A Founder’s Guide to Software Development

Welcome to the Pixeltree guide to software development for startup founders. You have a great business idea, but the world of tech can seem opaque and intimidating. It's easy to feel like not understanding software is a barrier to entry—but it's not. This guide is designed to empower you to become a tech entrepreneur.

Right off the bat, you don't need to be a coding expert to build a successful product. This guide will walk you through key terms and concepts and explaining how Pixeltree can be your tech partner to bring your vision to life and your role in this journey.

1. You Don't Need All the Features at Once

Focus on a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is the simplest version of your product that has just enough features to be usable and solve a core problem for your first customers. It's about building, measuring, and learning, not about a "big bang" launch. Prioritizing the essential features for your MVP saves time, money, and gets your product to market faster so you can gather real user feedback.

A common method of determining feature priority is assigning the following labels to each one; must-have, should-have, could-have, and nice-to-have. Ignore everything except the must-haves for now. List the must-haves in the order of most importance to least importance then start at the top and work down based given the amount of budget and time allocated to the MVP.

2. The Right Development Partner is Crucial

Choosing a development team is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Look for a team that:

  • Has a proven track record with projects similar to yours. Ask for examples of previous work.

  • Communicates clearly and frequently. You shouldn’t have to wonder how the project is doing. Get weekly updates, get involved in acceptance testing, and get demos every two weeks so you know exactly what you’re getting.

  • Shows a genuine interest in your business, not just the code. You want an engaged partner who will think through issues in the context of your business and users. Good design must take these real-world aspects into account to create a valuable and engaging product that will stick and grow.

  • Provides a detailed proposal with a clear breakdown of costs and timelines. Get a statement of work or a PRD (project requirements document) that itemizes the MVP features and how they are expected to function. This means both sides understand the agreed scope of work before any coding happens so there are no surprises or misunderstandings.

3. Be Wary of Offshore teams

While offshoring looks less expensive, you often pay for it later.

  • It’s difficult to communicate with a team a thousand miles away with differences in languages and processes. Simple questions can take all day to answer and delays and misunderstanding are common occurrences in offshoring. Vastly different timezones also means you may need someone to work at unusual hours.

  • Transparency and trust is harder to maintain so you may not have a clear understanding of the team’s processes, progress, or what problems they are encountering. This often leads to getting something you didn’t ask for and doesn’t do what you need it to do.

  • Without direct oversight, ensuring the quality of code and final product is difficult. Standards for testing, documentations, and code architecture may not align with your expectations or even meet proper security standards and other technological requirements your business needs. This results in technical debt that is expensive to fix later on.

4. The Design Process is More than Just Graphics

A good design process involves several steps beyond just making things look pretty. It includes:

  • Discovery: Understanding your goals, users, and business requirements.

  • User Research: Understanding your target audience and their needs.

  • Wireframing & Mockups: Creating low-fidelity blueprints of your app's layout and functionality. Then building high-fidelity mockups that are representative of your final build.

  • Prototyping: Building interactive models to test the user experience before writing any code. This is known as User Experience (UX) design.

Conduct a design phase before writing any code. This allows you to work out issues before development. Making changes and discovering things you missed is much cheaper during design than during development. Having to rewrite code is more time-consuming and often affects the code it interacts with leading to cascading problems.

While changes in development will happen, 90%+ of things can be discovered and resolved during design.

5. You Need to Be Involved

While your development team handles the technical side, you as the founder are responsible for the product vision. You need to be actively involved in:

  • Defining and prioritizing features.

  • Providing feedback on designs and prototypes.

  • Making quick decisions to keep the project moving.

6. The Project Will Likely Take Longer and Cost More than Expected

Unexpected issues, new feature ideas, and technical complexities are a natural part of software development. Plan for a buffer of at least 20-30% for both time and budget. This will help you avoid panic when things don't go exactly as planned.

Changes always occur when an idea is translated to design and then to development. Programming is complex and unforeseen issues arise, like unexpected chemical reactions, and bugs are a natural part of the process. Chances are, no one has made a product with the exact combination of features and code as your product so there is always a degree of the unknown and working through those challenges is a natural element of development.

7. So How Much Does Development Cost Then?

Breaking down a project into manageable, tangible pieces will help to estimate work more accurately.

  1. The design phase is estimated and conducted separately. Once the design is completed and approved we estimate developing that thing. This works well because user flows are completed and tested via clickable prototype. These are tangible, mostly quantifiable pieces that can be estimated. New features, considerations, and ideas are always discovered during design and it’s much cheaper and faster to adjust mockups than code.

  2. A technical discovery phase can de-risk development. If there are processes, integrations, or other requirements, that are unusual or new, these are considered risks or unknowns. A technical discovery phase is an opportunity for devs to take a couple days or a week to investigate these elements to better understand the scope.

  3. Main development estimate. Once design and technical discovery is complete, then an estimate for the main development can be given. This includes implementing the scope outlined in the statement of work or PRD. Depending on the work, estimates may include a flat sum, an hourly rate, or a blend of the two. For clearly defined scopes, fixed rates work well. For more ambiguous open-ended, investigatory scopes, an hourly rate is appropriate.

8. Documentation Matters

Good documentation is a lifesaver. This includes:

  • A clear Product Requirements Document (PRD) outlining what the software should do. A statement of work may also serve as the PRD and requires sign-off before starting.

  • User stories that describe features from a user's perspective. These are detailed instructions written by the product manager for the developers describing how the feature should and shouldn’t behave along with styling notes.

  • Technical documentation from the development team. This ensures everyone is on the same page and helps with future updates. All code should be tested which means adding new code and fixing bugs is much faster. When something acts up, tests point out where it’s going wrong so it’s easier to locate the issue. Make sure your developer is writing tests! If not, debugging and adding new features in the future will be far more expensive and time-consuming than doing it right the first time.

9. Quality Assurance (QA) is Not an Afterthought

Don't skip or rush the testing phase. QA is the process of finding and fixing bugs before they reach your users. A good development team includes QA at every stage, not just at the end.

A staging environment should be where acceptance testing is performed. You should also have access so you can test drive new features before they go live. Only when the product manager and client approve a feature will it be deployed to the live production environment. This step continues to ensure transparency.

10. Own Your Code and Intellectual Property

Ensure your contract with the development team explicitly states that you, the founder, will own all the code and intellectual property created during the project. This is a non-negotiable point for your business's future.

11. You Need a Plan for Post-Launch

Development doesn't end at launch. You need to have a plan and budget for:

  • Bug fixes and maintenance

  • New features and updates

  • Gathering and acting on user feedback. This is an ongoing cycle of improvement.

  • Monthly server costs

  • Security patches

  • Customer support (solving user issues like “why can’t I log in?”

Have questions, or ready to get started? Book a free consultation.

Book recommendations

In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore explains the gap between early adopters and the early majority in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. While early adopters embrace new tech for the sake of being first, the early majority won't commit until a product is proven and practical. The key challenge for companies is to bridge this chasm to achieve mainstream success.

Ron Jeffries' The Nature of Software Development guides you from the desire for value to the specific activities of good Agile projects. Using a half-century of experience and simple sketches, the author shows how to deliver better software sooner and at a lower cost, helping you achieve "cheaper, sooner, and better" instead of a mythical "free, now, and perfect."

Simon Sinek’s START WITH WHY shows that the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way -- and it's the opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.