With a functional app, you want to test before putting out to early adopters. Early adopters are going to be your biggest fans, so you want to get the experience as close to right as you can before launch. This is where usability testing comes in. Running a series of interviews with potential customers who haven't seen the app before is best.

When building an MVP, you want to steal as much code as possible. You're not worried about code licensing, you want to validate the market as quickly as possible with open source. So you want to use third party libraries to do the heavy lifting in your app. This is the heart of most great new companies, leveraging an emerging technology to serve a new market. Uber didn't build a GPS mapping system in its first version. Google didn't build an NLP system in its first version. Netflix didn't build a facial recognition library for identifying actors in its prototype. You shouldn't either. This article gives a few tips in identifying and using existing libraries for your MVP.

Interviewing engineers is a complex task that requires special skills. A new industry has popped up catering to this need — Karat runs interviews for medium to large sized companies, with some customization. Because the engineers and the core of your company, you should be thoughtful in who you hire and why. As the graphic above describes, the cost of hiring a bad employee is huge, whereas the cost of not hiring a good employee is not that high. Always err on the side of caution when making full time hires. Here, I'm going to give some thoughts on how best to conduct your process.

There are a few virtualization choices out there, and for most startups this choice is necessary. Buying a server is all but completely impractical in this day and age. So it comes down to a few top companies. I have a clear bias toward GCP, and I hope to make the case for it here, but there are reasons to go with other choices in certain circumstances.

No Code solutions have come a long way in the past few years. But there is still a lot to consider before committing to one of these solutions.

Choosing the right language for your app is an important decision point for your company. There are nearly infinite strong opinions on each language and which one is best. In this article I'll be as objective as possible and lay out pros and cons for major languages. Most languages are good for a specific use case, and the top few (Python, Node) are often best in most cases.

There are lots of ways to get an app built. I explored some tradeoffs in my article on outsourcing vs hiring inhouse. Here, we're discussing the advantages and disadvantages of dev shops and hiring single contractors.

Many early stage companies face a decision of how to build out their first product. Do we go the route of inhouse engineers, or do we outsource to start? Sometimes a combination makes sense. Here are some considerations to take into account.

Competing with Google for top talent can feel defeating. They have unlimited money, and all the clout. But there is a boutique industry popping up for specialized services of senior and principal engineering services.

A major decision point in early initiatives is between building a native app or with the mobile web. There are a number of things to consider from a user standpoint as well as technical considerations. I also give some options for hybrid and compromises between these two main modalities.