So you have a fantastic idea and you cannot wait to have it on the amazing world of web and create your own success story! The questions are – where to start and what are the steps involved? Before you go about defining and prioritizing the features of your product, you need to lay out the process of designing and developing your startup. If you are still looking for a VC and are yet to receive funding, you might want to hire an offshore team to have your startup built or at least a few mock-up designs with which you can pitch to the investors. The first step of materializing a concept is to have a rough idea of what it is going to be like.

Finding a good company that offers startup solutions for affordable prices might be tough and you can consider looking for a startup consultant who can help you with your initial search. Most consultants have a good idea about a number of design and development firms that work with startups and a startup consultant might just be a good bet for you if you are clueless. The second way to go about it is to follow the do-it-yourself approach and surf the web and search for startup web design and development firm. You would have to invest a lot of time in it but you can chop off this time to a certain extent if you follow the following checklists to shortlist the best companies in the field –

• Make sure the companies you consider have a fair bit of experience and have been working in the field before. The experience of the company should be relevant to the domain that your startup belongs to.
• Have a look at their portfolio and go through their previous work very closely. Browse the applications they have developed and see if those sites have a good UI and a good UX. Similarly look for any responsive designs they might have created in the past. This exercise would help you understand the design talent of the company.
• Speak to the startups they have worked for. The portfolio would get you to the live links where you can easily contact the startups that these companies worked for and ask them for a feedback. Startups often work on crunch timelines and therefore it is important to have the surety of timely deliveries.
• Get to know about the technologies that various firms are good with and shorten the list to the ones that are good at a certain technology like PHP or .NET depending on your startup model.
• Look for firms that are willing to develop a prototype of your final product. This would help you establish trust and correct your mistakes in terms of selection if at all you’ve gone wrong.

An agile development approach always comes in handy when it comes to web development for startups and hence you need to make sure that you hire a team that is capable of delivering the concerned project modules on a timely basis. Ideally any project should be divided into modules, the end of each module being a minimum viable product. Such an approach can not only help you come up with the right product but can also help you later when your application is in beta. A few firms around the world also get in the quality guys right from the start of a project instead of having them only to make quality checks once the development work is totally complete. This too makes for a better approach and helps in saving a lot of time.

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