In spite of their complexity and a large amount of required knowledge, the popularity of IT projects is constantly on the rise. Pulling them off successfully calls for thorough planning and careful execution.
The following guidelines are meant to help you get a head-start and spike the target audience’s interest as quickly as possible.
-
Develop an Idea
Having a concept in mind isn’t enough – you have to bring it to life. IT is a very wide field, which is why you should take into consideration all elements that come into play.
Will the user need access to an Internet connection? Do you need to use certain mobile elements such as a gyroscope or a camera?
Having a checklist of things that you need to put the idea into motion will help you avoid further unnecessary expenses. Take your time and plan ahead, as it can make all the difference between a successful and a botched project.
-
Choose a Competent Dev Team
First and foremost, you’ll need to get an estimate of the size of your development team. The aforementioned checklist can be quite helpful even in this case. If you have many elements (such as a large database, for example), you’ll require more people who specialize in different areas of work.
Manually searching for and hiring experienced developers can take up a lot of your free time and can be very risky, which is where an offshore development center comes into play.
In order to achieve a smooth workflow, every developer needs to be at a certain skill level. Qubit Labs takes care of the hiring process for you and puts your project in the hands of certified Ukrainian developers.
Shared responsibility benefits risk management, lowers the overall project costs and maximizes time efficiency. As the head of the team, you receive reports on a regular basis and are able to directly communicate with your team.
-
Plan a Budget
Knowing when not to go overboard is as equally important as not to cheap out on the vital aspects. Plan your finances beforehand and choose how much money you’ll set aside for each specific field – unless you’re completely sure that you can keep up with the costs of a project, don’t set it into motion.
Always leave some finances in reserve for the worst-case scenario, even if it means having to resort to alternative implementations. If you’re on a low budget, outsourcing software development can save you fortunes due to the salary differences in foreign countries.
-
Analyze Competition
To attract potential users, you have to be innovative. Recycling something that the others have done isn’t intriguing, which is where competition analysis comes into play. Focus on people’s feedback (more so on the complaints) and figure out ways to improve on them in your project.
For example, if the competitor’s app/website is slow to respond, let your developers know that they should focus on code optimization. Likewise, expand your views and receive feedback from multiple sources. Learning from other people’s mistakes will save you a lot of headaches and money once your own project has launched.
You can also use services like Ahrefs to know about your competitors. For example, to investigate their backlinks, find out organic keywords, their broken links and the main sources of traffic. It will help you to understand better the niche that you have chosen and the people that have been working there for many years.
-
Develop and Test
Test-driven development is a commonly used procedure that can help you avoid having to deal with a lot of bugs later on. While you don’t necessarily have to focus on this method, each piece of code that’s added or changed should be thoroughly tested before it’s pushed onto the live version of the project.
Alternatively, you can hire some beta testers that will help detect any interfering issues so that the final release is as polished as possible.
-
Market Effectively
Which forms of advertising you’ll use is highly dependent on your budget. Social media platforms have the biggest potential to reach a large audience, especially if you take advantage of highly followed influencers. By paying a specific sum, they can advertise your product to thousands or even millions of people instantly.
It’s also in your best interest to have an active account on every major platform – primarily on Twitter and Instagram – instead of focusing on just one.
Another possibility is the so-called paid reviews. If your product is sold at a certain price, you can offer it for free to a selected group of people in exchange for a detailed review. The higher your average rating is, the more tempted the users will be to choose you over any other competitor.
-
Focus on Customer Support
Communicating with your consumers and helping them deal with any possible issues significantly raises your reputation, especially in the beginning. Show them that you care about providing the best possible experience by being friendly and responding as fast as possible.
You’ll gain a deeper understanding of what exactly people are looking to get out of your product, which is invaluable. As the number of users increases, you’ll have to invest more in this sector. Even so, keep in mind that money invested in customer support is money well spent.
Conclusion
To sum up, I can say that to run successfully your IT project you should do a lot of things – develop your own unique idea, plan the budget, hire good specialists, develop and test your product properly, market it and etc.
If you won’t pay attention to these crucial points – there are a lot of chances for you to fail. All in all, you are not alone and your team, especially the development team, can help you to overcome many challenges with your IT project. So, it is very important to have a professional team with strong knowledge in the IT niche.
