efficient data handling. Scalable backend frameworks like Node.js and Django ensure efficient processing of user requests as the user base expands.
6. Security
Hardly anything has a greater impact on user trust and business reputation than data security. In our digital age, where cyber threats are ever-present, user data protection is critical in any industry, not only fintech and healthcare startups.
I bet you’re not an entrepreneur who would gladly deal with regulatory fines or legal liabilities. Thus, you should approach the issue of choosing a tech stack for your app very responsibly, especially if sensitive data is at the core of operations.
Security-first technology choices
Opting for a programming language renowned for its strong security attributes, such as memory-safe languages like Rust or Kotlin, can diminish the risk of encountering vulnerabilities like buffer overflows.
For apps with regular transactions and confidential data, digital finance institutions, for example, often employ Ruby in tandem with the Ruby on Rails framework.
Bottom line
As you see, technology choices play a pivotal role in determining startup success. I have outlined the six most critical factors that, based on our experience, can result in startup failure due to inadequate technology choices.
Prioritizing all of them is impossible in the early stages and will leave you frustrated. The right approach would be to choose the most important criteria for your startup and look for technologies and frameworks as per your requirements.
I also firmly believe that seeking advice from experts in the field is always a wise move. When you face doubts and the fate of your entire business is at stake, a fresh perspective from a tech provider can open up some non-trivial ways out.
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Ilia Kiselevich, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
CEO & Founder of SolveIt – a mobile development company, entrepreneur and product owner of HBT. Ilia Kiselevich is an entrepreneur with a keen eye for emerging technologies and a deep understanding of market dynamics committed to transforming ideas into reality. Under Ilia's guidance, SolveIt has garnered recognition for its remarkable quality of delivered solutions, award-winning UX/UI design, and 100% customer satisfaction score.
