Get it right the first time

In our personal and professional lives we all make purchasing decisions. Whether it’s a new refrigerator – like me – or a new software development vendor for the office – decision-makers factor in things like reputation, performance, referrals, design. However, too often the biggest driving force is Price. It makes sense in some ways. Long gone are the days when “Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM.” Now, there are multiple options when choosing vendors. By putting things out for bid, we can immediately go to the cost and justify that we are saving the company money. But are you? Let me describe a recent scenario we had at Bliss. A team with a social app idea comes to us to help with their design and backend integration. They had been burned by developers that had outsourced mainly based on cost. Spending money to overseas developers who didn’t deliver what was promised. Then they found us. The Bliss team had its work ahead of them as the code was a mess and basically we had to re-build it from scratch. So, the “savings” they thought they were getting by basing their initial decision primarily on cost actually ballooned their budget. We see versions of this scenario all the time. The advice here is to find a team you can work with and has a track record of success. Cost is always going to be a factor in decision making – but that’s what it should be – a factor. Because the truth is sometimes choosing the lowest price option can cost you the most in the long run. Takeaways The reason we were able to solve this for them: Expertise - We have a team of rock stars from multiple specialties (Design, UX, Integration etc....) Size - We do have the experts and we have a lot of them. We are a company that has scaled to meet challenges like this quickly as we have a "deep bench". Communication - Our style is always customer-centric. We listen and work with our clients with in-depth calls and meetings. We don't simply have someone fill out a spec sheet. Now I have to go research refrigerators.

Published by Matt Conley