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Thoughts on custom development shops

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Thoughts on custom development shops

(http://benreichelt.net/blog/2005/5/16/Thoughts-on-custom-development-shops/)

Published May 16 2005, 08:32 PM by breichelt

Comments

Shane said:

I work in a company that was started the same way. Me and another developer were brought together to develop a sellable application. Now many years later we do some custom application development but personally I find it's alot less 'fun' then you might think. It keeps me away from time spent improving our existing products or creating new products that 1000x may want to buy (as opposed to the 1x person who we are custom developing for) and even if we can take the custom app and repackage/resell it later on you usually find it's got a much more limited market. So having a product to make money on is good but always remember that almost every product out there has a time span and you don't want to find you've become a custom-development shop while your main app died a slow death and you don't have anything else to sell.

# May 17, 2005 8:13 AM

breichelt said:

Shane, I completely agree with you, I must not have been clear with what I was trying to say. I would much rather work on resellable products as opposed to constant custom work, when I mentioned the "fun" involved with custom work, I was simply giving one argument people might use when favoring custom work over resellable work.

# May 17, 2005 9:14 AM

Shane said:

I understood that you were against the custom development only. I'm just trying to reinforce the fact that ANY custom development can cost you more in terms of opportunities, and future sales of your existing products then you make in short term cash.

# May 19, 2005 9:33 AM

Sparky said:

Certainly custom-development has its down-sides, the need to "always be billable" being perhaps the largest, but I think one area that it's very strong in is in generating good, portable ideas.

Working in a custom development environment can expose you to business domains that you wouldn't otherwise encounter. Often-times, a "one-off" piece of software that you implement for a customer in one industry can be polished and re-deployed in another domain, as a product. The original customer is often happy to see this, since the new software doesn't directly compete with them, and an exchange can often be worked out for updates to the original software in exchange for gifting the IP.

One of the other responses touched on products-based companies morphing into consultant shops over time. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of software shops that are now products-based, perhaps most, cut their teeth doing custom development.

# May 20, 2005 5:30 PM

shayne said:

I'm a little late, but thought this was interesting enough to comment on.

I've worked on both sides of the fence being discussed, but have chosen the custom development route. As you said, it's a personal choice. I find it more challenging to do custom development because of the parameters I have to work within. Also, like someone mentioned, I'm always getting exposed to new business domains as well as technologies. So it keeps me fresh. All personal feelings.

Business-wise, the two are quite different. For a product company, you make a large up front investment to build a product that people may or may not buy. Large upfront investment + risk. Custom development, paychecks are rolling in consistently. I *KNOW* I'm getting paid once I've found the contract.

# July 1, 2005 2:05 PM