Hyperspace Ventures | An Entrepreneur's Guide to Building Your Digital Product

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An Entrepreneur's Guide to Building Your Digital Product

Everyday Hyperspace Ventures runs into founders, executives, and leaders who have great ideas, but don't know where to start when it comes to building their products. Technology is constantly evolving, and the options can seem overwhelming at times. Hyperspace's managing partners have tried all the options out there for previous ventures so we wanted to share our knowledge to help you confidently make the decision for your company. In this blog post, we will summarize and share the various options available on the market and highlight some pros and cons for each.

Option 1 - The Freelancer

Today, there are a number of services for you to find "an expert" online and contract out a small project or algorithm. This option is attractive to entrepreneurs because process is fairly frictionless and extremely low cost. However, there are three problems you can run into:

Difficult to find the perfect candidate - If you don't know what you are looking for, or don't have a background in software development, it can be extremely difficult to judge the ability of a freelancer. Their portfolios are often limited, and as a result, the odds of finding a real expert can be spotty at best.
Inconsistent quality - By definition, the freelancer is working on your project on a part time basis and likely has other side gigs going on to pay the bills. This leaves relatively high risk of incompletion, severe delays, and careless work.
Limited expertise - If your idea is a big one, you are going to need a team of experts building your product. No matter how talented they are, a single, part-time engineer will not be able to deliver a high quality or functioning product. There is a reason to why any software company you know spends millions of dollars on engineering talent and staffs hundreds, if not thousands, of developers at a given time.

Option 2 - The Marketing Agency

So you decided against a freelancer and now want to explore the possibility of contracting a small digital team. You look to various agencies that list website design and development as one of their offerings. Their pricing is relatively reasonable and you are told they can help market and promote the product once it's built. However, the problem is threefold:

Lack of technical expertise - If you look into the educational backgrounds of many employees at a marketing agency, you will rarely find what we call "true engineers". The typical core competency of these employees is in fields like marketing, brand management, journalism, etc. While they may be great at leveraging content management sites like WordPress or pre-built frameworks like Wix or Squarespace to create simple landing pages, they lack the ability to create functional complex web or mobile applications.
Limited skills for complex projects - Any large tech company today proves to be far too complex to rely on pre-built frameworks as its development route of choice. Experts are required to manage a wide variety of development languages, frameworks, databases, cloud computing, security systems and more. Here are the core skills that Hyperspace requires our members to know as minimum to build streamlined and quality products: HTML, CCS, JavaScript, PHP, Laravel, Python, Django, AWS, MySQL, MongoDB, React Native, Swift, Objective C, Java, Node.js, Photoshop and more.

Option 3 - The CTO/Internal Hires

We encounter a lot of companies that are fortunate to leverage substantial founders' capital or successfully raise a Series Seed Round or Series A Round. As a result, the firm is faced with decisions around full time internal hires. The decision to hire an internal CTO, or a group of engineers can be appealing given team inclusiveness, coupled with direct reporting and control. However, there are a few disadvantages to consider:

Expensive and lack execution capabilities - While the thought of having one central person handle all things tech is nice in theory, the reality is that there are very, very few people who are skilled enough to do so. Almost any CTO, unless you come across Mark Zuckerberg, or someone equivalent, will still need a team of engineers to execute on any state-of-the-art technology product. Furthermore, if the CTO in mind is truly world-class, they are going to demand a substantial compensation package. This translates into hefty 6-figure salary, benefits package and possibly stock options in your business. Unless you have raised millions of dollars, this gets expensive quickly.
Difficult to find the perfect candidate - Because you are looking for someone to handle technology, you are likely in the same boat as the majority of founders - you lack advanced technical knowledge. You don't have a good grasp for what is needed or what truly differentiates a skilled employee from one that is average or below. As a result, a founder tends to put the entire success of his or her business in the hands of the one hire who, if not incredible, can single handedly prevent the business from reaching its potential.
Flight risk - An incredible CTO will surely have a variety of offers thrown his or her way, and at any time, could leave your business for a more lucrative offer. Such an exit would put your development at a standstill and send you back to the drawing board to recruit, hire and train your next hire.

Option 4 - Hyperspace Ventures

The headaches from all these options are exactly why Hyperspace Ventures was founded. Learning from our previous ventures' mistakes, we have spent the last 10 years to assemble a team of experienced founders, executives, engineers, designers and product managers under one roof. Our team has one central mission: to help bring your dream to life so you can make a dent in the universe.

In addition to the help of our amazing advisory board, comprised of self-made millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs in a wide variety of industries, we have put our design, business and technology skills to the test to help dozens of founders realize their dreams. While we have seen our clients' ideas transform into multi-million dollar companies in a matter of months, there are two drawbacks to mention:

Limited available capacity - We are a fast growing company and we unfortunately can't always take on clients who request to work with us. We operate at near capacity, and sometimes it can take weeks, if not months, before an opening arises for us to handle a new project's workload. Our company wants to ensure that we can give our best to the endeavor at hand to ensure our clients' satisfaction.
Medium price range - Given the credentials and experience of our staff, our payroll is substantial. As a result, our pricing is almost always going to be higher than that of a freelancer. However, we have mastered our process for efficiency purposes over the past decade and can almost guarantee that the model we propose is cheaper and yields better results compared to the CTO/Internal Hire method, or any quote given from a development shop with similar backgrounds.