Start-ups

Have you started a new tech business or thinking about starting one? If so, there are challenges ahead that we can help with.

The Idea

Many tech businesses start with someone having an idea that uses technology to solve a problem. Depending on your background, as the founder you may struggle to change this idea into a product or you might just need some additional support.

The Role of the CTO

When the road ahead becomes uncertain or difficult, you may start thinking about hiring a Chief Technology Office or CTO.  The aim is normally to place all things technical in the hands of the CTO.

Getting the right CTO to see your business grow from start-up to scale-up and beyond is difficult. It takes time and financial backing to do this right. The wrong decision can have a major impact on the development of your Minimum Viable Product or MVP.

Build your Product

Experience shows that new ideas typically get off the ground in a number of ways, such as:

You develop the solution yourself
A friend or acquaintance does the development
You do not know where to start and look for help

In all of these cases, you can only get so far before needing help. May be it is some ideas on how to implement your solution, a review of the architecture to gain confidence that the right thing is being built, additional development effort or just managing the tasks that have to be done.

Experience shows that new ideas typically get off the ground in a number of ways, such as:

You develop the solution yourself
A friend or acquaintance does the development
You do not know where to start and look for help

Requillion Solutions

Whether you need to call on temporary CTO services or help in building you product, Requillion Solutions can offer our services to help you get your idea off the ground and turn it into reality.

We will work with you to determine what needs to be done. Starting with our reference architecture, we can quickly help you design your product. Using our libraries, we can kick-start your product development and help to get it to market quickly.

Our Services

With the advantages of services available at your finger tips, you can decide how you want to make use of this new resource. There are many places along the road to launching a product where you might need our help and we can come in at any point.

At the very start:

You have a business idea but you do not know how to bring it to life. You need the help of a CTO as a Service. We can help by discussing your idea and formulating a way forward that might include:

Ideation – the process of brainstorming new innovations
Strategy – working out how the MVP can be brought to life
Budgeting – determining what resources you may need
Roadmap Planning – creating a list of prioritised features
User Stories – capturing your requirements for the product

Getting the development started:

Once you have a plan on what you want to build and how it is to be developed, you will be keen to get finger to keyboard. It is important to realise that, as your product grows, it will require more effort to manage its evolution. That requires more structure than you might have right now and we can help minimise the time required to set it up:

Setting up a small team development process
Supplying hosted environments and tools
Creating or reviewing technical architectures
Creating the backlog of tasks that need to be done

Doing the development:

Having set up your development environment, you are ready to start writing code and creating your product. You may be planning on doing that yourself, you may have a colleague helping you out or you may not have access to any development resources. No matter how the development is going to proceed, we can help:

Writing code
Code reviews
Quality assurance and testing
Capturing your intellectual property (IP)
Releasing and deploying the product
Keeping you informed about progress
Planning the next steps

Creating the MVP:

You are now on your way towards building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). Every day will bring new challenges but it will also bring great delight as you see your idea take shape. We can help advise on the steps you need to undertake to move the product build from development to production.

The Balancing Act - Being Agile

Now your development is underway, you may think it is a straight road to the finish line. Experience shows that there are many junctions and cross roads where you need to be ready to adjust course. This is known as being agile.

So you may have heard of Agile development and want to implement it. Keep in mind that being agile is a mindset, not a process. And if you were wondering if you need to be agile, right now is the time you really need to embrace it.

A few things happen as a product begins its development. First it is more like a proof of concept. Not fully thought through and highly experimental. Then as things start to form, it brings about new ideas about how to tackle the problem. Then quality is an issue and testing begins. Planning the development means that you are now starting to balance features against quality against the roadmap of new ideas. Without careful management, this can lead to product delays and an unfinished MVP.

We can help with this stage of start-up life:

Managing the roadmap
Prioritising the backlog of tasks
Evolving the way development takes place
Balancing quality against delivery
Managing the deployments
Introducing continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD)
Starting the process of managing the environments (DevOps)

By this point, you should be well on your way to deploying an MVP and securing your first customer.

As you gain larger numbers of customers, you move from start-up to scale-up.