How to find a software development company
The article is a part of Code Inspiration’s software development outsourcing Knowledge Base.
When it comes to a decision to outsource a piece of work or full project, to scale the existing in-house team or to find a single freelancer to work on your project, each customer takes a hard decision whom to select. But before taking this decision, there is another challenge: where to search for a good company or freelancer?
Here we want to address first of all to our audience. Of course there is nothing better than a recommendation of a friend who has already worked with the agency or freelancer. But what to do if there is no friend who can recommend you? Where to find and what to pay attention to while doing your research?
Based on the feedback we received from our existing clients, the first and the most convenient way they reached Code Inspiration was a recommendation of their friend. Among other sources we can mention:
- Listings on verified portals, like clutch.co, crunchbase or manifest, for example.
- Websites like Toptal, Upwork, freelancer.com, guru.com which provide a possibility to post a project and interview personally.
- Ads banners.
- Through Google search.
Let’s talk briefly about all these options.
Find software development companies’ listings on verified portals
Clutch.co is a platform that collects verified clients’ reviews via direct phone calls with them. Before posting a review, Clutch analyst checks company, its market presence, the fact of provision of service, how the services were provided, how did the company and the client interacted in the given project and so on. Then the review is posted on the website. Together with this Clutch provides a great number of listings where companies are rated on the basis of clients’ reviews.
TheManifest is one more website with a reliable information provided by described above Clutch.co. and completely consists of listings, providing lists of top-performing agencies from around the world. Both Clutch and TheManifest provide an option to pay for placement on higher positions. These placements are marked with a relevant “Sponsored” icon.
One more option to find an outsourcing company is Crunchbase catalog. This is a website that contains a list of innovative companies, information about their founders, executive board, key team members, raised investments etc. Even though Crunchbase is aimed at collecting data about startups, their founders and investors; technological and product companies, it contains a great number of outsourcing companies all over the world.
Even though Crunchbase itself is considered to be a reliable source of information, don’t forget that representatives of companies fill in their profiles themselves and this is not verified process.
Surely, these are good resources, however it is always a constructive step to talk with a selected company representative on your own and decide to trust them or not.
Find software development company on freelance platforms
There are also freelance portals such as, for example, Guru, Upwork, Freelance, TopTal. These websites provide a possibility to post a description of your project and wait for requests from potential executors, be it freelancers of outsourcing companies. These portals guarantee payments for executed works, and there is also a possibility to pay so that they find a reliable executor for our given project.
One more positive aspect is that customers are asked to write reviews after completion of work and these reviews can provide you with a good understanding of an outsourcing company reliability.
Among negative aspects are:
- Freelance portals take a commission for their service.
- No possibility to communicate without the freelance portal. This is not convenient usually sometimes because even to share a link, or send invitation to Jira you need to enter the freelance internal chat and communicate their, because portals do not allow sharing emails.
In addition, there is no possibility to organize a group call which is often necessary when working on complex projects.
Find software development company in Google search
Google search is considered to be a basic way to find an outsourcing company. It should be noted that google reviews may not be a reliable source of information due to the fact that anyone can post them and reviews might not be relevant.
One more aspect is that using google search you probably will not browse more than 1-3 pages. The thing is that first pages of google search results usually belong to companies that constantly spend big sums on SEO, thus, ordering services from such a company you pay also for their SEO spending in addition to their work on your project.
Ads banner
Code Inspiration team is of the opinion that ordering software development service is a serious work, this is not just ordering something on eBay. Ordering software outsourcing from a reliable company is of high importance and it seems like ads banner is aimed just to attract attention and bring a potential customer to a corporate website and probably this company will be a reliable partner for your project. Or not.
Summary
From the perspective of Code Inspiration, selecting a vendor is something about trust. Our team members rank mentioned ways in the following way:
- Recommendation;
- Top-rated companies on the portals with verified reviews;
- Freelance websites;
- Google search;
- Marketing banners and advertising.
The article is a part of Code Inspiration’s software development outsourcing Knowledge Base.
