In-House Vs. Agency Software Development
Deciding between in-house, full-time development and working with an agency is a big step in developing your product. Use this guide to help you.
The Hiring Dilemma
The thought of having your own in-house team of incredibly skilled professionals is amazing. However, the hard-truth is that it takes months or even years to build that dream team from the ground up – let alone build disruptive products together.
You’re posting jobs, sifting through resumes, reviewing assignments, and conducting interviews.
You wait for the candidate to finish their notice period and the onboarding begins.
The team is finally assembled and now the actual work can start on a roadmap, wireframe, and design.
Kickoff stakeholder interviews to get a full understanding of your product needs. C-suite level team members at Ventive review the insights and provide strategic guidance on next steps.
Roadmap work begins and a strategic direction begins to take shape. This is when the framework of our process takes place and is applied to your business needs.
The insights from the stakeholder interview is transformed into lo-fi app frameworks, ready for review. This is when you start to see your idea and business take shape.
Depending on your project's complexity, functional design and features will be launched in a testing environment for feedback.
| Key Decision-Making Criteria | In-House Developer | Software Product Agency |
|---|---|---|
| How much will it cost to get started? | You're spending at minimum $10k per month for a single junior developer based in the US. If you need help building a product roadmap, strategy, and managing end-to-end execution you are going to spend 2-3x that amount. | Eliminate all hiring hassles and overhead— work with veterans for your development requirements while paying them only for set hours and length of their engagement. |
| How much do i need to spend on an ongoing basis? | Team’s full-time salaries continue during inevitable project lulls – and you have to bear costly software licenses and continuous training expenses. | Cost-efficient scaling to let you add or subtract resources precisely when needed, ensuring every dollar spent contributes to your project’s progress. |
| How quickly can I get my product to market? | Recruiting, onboarding, and aligning a qualified team takes 3-6 months before meaningful development or project collaboration begins. | Hit the ground running with top-notch experts who can roll up their sleeves and immediately dive into development, dramatically speeding up your way to market. |
| How can I access the talent I need? | You generally have two options: | Most software agencies are going to have a deep bench of vetted talent to activate based on the needs of your product. At Ventive, for example, we have over 50 team members with expertise growing business with innovative products. |
| Will it be easy to scale my team as needs change? | You need to plan 6-12 months ahead based on projections. Depending upon the health of your business and cash on hand the difficulty and risk of this can vary significantly. | Since agencies like Ventive always keep a bench of talent available, they can always scale up and down based on revenue growth, feature sprints, bug fixes, etc. |
| How will I support the app after it is launched? | Support needs vary A LOT from month to month. If you staffed up to complete major product goals you will have to find work for those team members or consider letting them go until another big project comes up. | You will have support that will scale based on your strategic business needs. If you have minimal work needed, then your billings will be minimal. If you need a big new feature to land more sales you have a full team at full throttle immediately. |
| How can they help with the strategic aspects of product growth? | This depends upon your budget. If you have the budget for an executive-level contributor like a CTO or CPO, then you will have more access to strategic direction. If you're mostly working with junior devs, you wont have the strategic expertise available to you and you may be flying blind. | At good software and product agencies there are CTO-level employees on staff contributing to the success for your product. For example, Ventive's entire C-Suite keeps an eye on every project to see opportunities for the growth of your product. |
| How much oversight and management is required? | You need to set up a fully functioning management hierarchy with the supervision to go with it. It's not easy, but if you have done this before you can usually get started on the right foot yourself. | Expert-managed development frees you to focus on business growth and strategy. Do what you're great at. Let your agency dev team handle the rest. |
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We built Strike Tax's product on a bootstrapped budget to $10MM in revenue.
The founder of Ventive, Jonathan Cardella, set out to build the most powerful tech-enabled R&D tax credit agency in the US on a budget WITHOUT hiring tons of devs.
With Ventive owning the product strategy and implementation, Strike grew to $10MM ARR in under 5 years.
Technology Integration
Together, we build products that build businesses, fast and on budget.
Ventive's dedicated teams have been there before. We know how to build products that produce revenue, raise capital, and strengthens your business.
“Feeling like they are a part of my team and their ability to understand my product and industry has been a key part to our success.”
Work with award-winning developers.
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