Some believe creativity is the exclusive province of artists, but it’s at the heart of every business. The right digital product agency for Web, Android and iOS Development respects your unique ideas and helps you bring them to fruition.
If you’re starting a business these days, you need to have a digital mindset. Websites and mobile apps are necessities, but no one needs one-size-fits-all answers.
It’s important to work with a company that understands what makes your business special. A mobile app designed to help ranchers get their cattle to market will have different features than an app designed to help vegetarians find the best options on fast-food menus.
On the flip side, startups have some core principles in common. According to forbes.com, startups:
- offer unique products or services
- believe in innovation
- disrupt old, entrenched ways of doing things
A company that does digital product design for startups should understand the differences and commonalities of its clients.
If you’re at the beginning of building a new venture, it can seem as though you’re surrounded by chaos. By taking a moment to get the view from above, you see the steps you’ve taken and those you need to take as you move forward. Patterns emerge amid the competing forces of flexibility and consistency.
Creativity has been described as a furnace, where disparate forces crash and combine to give the world something new. That description might resonate if you’re currently ushering a new idea into reality.
Digital product design can seem chaotic to the uninitiated. But the company you choose should be able to tell you what’s happening and why throughout the process of developing your website and/or mobile app. Here are five tips to help you select the company for you:
- Assess the Opportunity
- Understand and Identify the Why, What, and How
- Validate the Product
- Product Velocity
- Get the Right Team
Assess the Opportunity for Web, Android and iOS Development
Ideas don’t always show up on command. You can sit at your desk with a notebook and pen at the ready and never get a single burst of insight.
Then you can take a walk with your dog or hop in the shower, and suddenly, you’re singing along with Jimmy Cliff: “I can see clearly now. The rain is gone.”
No matter how you gained the insight that led to the creation of your business, it’s not enough on its own. Before the idea is ready to be released to the world, it needs to be poked and prodded to make sure it will hold up.
Building a mobile app or website works in a similar way. Even before construction begins, it’s smart to think through different scenarios and find out what potential customers think about the planned features.
Ideas are great, but not all of them are practical. A good digital product agency will help you test your ideas and get valuable feedback.
Understand and Identify the Why, What, and How
During Web, Android and iOS Development for startups, questions are crucial in the early phases of development. You need to consider:
- Why is it necessary?
- What will it do?
- How should it work?
Don’t skip this phase or rush through it. An agile digital product agency will take these questions seriously and mull them over because they’re a pathway to the results you want.
Allow the initial answers to percolate. It’s also helpful to speak with some of your customers. They might see their needs differently than you see them.
In fact, feedback is central to the process of digital design. A good company will update you often to make sure the product is meeting your expectations.
By checking in with you early and often, designers and developers don’t go too far afield. That means your product can be finished more quickly with fewer last-minute changes that could delay getting to market.
Eventually, this process reveals a concrete direction, and it’s time to take the next step.
Validate the Product
It’s not often someone has a truly original idea that changes everything for all time. In most cases, creativity is about making incremental improvements.
When it comes to developing the digital product that’s right for you, failure isn’t just an option. It’s a requirement.
When asked about the trouble he had coming up with the lightbulb, Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
You probably don’t want the company you hire to fail that many times. The developers should know the basics of website and mobile app design to reduce the need for 10,000 failures.
But just as startup businesses need to pivot when needed to find new customers and markets, developers need to know what’s not working so changes can be made.
They should fail fast, so the designers can figure out what went wrong and figure out possible fixes. And many of the fixes will fail too.
It may seem like a paradox, but failing fast and often is an efficient strategy that avoids confirmation bias. You don’t want to think something works the way it should. You want to know it does.
In the long run, rapid iteration and development can save money, time, and effort. If you come across a digital product design company that’s afraid of failing, find one that embraces the seemingly messy road to innovation.
So the rule is to test and test again.
Product Velocity in Web, Android and iOS Development
Building a business is a game of passion and perseverance. It’s about putting the right team in place, and it’s about making plans and executing them.
It’s also about money. Your start-up business won’t survive if customers can’t buy your products and services.
That should be a chief concern during digital product design for startups. How fast can the company you’re working with assess your ideas, develop the product, and get it to market?
When speed is of the essence, scaling up is the way to go for your company and your mobile app and website. Digital product design for startups doesn’t have to do everything for everyone in the beginning.
The strategy is about serving customers as quickly as you can and expanding what you can offer as you grow and develop.
That’s why you want to team up with a digital product agency that has staying power and can work with you over the long haul.
In the beginning, you want to catch that first customer. As you develop long-term customers, you’ll want a company that can adapt its digital products to better serve them.
The Right Team for Web, Android and iOS Development for Startups
As you start your business, it’s important to have the right people on your team who can help you achieve your goals. That goes for the people you hire internally and externally.
Intuitio Labs has a nearly 20-year history of providing consulting, design, and development services for startups. Our process involves:
- asking questions to understand your needs
- testing our products again and again so we know what to improve
- getting our clients to market in six to 12 weeks
When you bring your creative idea to us, our talented team develops fresh ideas and approaches to solve your problem.
With a combination of unbound ambition and boring experience, we’ll discover your needs and then fail fast to make them a reality. We’re a trusted partner with years of hands-on experience in launching successful digital products for startups like yours.
Our creative process can seem chaotic at times, but we take digital product design for startups step by step. We know what to do, when, and how.
If you’d like to learn more about what it takes to make something great with us, visit intuitiolabs.com.