When you embark on a new business venture, you typically embrace the usage of fresh, innovative technologies to achieve your desired goals. These technologies inform and manage the operations, culture, and customer experiences that enable your startup to meet constantly changing business and market requirements. However, your success will inevitably come down to scalable software development solutions.
Business growth isn’t typically linear and predictable. Your team needs to flex as your needs change. The success of your startup depends on more than just deploying suitable software. It requires integrating the technology into core business processes to fundamentally impact performance and deliver more value to customers.
To achieve this, your business needs to be able to grow and shrink production in response to fluctuations in demand. In other words, you need to make scalable software production a goal from the outset.
What Is Scalability?
According to Gartner, scalability is the capacity to increase or decrease performance and cost as needed. As work or demand changes, being able to scale processes is an essential ability that enables companies to remain competitive against changing market conditions.
There are many different reasons why a business may need to scale its operations up or down. Here are some examples:
- A significant increase in sales that calls for additional staff support.
- An increase or decrease in production and demand.
- Notable changes in the number of platform users.
- Significant increases in the amount of data processed.
- A higher or lower quantity of units manufactured or distributed.
Organizations that can keep up with these changes and scale support as needed will ensure processes don’t come to a halt and customers are kept happy.
Scalability Engagement Models
When it comes to the examples mentioned above, there are different scalability models used that each serve a key business purpose. To establish a scalable software development process, you will need to establish an agile process.
Team-Based Model
As your company’s needs change, revenue increases, and demands of growth call for team expansion, it’s beneficial to have a strategy in place that can be easily implemented and executed. Hiring extra staff to handle the increased workload is one way to do it, but that increases costs correspondingly and doesn’t benefit the bottom line.
Achieving true scalability with this model requires you to find ways to enable your current team to do the work. This could be through:
- Deployment of technology
- Improved training
- Incentivization
- Enhanced management methods
- Increased purpose and direction
- Flexible working options
…or any combination of these and other ideas.
With this model, you won’t be left with an expensive staffing surplus if the need for throughput drops back down. Instead, you’ll have a direct strategy in place to supplement the needs of your scaling business that can be implemented time and time again.
This model is particularly appropriate for growing small- and medium-sized businesses that value their employees and can’t afford to spend time and money hiring and training new staff.
However, it isn’t realistic when the needs are far greater than what your current staff can handle. In these cases, it is beneficial to partner with a company that understands your business needs and can assist with quick changes in workload.
Project-Based Scalability
One of the common ways to make scalability a part of your startup’s strategy is to use a project-based model. This is a time-bound method of partnership in which a company uses an outsourced vendor that has the expertise to deliver results by an established deadline.
This model is best used for:
- Larger businesses with limited in-house development capabilities
- Scalable software projects that fall outside of the company’s core products or services
- Projects with requirements that are unlikely to change during development
If you have a clear picture of your development project, handing it off to an outsourced project team minimizes your risk and requires less time-consuming responsibility for your staff.
Consulting Model
With this model, a company gets access to expertise that’s not available in-house, such as strategic advice, architecture, UX design, and security assessments. By outsourcing these functions on a consulting basis, you establish a fixed price for services over a specific time period.
The consulting service will:
- Analyze your goals, objectives, and challenges.
- Work with you to define your requirements
- Choose the right architecture to solve your business problems
- Improve efficiencies and manageability
Consulting services typically include ideation, alignment of business requirements, product design, and development, implementation, training, and security. At Xperity, we take this consulting model to the next level by offering process improvement at every stage of the lifecycle and maintenance of your new product on an ongoing basis.
Staff Augmentation Model
The staff augmentation model is the simplest of all the scalability models. It enables you to extend your existing human resources with outsourced workers. Effectively, you’re borrowing your outsource provider’s talent for the period you need it for. You retain ownership of the project as well as the responsibility to supervise the extra staff. This means that you will guide the project with minimal input on innovation by the outsourced partner.
This model allows you to increase your output while searching for suitable workers, and the ability to downscale when you find them. Staff augmentation is a cost-effective way to supplement your workload and speed up project timelines.
Additional benefits include:
- Access to top talent at a fraction of the cost of long-term employment
- Minimized recruitment headaches and time-consuming talent searches
- Reduced onboarding expenses and time-to-train
This is a good model for companies that have an in-house development team and strong technical leadership, particularly if these lack specific skills or expertise. If your project is urgent and you need to fast-track it, augmenting your staff will help you make it happen.
How Burn Rate Affects Scalability
Burn rate is the length of time it takes a company to operate until it runs out of investor money. A low burn rate means the company is more sustainable, while a high burn rate means it’s potentially in trouble.
You can perform a gross cash burn analysis by subtracting the amount you spend each month from the revenue you bring in during the same month. Then, determine how long your cash will last by dividing cash on hand by your cash burn rate. This gives you a strong sense of how long your cash runway can last before you can no longer survive.
It’s common for startups to have a high burn rate as the organization is investing in its products, processes, and itself as a whole. Keeping burn rate a key consideration as you increase and decrease spend will help you easily scale up operations as needs change. It’s important to use scalable software that keeps costs as low as possible as your needs change over time.
How Scalable Software Can Increase Funding
Few investors will fund a company with a high burn rate, which means it could be difficult to grow your business at scale, according to the Corporate Finance Institute. This makes it particularly important to ensure your processes and tools support scalability in the short- and long-term.
By making scalable software and workflows a part of your startup’s digital strategy, you’ll be able to:
- Do more with your existing company resources
- Bring your products to market much faster than before
- Significantly improve your customer experience
- Reduce your technology development costs with fewer, more efficient teams
- Attract the right investors to give your company the competitive advantage it needs
Being adaptable and flexible to changing business needs will allow you to take on more work and generate higher revenue without increasing costs. Ultimately, this makes your company an attractive vehicle for investors and sets you up for success when it comes to securing the funding you need for growth.
Scale with Xperity
All this is possible when you have the right development partner for your startup journey. The Xperity Performance Framework makes scalability simple and streamlined. We leverage experts who have the key skills and knowledge to function as an extension of your workforce in many different capabilities. Our resources are flexible, adaptable, and focused on ensuring project success in a scalable and efficient way.
Ready to learn more about how Xperity can help you with scalable software solutions? Contact us today for more information on our Performance Framework and how it is strategically designed to help you achieve your company’s goals.
