A major paradigm shift is happening in FinTech — building products from scratch is becoming a thing of the past. What was once a laborious process involving huge tech teams, architects, project managers, support teams, etc. has been simplified with each passing year for those in the know. With a growing community of support, resources such as Stack Overflow, CodeCanyon, and savvy mentors directing their protégé’s in the right direction — new technology is assembled like Lego blocks instead of cooked up from scratch like Pappy Van Winkles famous bourbon.
According to the Startup Genome Report, 92% of startups fail within 3 years. Of those, 74% failed due to premature scaling by spending large sums of money on product development, hiring, marketing, etc. before they found a working business model.
While certain expenditures are inevitable to validate and sell an idea, some can be minimized or even avoided. An average lead developer will cost an organization anywhere from 130K to 200K depending on level of experience and geography. A small support team will run another 200K. A few mid level developers will run another 300K leaving some companies in a large hole before they’ve made a single dollar.
The solution is simple — leverage what others have pioneered and share a small royalty of the rewards. Because in reality, how many different ways can you build a watchlist, a chart or an account overview page? Eventually, most entrepreneurs find out that after months of work and hundreds of sleepless nights, they’ve built a product that doesn’t differentiate itself from existing options, or doesn’t solve a problem in a way that’s disruptive enough to change user behaviors.
Instead of building from scratch, take the basics from somewhere else and focus on the main value proposition of what makes the offering unique.