After 15 Years Developing Apps, These Are the Three Traits I Think Are Most Important For Dev Teams
I was at a trade show in Las Vegas the other day talking to a potential client. He told me something that I’m hearing more and more these days.
“Nothing is more expensive than a 25-dollar-an-hour offshore engineer.”
That sounds counterintuitive, but let me explain.
The guy had contracted an offshore development agency to build his app on a budget. He got the price point he was looking for, but, when he received the completed app later, it was nowhere near what he needed. He ended up spending much more redoing it from scratch with another agency.
It’s a common rookie mistake to believe that the main thing dev teams compete on is price. The real metric that business owners should look for that you’re probably not thinking about is processes.
When I say processes, I mean:
- Quality project management
- Team cohesion
- Effective individual contribution.
These are the things that get you quality work on the right budget.
After 15 years of running Appstem, I think we’ve created some of the best processes in the industry. I think it’s 100% because we’ve focused on keeping the business:
- Lean
- On-shore
- Independent
Let me explain these a bit more:
Why We Stay Lean
I’ve had numerous clients ask me if our projects could go faster with more coders on them. Anyone who’s worked with dev teams knows that is rarely the case.
Two developers on one project can sometimes slow it to a crawl. In many cases, one, highly skilled developer can easily replace the work of five less-skilled and less focused developers. There’s less back and forth and more focused work.
Too many businesses today focus on scaling their teams so they can build out billings for man-hours worked. It has very little to do with increasing efficiency. Every time you decide to build out your team without making your current team more efficient is a missed opportunity to provide more value to your current clients. It’s a surface-level metric.
I’ve only grown the business slowly as we brought on more clients. With a longer time frame in mind, I only bring on complexity when I have no other choice.
But how do you create a lean team of highly effective developers who don’t need to be micromanaged? My other two points should explain it.
Why We Stay On-Shore
While offshore teams often are cheaper at face value, managing an offshore team is highly intensive. Much of that sticker price that looks so appealing is largely going to the project managers, not the engineers.
That’s not to say there aren’t any great offshore operations, but anytime you’re dealing with project managers in the States and a team in another country you’re dealing with one more layer of communication.
I’ve watched quite a few of my competitors get acquired by larger businesses that immediately ship all the engineering roles to other countries in South America or India. Just as quickly, their quality dips as they have:
- Many new developers
- Gaps in communication between management and the team
- Higher turnover rates because engineers don’t feel part of the team
How can you possibly create good processes for an engineering team that runs like that? Often the clients of these types of agencies look up Appstem when they receive an app that doesn’t work and need to redo it.
Even after 15 years of business, we still do things more or less the same way (at least the good parts).
Our clients’ first meeting is always with me, our CTO, Chris Newhouse, and our Creative Director, Chris Harris. We remain a primary point of contact for all of our clients. The engineers you meet are the engineers who will be working on your apps.
While we are a remote office, all of my engineers are still based in the Bay Area. We get together regularly and I know each of them is just a quick phone call away. That kind of closeness builds a rapport and dedication you simply can’t get with offshore teams.
Why We Stay Independent
I regularly receive offers to buy my business and, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve seen many of my competitors bought out by larger agencies hoping to add their business on as a value-add or ship the work abroad. To this day, I’ve always said no.
Why? Because with full control of my business, I get to scale at the pace I want. A pace that is healthy for me and healthy for my clients.
I think the success of this strategy speaks for itself in terms of the tenure of our clients and our employees. Many of the clients we work with today are the same clients we were working with 15 years ago. They treat Appstem as an integral part of their team.
And I’m proud to say at Appstem we have an average employee tenure of four years. That’s four years for highly skilled devs in the Bay Area. And I’ll be honest, we don’t pay the top salary you can find out here. Most of our management team has been on for roughly a decade.
My employees stay on because they love our culture and they love how interesting it is to work on something new every day. We have a camaraderie and a cadence you won't find anywhere else.
How do you know I’m telling the truth? Go check out Glassdoor
I want to end this letter by first thanking my employees and clients who’ve made 15 years at Appstem possible. I’m blessed to have spent the last decade-plus doing what I love with the people I love doing it with.
Second, I’d like to invite any business that wants to get serious and build real apps that you could not build with any other development team to leave me a message. We’re always looking for new clients and happy to show you why we’re one of the oldest shows in town.
If you want to hear more about my story building Appstem, I recently had an article published in Bootstrappers.com, I encourage you to check that out.
