How Easy Is It To Develop Your Own Software Product?
Software is all around us. Right now, you’re reading a blog that uses software to keep it online, and you’re doing this via a web browsing software program. There are so many different types of software that can be used in industries across the world.
The question is, how easy is it to develop your own software product? Is this something you can do in a few hours, days, weeks, months, or years? Generally, it is pretty difficult to develop a software product. This is because there are lots of different steps and things to consider throughout the process. Of course, some software products are easier to make than others.
For example, if you create a plugin for WordPress, it’s going to be much easier than making some fancy medical software. The more things your software does – and the more complex these actions are – the harder it will be to develop your product. To give you an idea of what it takes to go from an idea to some usable software, here are the main considerations throughout the development process:
Researching your product
Like all business ideas, the software requires a great deal of research to be sure that there’s actually a market for it. There’s no point in creating software that does something that nobody is going to use. You will have to spend some time researching and figuring out what your software product could do, and why it might be useful to certain people. Naturally, this process alone could take a few months.
Building your software
Once your idea is born and you know it will actually be useful, you have to start building your software. Here, you are faced with all sorts of considerations. To start, how much is the whole process going to cost? It’s hard to put a figure on this as (again) it depends on the software you’re producing. Simple plugins or apps will be much cheaper than very complex and innovative pieces of software.
Likewise, your own skills and experience play a huge role. If you are a software developer and you’ve been developing software your whole life, you can take on the role of building this product yourself. But, if you aren’t a software developer, you’ll need to hire people to help you build your product.
This won’t just mean posting software development job openings, but it can also mean posting software testing jobs as well. Basically, you need people to deal with the technical side of your ad, writing the code and testing it to ensure that it will work. So, the process of finding these people can add to the difficulty of developing an app.
Testing your software
Speaking about testing, there are two types of testing involved when developing an app. Firstly, you have the tests run by your developers – these ensure that all the code is up to scratch. However, you will also need testing from outside sources. This means looking for individuals to use your software and see how it works. You can run testing periods that last weeks or months, giving you more than enough time to find all the bugs and make fixes.
This is such a critical aspect of software development as it means that you can release your product with as few issues as possible. Yes, you can skip this process – or run some short tests – but it will mean that your product is likely to have loads of bugs. So, you manage to release it earlier, but people will be unhappy with it because it’s so buggy.
How Easy Is It To Develop Own Software Product: Marketing your Software
People often forget that marketing is an important part of software development. You can develop a killer app, but how will people know about it? You need to run a marketing campaign to get your software out there, ensuring that your target market is aware of it.
As an example, you could attend a trade show for the accounting & finance industry, offering demonstrations of your new accounting & finance app. Of course, online advertising is also an effective method of making sure people are aware of your app and what it can do for them.
Overall, you can see why software development isn’t as easy as you might think. Yes, you can develop a software product very quickly, but will it be of high quality? If you want to make something that’s successful and genuinely useful to others, you have to take your time. Software development requires a great deal of patience – and money! Depending on how complicated your software is, you could have it up and running anywhere from a few months to a few years.
