Even though we’re an outsourcing company, we also get multiple solicitations a day from competitors who ask us if they can help us build software. They try every gimmick in the book to get us to respond– free lunch, free coffee, and lately, they’ve been offering some sort of free work upfront to capture our interest as a prospective client.
This puts us in an odd position because we also rely on outbound marketing to bring in new business. So now how is a prospective new client supposed to know how we’re different from the myriad other outsourcers out there knocking on their door?
Our home page covers this in pretty extensive detail but Google Analytics is telling us that lots of folks are missing the message. Consequently, over the next few blog posts I’ll attempt to walk everyone through what makes us different.
Starting from the beginning, I want to talk about how we work with a new client who comes to us with a new idea, and how that might be different from our competitors.
1. Free Upfront Release Plan
We talk about free release planning in extensive detail in a previous blog post, but to summarize, it means that before we collect a dime from you, we’ll work with you to figure out:
- A list of all the features that the product will have
- A rough overview of what it will look like
- How long it’s going to take to build, and
- How much it’s going to cost to build.
Typically an outsourcer will charge you a “discovery” fee for this, however we feel discovery fees are shortsighted. Instead, we see free upfront release planning as an investment in a future partnership.
2. Senior Level Engagement Manager
All prospective clients will work closely with one of our senior engagement managers (either Michael Manzo or myself) through your entire relationship with CodeStringers. Both of us have decades of software AND entrepreneurship experience which will allow us to impart upon you the wisdom we’ve learned from seeing what has worked and what hasn’t worked in the past. The analogy we use is– we’re not going to let you build a chocolate teapot.
Competitors, on the other hand, generally will initially communicate to you with one of their silver-tongued salespeople who will tell you precisely what you want to hear. Then once the deal closes, they will hand you off to a junior project manager who will do precisely what you tell them. If you want that chocolate teapot, you’re going to get it.
3. Cost and Deadline Guaranteed
If you’re planning to build a software product, you probably have investors. Those investors probably want to make sure that if they give you money, that you’ll actually deliver a product, on time. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take that worry off your hands? That’s exactly what we do. We’ll guarantee that we’ll build what we agreed to in the release plan, on time and on budget.
How do we do this? It’s because we’ve developed a series of proprietary agile software development processes that have proven effective. If you’re interested in the details, you can find them at our Agile Resource Center.
Other software development shops, on the other hand, will either:
- Not offer a guarantee, rather they’ll give you an estimate upfront and then the project takes as long as it takes, or
- Offer a “guarantee”, but in the middle of the project they’ll tell you that what you actually want to build is different from what you said upfront, therefore the guarantee doesn’t apply. And if they didn’t have a senior level engagement manager upfront making sure your requirements were properly written, then it makes it easier for them to blame you for why they will miss the guaranteed budget and deadline.
Putting It All Together
When we work with a new client, we will assign you a senior level engagement manager who will, at no cost to you, work with you to make a clearly defined release plan with a guaranteed delivery date and budget. We are unaware of any other outsourcer who offers all of those things.
Does this sound like something you might be interested in? If so we encourage you to contact us for further discussion. But if you’re not ready yet, please take a look at our Agile Resource Center which will give you a detailed layout of how we do what we do.
Christian Schraga
SVP Product
CodeStringers