How to save tons of money on your startup project?
This is a real case study of my recent work. How I saved tons of money on a startup project like yours.
My client is a small startup event management; they have a niche web application developed in laravel. It has around a hundred paid customers, its infrastructure is simple, and the web application is hosted on a shared server. Now they are growing in numbers, and the current application has come to a point where it needs to be ready with scale.
So they were introduced by my wife. She told me horror stories about how much the client has suffered in the startup, spent tons of money on the offshore company and not getting any results, delays in delivery, poor communication and poor quality of the services and everything in between.
It was the tell-tell sign for every startup I knew. So I was not surprised by that.
We briefly discussed the project’s current state and what she wants from me.
She is not tech-savvy, but she understands the importance of the right mindset and attitude towards customer service.
I asked her, “What are the problems you are facing now?” She said, “My current business relies on the application, and it has been such a pain to deal with the Indian(Sh*t) company. I am stuck and need help with it.”
“Okay, tell me more about it” I nodded. And she explained to me the current application’s details, why she needed to scale more, and how the oversea company was not cooperative and greedy for money.
So I asked for NDA and explained what she would get from me and how she could save money. It was not simple, but I have summarised as below.
- Provide guidance and consultancy for current application status.
- Road map to improve and suggestions for scaling the application per industry standards.
- Estimated timeframe and an approximate budget for required efforts and deliverables.
- Technical document for the solution implementation.
Once I had an NDA signed, I got her control panel access and got the current application’s state, took a full back up and set it up locally. I checked the code, and it was a true horror story; no unit testing and the tech stack was pretty old, like laravel 5.4x, lack of documentation, lack of security, a poorly designed database and a poorly designed application. I set up the code in the GitHub repository.
Well, at least it works!
My approach was simple, and I took the opportunity to delve deep into the code and structure. I suggested implementing a restful api from the Laravel MVC framework, a detailed technical document on the approach with the sample example. I wrote user stories that map to the existing application’s original capabilities with acceptance criteria, solution architecture, and implementation planning.
It was an executive summary to explain non-technical details with the reasonable efforts required and budget, and I charged her £500 for it. It was two days’ worth of work, and she was over the moon.
Later she showed me the estimate received from the current vendor, and my eyes popped out with raised eyebrows. It was 79k, and mine was just under 9k. And on the top, there were no methodologies, frameworks or technical information for the solution’s implementation and security.
So if you are fade up with overseas services and pricy solutions. And you want to scale your startup and save money simultaneously.
Do you want to save money and time? Then you can consult me.
I will provide you with the right guidance with a money-back guarantee.
If you are not sure and want to know more, contact me on ravi@raminfosystems.co.uk
