Common tech mistakes that you can't afford to make
We work with a broad range of clients. But we have noticed that there are tech mistakes which keep coming up. These are easy fixes, that will make scaling easier… and save you money!
Mistake 1: Building business processes in Excel.
It's easy at the beginning. But it results in a disjointed hellscape costing the business 4-5-6 figures through unproductive time.
🚀 Solution: Ditch Excel.
Find off-the-shelf software to replace it. If none is available, go to market with your challenges in a brief and work with a tech partner to build a solution. As a part of your brief, make sure you work with your team to understand the cost of continuing with your current tech (time, direct costs, opportunity costs etc)- replacing Excel will likely generate ROI but it needs to stack up for you.
Mistake 2: Tech becoming the objective: "What's the best software which does X?"
Implementing tech shouldn't be the objective. Solving a challenge or achieving a given business objective should be the focus.
🚀 Solution: Tech must do something to empower your strategy or it will fail. In this example, 'Replace our Excel sheet' shouldn't be the objective. You need to list all the challenges around using it, then look at what you need to do to address those.
Mistake 3: Not including tech in your strategy
90% of scale-ups have no tech expertise in the leadership team. This means that no one is there to ask "how will tech empower us to meet our financial/business objectives?"
🚀 Solution: When business objectives are set at board/leadership level, you need to have someone in the room who has a professional background in tech, whose remit is to understand "How will tech be used to empower these objectives?". If that person doesn't exist in the business, hire/outsource them.
🚫 Treating product development as finite
38% of tech start-ups run out of money. If you want to change the world with a product, or do something that's never been done before, budgeting for one iteration will be painful.
🚀 Solution: Change your mindset. Product development is a constant journey of learning and iteration to balance commercial viability and what customers will pay for. Understand how many 'iterations' you have before running out of cash. Product development never ends (just look at Google; they are always developing their products).
🚫 Perfect a product without customer feedback
35% of tech start-ups fail because there is no market need for their product. Perfecting a product without user feedback can be fatal. You’re potentially wasting time/money building a shiny product that no-one wants to use.
🚀 Solution: Make the first version for an innovation low effort. Demonstrate it to people who understand the vision and potential. If they provide positive feedback and want to use it, you can develop it further. This doesn't mean purposefully make something shoddy- it means getting feedback at the smallest step before investing significant resources.
7-figure businesses who are not adopting these approaches probably have 5-6 figures per year of undiscovered efficiency. This is also holding back growth.
But… as a tech partner, we can help businesses achieve all these things! Get in touch if you need some guidance.