After several requests, I am finally doing some videos on project scoping and management!
This video is one of the first things I tell new entrepreneurs that want to build an app or SaaS. So many businesses lose so much money every day because they don’t know where to start. But no longer! Take a look and now you’ll know.
Please comment and let me know what you thought about this!
Transcript:
Alright. This is how web design, app development, and just development in general is similar to construction projects. I mean construction as in home construction, or industrial building construction, or commercial building construction. If you wanted to build a building, and you find this plot of land, and you get started, and you take a look and you say, “Oh let’s build a house on this plot of land”. The first thing you do is not call a carpenter to come in, and take a look, and say, “Oh yeah, I’ll go ahead and get started today”. That’s a terrible idea. No carpenter is going to take a look and go, “Yeah, this is a good idea”.
What you would first do, is you would call an architect. You would call someone to plan everything out for you. They would review everything. They would take a look at the size of things. They would figure out how the foundation needs to get poured. They would work with you on how many rooms you’re going to have. How many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, what the floor plan is going to look like, how the house is going to be used, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When you’re building an app, if you’re building a website, if you’re building a portal, if you’re building software, the first thing to do is to get an information architect or a new age designer, or someone with several years of experience developing these systems to sit down with you and work out what pages do you need? What features do these pages have on them? How does this system work? How is it meeting your goals? How is it meeting your users goals? Et cetera. Before starting work on anything, what I see all the time is a company or person will have a good idea for an app, or website, or whatever, and the first thing they do, is they go online, they find an outsource person to do this. They say, “Hey, go build my app”. That is basically equivalent to coming in, buying a piece of property, calling a plumber, and saying, “Hey plumber, build my house for me”.
At the end of the day, the plumber just doesn’t really know anything about framing. They don’t know anything about laying foundation. Your plumbing in that house is going to be amazing, but the rest of the house might fall down. That’s basically what happens every single day. What you have to do, this is a simple, simple thing, simple, simple steps, figure out what you want to do. Put together a basic set of ideas around this, and then find someone who can help you plan it. Find someone who will produce a scope of work document. Who will figure out what users you have, and what they can and can’t do. Who will do flowcharts of the system, and describe how users flow through the system to meet their goals, et cetera.
That is the number one biggest thing I see so many people fail on when building apps, and websites, and portals. Be it for a very large company, or for small companies, this happens all the time. That is my lesson for today. Thank you. This is Jason Long with Brain Leaf, with Code Right, with so many other businesses talking to you about how best to build these things. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
