These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the KPad team, formed by Damasia Maneiro and German Viscuso.
Let me start with a disclaimer: I’m a developer so I’m biased. As developers we often tend to think about projects, start-ups, companies and business in general in terms of source code. It is well known that when the code sucks it becomes much more costly to maintain and improve (and by sucking code I mean dirty code). This extra cost then impacts other critical areas: cost and risk of mismanagement increases, schedules and budgets get tighter. To sum up major areas suffer because the cost of error is huge due to the cost of code. Thus dirty code leads to business (or project) failure.
Even though this argument sounds compelling it’s actually misleading. The reduction of development costs has been championed by business people with the introduction of many dreadful techniques such as reducing the hourly rate of programmers to nonsense levels. For them cheaper code development equals business success (if code cost tends to zero the cost of error tends to zero). Moreover if the cost of code is reduced then business would have the ability to fail faster, leading to a quicker learning curve and a better business in the end.
But what if you’re trying to solve the wrong problem? What if your software is not as useful as you think? Even if you could automagically deploy at no cost a flawless version of a useless product that nobody wants and then kept rapidly iterating more versions of that crappy product, you would still eventually run out of money and time and your business (or project) would still fail.
Cost should not be the major factor in project success. It should be the value, the novel idea, the ability to ask the right question and provide the solution. After all sometimes limited resources help drive creativity!
For start-ups this is specially important since it’s all about the value that you’ll bring to the world. You’ll also notice that when a project starts from scratch coding is likely to be relatively fast even with low quality practices (which minimizes the code cost factor). Cost of software will become more and more important as the code matures but is only one aspect of the equation (and not the fundamental one).
Remember: you have the chance to do more of the right things and to do things more right. Start with the former but do not neglect the later as you make progress, that’s the path to your business success!
