With thousands of startups being created each year, almost 90% of them prove to be unsuccessful. But, what are those 10% of startups doing differently that allows them to scale no matter what the global economy looks like? Other than the 2 principal reasons being no market value and the draining of cash, many companies failed because of user-unfriendly products, disharmony among teams, and a lack of DevOps.
The tech market in 2023 is a high-pressure environment for startups to deliver products at high speed without compromising on quality and innovation. Both these goals can be achieved by using DevOps.
According to 48% of the surveyed companies, DevOps proves to be necessary for growing your business in the coming years. Being a startup, maintaining a synergy between your IT operations and the Software Development department is the key to growth. Establishing hard-core DevOps practices at the outset of your startup lifecycle is important for your long-term success.
In this blog, we’ll talk about what DevOps is, why is it crucial for startups, and some tools that prove to be a boon for them.
Let’s dive in.
What is DevOps?
DevOps in 10 words is ‘the convergence of operations with development processes and vice versa.’ There can be a great deal of confusion while understanding it, but once you get familiar with it, it’s almost apparent.
DevOps eliminates the gap between the development and operations departments. Thus, when a product needs modification, there’s no back & forth among the teams. However, this does not mean that everyone does everything. It creates individual groups of varying skill sets that work together to meet the goal. It’s a partnership between members where they share knowledge.
Another crucial aspect of DevOps is automation. It promotes automating repetitive tasks using machines to remove human error and gives the team to focus on something productive. It is not the same for all companies. Therefore, each company has its tactics to implement DevOps in their business.
Benefits of using DevOps
We’ve curated a special list of benefits that you can reap by using DevOps in your team:
1. Less Problems
In a startup, the end product is what matters. If the engineers spend hours trying to fix common mistakes, nobody’s happy. DevOps helps to simplify the product-making process, and remove errors. This benefit of DevOps makes it worthwhile for getting used in a startup.
2. Improved Understanding
Since both the Development and Operations team is working closely, they both have a good understanding of what is going on in product development. Things do not get complicated due to effective communication between the departments.
3. Increased Customer Satisfaction
14% of the surveyed startups state that they would not have failed if they had more heed to the customers. DevOps offers company members to save time as it detangles product problems. It doesn’t matter if you offer the best product, if you can’t satisfy your customers, you won’t succeed.
4. Higher Team Agility
Before we dive into DevOps strategies, let’s cast a glance at the numbers that underscore the urgency. According to recent studies, a staggering 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to reach their intended goals. The factors are diverse – from resistance to change and disjointed workflows to inadequate technology adoption. These statistics serve as a stern reminder that embracing digital transformation demands a well-crafted blueprint, and this is where DevOps steps onto the stage.
5. Automation
Since DevOps helps to automate the iterative mundane tasks, it eventually enables the IT staff to focus on their product development. Startups that use DevOps for automation, spend 21% less time on debugging work. In startup culture, it is a significant amount of time since every day is a race to put the best product on the market or keep it alive.
Why do Startups need DevOps?
The answer is simple. If the startup doesn’t invest in DevOps, there is a higher chance of it being a part of that 90% unsuccessful startup group. According to a survey, more than 95% of the companies have invested in DevOps or are planning to invest in upcoming years. This means that 5% will be at risk of failure as compared to these. Don’t let your company be a part of that 5%.
It’s a hard world for startups. If you want to earn more money, you need to spend accordingly as well. If you don’t effectively spend on the DevOps team in the early years, you will come back to losses in the later ones.
Here’s a list of reasons why your startup needs an efficient DevOps-optimized approach:
1. Enables Orchestration
The workflow orchestration that is powered by DevOps has a higher chance of speeding up the application cycle by 3 times or more. This leads to reduced costs, better customer satisfaction, and faster time-to-market. When all the departments will follow the same standardized software development cycle, everybody will be on the same page.
2. Assured Software Quality
Before releasing the product into the market, DevOps enables the company to catch bugs which helps in better quality software and maintenance of the company’s reputation in the market. With this development process, the developers discover the bugs earlier and don’t let them penetrate the whole software.
3. Better Cross-Departmental Collaboration
DevOps enables effective communication amongst the different departments which leads to better collaboration in the organization. Departments like IT, development, sales, and finance collaborate in a better manner which leads to the prevention of costly mistakes at the beginning of application development.
4. 4.Increases Customer Lifetime Value
Since Customer Satisfaction is essential for a successful startup, DevOps helps to take continuous and frequent reports to take customer feedback into account. This helps DevOps play a lead role in startup culture. By innovating faster with DevOps, startups can also scale multiple heights with enhanced customer lifetime value.
5. Fuels New Product Ideas
With the help of DevOps, you can create a single view of the customer that can be shared by development, sales, and manufacturing teams. This helps the company people to understand the innovative ideas and what new can be added to the already existing product using customer feedback. New and better product development will lead to organic revenue growth of the business.
6. Accelerates Innovation
DevOps enables agility among the team, leading to actionable insights and customer-centricity. This concept helps startups to innovate their products faster than the major tech companies and helps them offer an edge in the market. Regular innovation backed up by customer feedback can result in accelerated growth and a healthy bottom line.
7. Minimizes Errors
Error recovery has always been costly since forever. DevOps eliminates mistakes in the products in their early phase which minimizes the cost of recovering from a big error in the later days. This offers error-free delivery on time and more scalability.
Final Words
Every startup wants to grow and eventually reach unicorn status. Implement DevOps in your startup from day one to enjoy all its benefits in the long run. This is the magic ingredient that can make your product bigger, better, and faster than your competitors.
