Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Company Strategy

Porter's Five Forces² is one of the most popular frameworks for rigorous evaluation of company strategy. We'll use it here to highlight a few key business drivers common to most tech businesses (see Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3 Porter's Five Forces

Bargaining Power of Suppliers

First we have the bargaining power of suppliers. A company with an enterprise product, like Enable Quiz, will have suppliers in two major areas: systems development and software subcomponents (sublicenses) for software piece parts used in the application. The rise of offshoring has made the market for development engineers more competitive. But there's a catch: It's hard to manage an offshore team. The physical distance and language barrier exacerbates any weakness in your ability to articulate your product design or manage developers. One of the most important things you can do to help yourself is to ensure you're not relying on your engineering team to be your product design team, and the best way to avoid that is to start with a well-articulated design. Without a strong product design, you'll be dependent on finding that one developer out of 20 who has the training, experience, natural ability, and desire to design your product as well as execute your software implementation. If you do find and can afford such an individual, use him or her to the greatest degree possible. But I wouldn't bank ...