A software platform is just like any other kind of platform. It's a place where you stand, where you start from and begin to build something of importance. In terms of starting a business, it's the base software and technology foundation that will underpin your entire operation from day one. The vast majority of new businesses pay little attention to this in their early days and over time will prove to be to their detriment. Here's why:
Everything moves super fast in the beginning. You are still figuring things out, you probably don't really know what you are as a business, you are pivoting and testing and searching for traction. You add SaaS products to your list as you navigate this uncertainty and in the process begin spraying any valuable business intelligence you've acquired across the net. Speed is your focus, not software projects.
We believe that this is an error. The decisions we make in the beginning will be woven into what we build for our businesses. There are certain things that deserve that little bit of thought and planning and a slower pace to examine what we think we will need in the future for our business. A digital genesis approach is what is required. In the world as it is today, your business is a trifecta of software company, media company and then your niche business model. You need to be thinking cloud and data and growth and probabyl most important of all, getting as much as possible for as little capital outlay as possible. There are ways to build a software platform for your new business that will not take months, will not lock you down in any way and will not take all of your startup funds. Let's examine this further.
Regardless of the type of business you are creating, there are always going to be some universal capabilities you'll require.
Most new businesses make the mistake of spreading these capabilities across the internet. Websites are deployed on buggy and high maintenance Wordpress templates, email subscribers and lead information is stored on third party apps and website visitors and other analytics and demographic information are sucked into platform that have hidden costs to then extracting value BI from the data that your website generated. If you think about it, these third party companies are building platforms for everyone to use. They are catering to a wide set of people and as such their capabilities might not match yours. You pay for a service that only provides 20% of what you need. And these platforms are built in the cloud too, so why not have a platform that gives you 100% of what you need, all the time and that can be changed as you need it to?
Let's take a scenario. You want a website and you have 2 versions of a UI/UX update that you are not sure to run with. How do you test it effectively? Can your highly modified and fragile Wordpress blog serve multiple versions of you app with different UI simultaneously at a percentage split you designate? Probably not. Running your website on your own platform can, especially if you use App Engine on the Google Cloud for example. Simply make a second version of the app, with the updated pages or fuctionality and deploy, splitting traffic in a percentage ratio you decide with a few clicks. Then one app gets one percentage, the other the rest. You take the data generated and analyze it to decide which UI to run. Run a change, learn something, apply the lesson, rinse and repeat. Books like "Lean Startup" by Eric Ries explains this validated learning approach in great detail and is a great source of information on how to grow a business with solid information learned over guess and hail mary's.
The core thing to remember about this approach and the use of a platform is that you own everyting. The data, the insight and can use the data to make strategic decisions that will grow your business. Another fantastic thing about running a platform you control, is that you can change what you want without losing anything? If you want to update your UI, just do it. It's just the face of your app. You don't change its capabilities, the data from pervious versions remains. Think of it as a skin. Compare that to your typical Wordpress implementation. A new template might not have support for plugins you use, you might have versioning issues and so forth. Why hand over control to a platform under someone else control. Your business is way to important to allow that risk.
Then there is traffic. What happens if you strike gold and you get a strike in traffic. Can your cheap, shared hosting provider scale your site on a whim to cover the load? Most likely not. Say you manage to upgrade your server and after the spike, you are now paying more than you need as you need that capacity anymore. Running your own cloud platform as we are discussing protects you from spikes and automatically scales up (and most importantly, down again) to suit the demand. What you will see in your costs is a heavy month on a credit card, that was hopefully offset by extra sales for the period and then back to normal cost afterwards.
I know what you are thinking though. Building a software platform is both time consuming and expensive? You are afraid as you don't have the expertise to pull it off, or have no interest in getting into the software development business. I believe these fears while valid, are now outdated and irrelevant. For one, every business this year and in the future is a digital genesis business, you need to be involved in software and media and your core offering if you are to succeed. And secondly, it's not as time consuming, costly or huge an undertaking as you might think. In fact, this is why I discuss software platforms for new businesses on my blog. I've got starter templates to get you started for a fraction of what you might think it will cost. Just send me an email or connect on LinkedIn or social about Clucid and we'll explain in more detail. We've built software for the enterprise and startups and everyone in between. These capabilities I've discussed are now with reach of everyone, with low budgets and limited time and experience. The capabilities are now in the cloud and have been democratized for all.
Platforms are the way forward. You have only two choices in this respect. Invest in yourself and your business and build your own and let it grow with you, or use others and be at their wim, increase your vulnerability and reduce your speed of business evolution and potential success. In terms of learning, understanding cloud computing to a level where you can make intelligent decisions is the same as any other topic you are learning about. It's no different than learning to use LinkedIn for lead generation or how to "Win on Instagram". These are all tools of the trade for the modern Digital Genesis based business and worthy of your time and effort.
So, if you are starting your business or in the process of formulating an idea, don't forget to think about software platforms. The little extra upfront thinking, planning and effort are worth it in the long run, as you'll be answerable to no one and in full control of your businesses evolution and success. Good luck.
We’re ready when you are. Simple schedule some time below and let's discuss your business.