ChaitanyaSagar.com

Software development is not easy for startups. With a PowerPoint presentation and a few arguments that convince your friends, you can’t achieve the precision and refinement in thinking that a fixed price contract needs. An umbrella Time and Material contract with modules in fixed pricing can work for you.

It is our nature that we will not be able to get to the finest level of detail for a big application. Generally, entrepreneurs have a vague idea. Their thinking evolves–you add modules, change them and scrap others. But if you signed a fixed price contract, you can’t go back and change it every time you change your requirements. The moot question will then be who will bear the additional cost –the software services vendor or the entrepreneur? This lands the project in trouble.

To avoid this, I recommend that you sign an umbrella Time and Material (per hour or per person month) contract and sign a fixed price for each module. Though it is not possible for you to document an entire application, you can think through and document the details for each module (size of about a tenth of an application). Then sign a fixed price bid for each module. Not only will the service providers be willing to sign a fixed price because they know - because they have it written-what they are getting into. If you sign fixed price, effort over runs for smaller modules will be borne by the vendor and not you.

This framework is more attuned to your nature, gives you more time to pen down the requirements and is more likely to be successful.

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Search engines have been resilient and successful applications Internet has had. Consumers, businesses and marketers have been glued to them making them the melting pot of Internet and marketing. But search engines have big problems.

Though they use logical ‘signatures’ of good content like number of incoming links, they cant differentiate good content from ‘cooked up’ material. Take a look at this video. The maker of this video claims that he was able to get some junk rank in the first page for target keywords. There are a ton of ‘search engine optimizers’ who ‘exchange links’ or create links that manipulate search results. If you optimize your website or content for keywords just because you want to attract business, I am not sure if you the search results are being optimized in the process.

That’s not too encouraging for search engines. There’s a good proverb in Telugu. “Pulini choosi nakka vaata pettukunnatlu” It teases a fox that tries to look like a tiger by having scars to copy tiger’s stripes. The difference between a fox and a tiger is DNA. But a search engine can’t differentiate the DNA.  It reads a fox and puts it in the search results for “Tiger” because the fox has stripes, those incoming links, the keyword density etc., on its back. That probably explains why the research shows that 50% of search engine queries don’t end successfully.

But that’s good news for entrepreneurs. Discovery of content is still a problem yet to be solved. Digg, StumbleUpon and other websites have come up to solve this problem and there are opportunities out there to solve it.

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