Starting a software Company

How Software Has Changed

     Software has drastically changed in the last twenty years.  With cloud infrastructure, it is much easier for entrepreneurs to start their own SaaS companies with little resources.  Gone are the days where companies spent millions for on-premise equipment such as servers, storage, and everything else.  Gone are the days where full time developers made everything from scratch.  In the early days, my father, a COBOL programmer, had to make everything himself.  In today's market, GitHub, GitLab, and every other repository service has open source software and plugins that developers give a way, for free.  Websites such as Freelancer.com and Upwork make it easy for American entrepreneurs to connect with developers in India, who only charge $20 per hour.  The $20 sounds enticing to a startup, especially compared to prices of American developers.  If this is so easy, then how come it took me nearly two years just to get my software launched?   
     Regardless of your project, budget, and expertise, one thing remains the same in every industry.  Professionalism will create a fluid and dynamic workflow.  What I have learned from my mistakes, and believe me, there are tons of them, is that the tools needed to grow are sometimes not what is staring you in the face.  In software, it's all coding so many people think "oh, I need the best coding."  While good code will save lots of headaches, something overlooked is design.  For the first year, I was going back and forth with my developers all the time, bad layouts, bad colors, you name it.  When I hired a designer and started using Zeplin, things got much better.  As I navigated this, I found what tools, and designs, suited us best.  I was fortunate to work with Flatiron, a school that teaches designers.  I was able to create strong connections and one of the designers came on part time with BlueClerk.  The company began to look at what we needed, what did not flow, and what just flat out was confusing to navigate.  Within one week this designer was able to change our entire structure.  Moving menus, changing links, things that looks trivial that make a huge difference.  This seemed like a huge undertaking, to completely redesign the web version of the software, right before launch, but it was relatively easy.  My head designer had made shared components and templates within our system.  It took less than one week to change everything on our system.  Sure, changing the code was easy, but it would have taken months of back and forth without this designer helping us out.
     Whatever your software is and whatever your goal is, remember the professional tools that are needed to accomplish your goals.