There are a lot of stories that compare the success of software companies to a rocket ship. This analogy is particularly helpful in understanding how to efficiently deploy capital in order to achieve success.
To set the stage, you’re the CEO of a software company here on Earth. Your customers, however, are in orbit, and your mission is to create a rocket (your software product) that can successfully reach them in space.
In this article, we’ll talk about the three things you need to build the rocket to do that:
- You need a spacecraft.
- You need a booster to get you into orbit.
- You need technical leadership to manage the flight.
1: The Spacecraft
Your spacecraft is your value delivery vehicle – it’s the only thing that your customers can see and touch. Think of all of the aspects of your product that you can monetize. For example, the functionality that solves business problems, the user experiences customers interact with, the APIs they integrate with – basically, all the things that save them time and money in their business so they happily approve your invoices. You have to build the spacecraft because it’s what captures your unique value proposition.
2: The Booster
The booster is the launch vehicle you need to get your spacecraft into orbit. Its sole purpose is to safely, effectively, and efficiently get your spacecraft into orbit and to your customers. Now, the booster has to be specific to your spacecraft, but fundamentally it’s just a whole heck of a lot of plumbing that’s easy to get wrong. It can also blow up on the launch pad or in the air (and blow your spacecraft, budget, and target dates with it). You have to either build it, buy it, or do a little bit of both. There’s more flexibility here since it doesn’t really have anything to do with your unique value proposition, though it does have to be specific to your spacecraft.
3: Technical Leadership
The expression “it’s not rocket science” has become popular to refer to any field that doesn’t require deep or nuanced expertise. But when you watch two SpaceX boosters land in synchrony after successfully flinging a Tesla toward Mars…yeah that looks like rocket science! These days anyone can write code and run it in the cloud. That’s not the point. To efficiently, effectively, and profitably build successful, stable, scalable, single-source, multi-tenant cloud platforms and products takes some serious technical leadership talent. You don’t need to hire a software rocket scientist – but having one on-call can certainly keep you out of trouble!
Houston, we have some problems.
We’ve identified the three things you need to get your rocket into space where your customers are orbiting. But, just like with Apollo 13, problems can pop up along the way and impede our success.
In our example, the spacecraft is what customers are paying for. This represents all the features, functions, APIs, and user experiences that provide your core value to customers. And this is where you need your team to focus their energy. You need them to give their all to create the best user experiences and functionality to solve your customers’ most challenging problems – through the use of your products and platforms. The better you do this, the more you’ll earn in recurring revenue.
And, if we’re being honest here, this is the work your internal team is most excited to work on. It also happens to be what they’re best at doing – that’s why they are always pitching new ideas for product features!
But here’s the dirty little secret of software product development: your team is spending up to 80% of their time working on the booster, not your spacecraft! On one hand, it makes sense for your team to be spending the lion’s share of their time on the booster because it’s the most difficult, complex, and risky part of the rocket, and if it doesn’t work your spacecraft will never make it to orbit. But on the other hand, your team is spending up to 80% of their time doing things that don’t deliver value to your customers, and that they may not be particularly qualified to work on, and that’s very, very easy to get wrong!
Even if you’re okay spending 80% of your R&D time, effort, and budget on plumbing, don’t forget that once it’s built, you have to maintain it. And since it represents 80% of your codebase, you’ll have to spend 80% of your maintenance budget and headcount just on that. That leaves you only 20% for innovation, new features, or continuous development of the things that actually matter to your customers.
I know what you’re thinking…if only you didn’t have to worry about the booster, you could spend 100% of your R&D time and budget on your spacecraft…
Taking it further, what if you not only didn’t have to build the booster, but you didn’t have to maintain it either?
How much faster could you grow if all you had to build and maintain was the product code your developers were good at writing and for which your customers were ready and willing to pay?
There is a better way.
If you were building a new spacecraft today, would you try to build your own rocket booster too? Or would you see if you could use reusable booster technology from SpaceX to get your spacecraft safely and cost-effectively into orbit? That would be the smart thing to do.
This is where PlatformPlus comes in: PlatformPlus does for software products what the Falcon-9 booster does for the Dragon Spacecraft.
PlatformPlus frees up your team to focus only on those things that deliver value to your customers – the things that generate you revenue. We’ve automated the rest close to 100%.
It’s Reusable.
Just like SpaceX, our booster is 100% reusable. Why throw it away time after time when you can build it once and reuse it? That’s the premise behind PlatformPlus. We designed a horizontal platform made specifically to help software companies de-risk and accelerate the creation of their own vertical platforms on top of it. Its reusability launched into the stratosphere.
As I like to say, “think reusability squared.”
It’s Well Maintained and Supported.
We’re accountable for maintaining our booster technology. It’s our responsibility to keep up with advancements in technologies from Microsoft, Amazon, and others. Since our Platform is based on timeless first principles of software architecture (principles that were true 30 years ago and will be true 30 years from now), we have an amazing track record over the last 15+ years of providing customers with clean, low-risk, low-cost upgrade paths to the latest versions of our technology, allowing their products to remain current and fresh over all that time.
The ‘Plus’ in PlatformPlus also gives you access to our senior technical leaders, who are responsible for training, advising, and guiding your team to attain the highest development velocity possible, while simultaneously minimizing risk.
It’s Powerful and Automated.
We’ve automated the construction of the vast majority of the infrastructure/plumbing code for your software products and platforms. The architecture is sound, scalable, flexible, secure, and built to last.
And no matter how complex your data or use cases, PlatformPlus can handle it. In fact, the level of automation actually increases with complexity.
It’s the key to achieving ROI on R&D.
Your mission is to get your software product or platform to market, quickly, correctly, and cost-effectively. If you can slash development time by up to 80%, defects by up to 90%, and free your developers to work only on those things that you and your customers value, isn’t that worth a look? PlatformPlus helps you get the most out of the team you already have.
To get started, give me a buzz at (888) 872-9701 or email me at singha@modularis.com.