Understanding the Cost of App Development: A Guide to Budgeting for Your App
How to start scoping?Evaluate where you are starting. Are you starting from zero or have you already accomplished a certain amount of work in trying to define what your product is? What have you already created, produced, or defined - anything you can share to help create some kind of a scoping reference for the team you’ll be working with. Can someone else start to understand your idea and your vision?Some questions to consider…Who is this product for? What problems does it solve? What are the business objectives? Who are the people that are gonna be using it?How are they gonna be using it? Understanding Project RangesA product of any kind, from a web, mobile, or custom software perspective, could have a wide range of costs. The more you invest in defining what your scope needs to be and who it's for, the more you can leverage a budget that will work for your project. The House AnalogyYou wouldn't ask somebody how much a house costs without giving them some idea - where is it? How big is the lot? How many square feet is it? Otherwise, you could be talking anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars. The same goes with software. You’ll want to be as transparent as possible in the beginning, in order to be able to produce the results that you want and that are within your budget. Is there room to grow after you set your scope?This is where we lean on the strategy team with our clients to see where they are at. What is their particular industry vertical like? What is their niche like? What makes the most sense when it comes to developing software?Do we take a very bare-bones, MVP approach that might be a bit more cost-effective and agile to develop? Or is this a critical, "it has to be right on the first go", release? A lot of these things get easier to figure out the closer to the deadline you get because requirements change, constraints change. It's easy to sit down and whiteboard- plan all of it out and then once you get into the reality of the situation, you might realize you need to pivot some, and all of this is happening while the market's ever-shifting.Knowing when to sit in your project’s definitionUnderstand that you could work on the definition forever. Look at what the objective is. Are we trying to get something to market as soon as possible at the highest quality possible with a minimum feature set? There's a goal that needs to be met there. A lot of times, things can get a little sideways when the ideation phase of the project never really stops.You want to get, where you know what your core personas are, you know what they need, you know what problems you're trying to solve and you have an idea of what your go-to-market plan is. Even if go-to-market is an internal review of some sort, you satisfied the definition to the point where you can meet that milestone. If there are timeline or budget constraints that are driving the project, ensure that the entire team has to be aware of those constraints and know when those trade-offs need to be made. Don’t be afraid of an MVP!!Rapid prototype style development is one of the best happy mediums if you're caught somewhere between, "I have all these great ideas and I've thought it all the way through, but I've not really started yet." Take pieces that are much more budget-friendly and just build out units of that. While doing that, do it in a paint-by-number way where we know where all the numbers are, but we're just going to paint in the certain things that we're able to, and bootstrap an app that way. Break it down...
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