Is a Software Services startup still a good idea?

If you eyed a software services niche with low competition, would be a good idea.

Also helps a lot to know the market, or connections

I am a passionate startup ex-founder and entrepreneur. I would need to vet the idea before giving you an answer. There are two items I need to better understand. 1) Is this a software and services company or 2) a Software-as-a-Service company. If it is #2, I can tell you that recurring revenue and the relationship to pricing is an extremely critical piece to your success. Also, there might be an option of a fremium pricing option. Just not sure what you are asking exactly.

Starting any company is profitable but it also depends on how you run the company to be profitable, but of course it is a good idea and surely you will be able to covert it into an industry. Make sure you follow the following process:
1. Conduct market research: The first thing you should do before starting a software development company is conduct market research. Identify your major competitors, target audience, their needs and preferences. Analyse the stage you are entering the market in: introduction, maturity, or decline.
1. At the introduction stage, there is no such software on the market. As a result, your product may be either in huge demand or in no demand at all, if you fail to persuade customers that they need it.
2. The first thing you should do before starting a software development company is conduct market research. Identify your major competitors, target audience, their needs, and preferences. Analyse the stage you are entering the market in: introduction, maturity, or decline.
3. At the decline stage, the market is already saturated with offerings like yours, which means that your idea lags.
2. Choose the way to sell your software: One more important thing is to decide how you will sell your product. If there are similar offerings on the market, study the way your competitors do it. Basically, you can either sell your software directly to the end user or allow users to download it through your website. In the case of direct sales, you will be dealing with big companies and SMEs. You may sell licenses for your software or charge for subscriptions, making the product available for a limited period while the subscription is active. You may also customize your software to make it perfectly suit customers’ needs. Your profit will depend on the uniqueness of your software and on the number of competitors on the market. Basically, selling a few expensive licenses to big companies may be as profitable as selling lots of cheap licenses to SMEs. If you plan on selling your software through a website, you should start with offering users a free trial of your product to see if it works for them. Meanwhile, you may gain revenue from support and maintenance.
3. Run your software development business: Basically, you may own a successful software business without a technical partner. However, having someone more code-savvy may be useful. They can be involved part-time into your company and review the architecture and code. In return, you may offer them equity in your company. However, you will have to share your growing profit with the co-owner in the future. One more option is to turn to a reliable vendor offering software as a service. However, you will depend on them a lot, as you will have less control over the software development. Besides, you should allocate some extra time and budget for communication with the vendor to make sure the software satisfies your requirements.
4. Start up: Once you’ve conducted market research and decided on the way you are going to sell your product; you may proceed to the software development company creation.
Structure your efforts in accordance with the following step-by-step guide.
1. Protect your intellectual property: Once you have an idea, obtain the necessary patents and register trademarks to protect it. Make your collaborators sign a non-disclosure agreement at the product creation stage to prevent leakage of any project-related information.
2. Draw up a business plan: State your business purpose, product, target audience, competitors, financial needs, and the expected time to market for your product. Don’t underestimate this step, as the wrong business model will most probably undermine the success. Quirky, Inc. delivered the invention platform where people could vote on product ideas they appreciated, and the company would then manufacture and sell them in 2009. The company spent over $800,000 developing the products, but neither of them brought in high profit. The start-up struggled to raise money, went through numerous layoffs, and even shut one of its offices. Later, they eventually filed for bankruptcy and sold the business in September 2015. Now, the invention start-up is back with new owners and a new business model. The platform preserves its purpose, but Quirky itself will no longer manufacture products. Instead, they delegated this task to other companies. The start-up conducted no market validation and chose the wrong distribution channel – retail chains. So, they overspent on inventory but failed to recognize whether each product addressed a real consumer need. After all, clicking on an invention you like is different from being ready to pay for it.
3. Consider legal issues, taxation, and insurance: Determine the legal structure of your business for the purpose of taxation. Take care of insurance in case something goes wrong with your software.
4. Engage developers: Organizing your own software development team is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Consider outsourcing your development efforts at least at the first stages. This way, you will get this piece of work done by specialists. If they are overseas employees, you may benefit from their lower labour rates compared to those of the specialists inside the US. Longer project engagement, costly onsite training, language barriers, and different time zones are possible drawbacks with this option. However, reliable contractors mitigate them to the minimum. When hiring a software development team, keep in mind the following:
a. Do not contract suspicious outsourcing vendors or freelancers. Let alone doubtful reliability and security issues, one day you may find out that your software is available for free downloading while you initially intended to charge for it. Ideally, you should turn to a reliable software development company with a solid reputation. Number of employees being over 50 and time on the market being longer than five years are easily available and useful indicators. This contributes to fewer delays in your project implementation.
b. Remember to keep the ownership of the source code. To ensure this, you may apply the ‘work-for-hire’ rule when the developer creates the software for you as an employee. If you turn to a vendor, store the source code in your source code repository, not one owned by the vendor. Otherwise, you may have to start your project from scratch when changing the development team or vendors.
c. On the contrary, hiring wrong people will ruin even the most elaborate plan. GovWorks Inc. was founded in 1998 and launched a web portal for civic requests to facilitate communication between citizens and local government. The founders had a sound business plan, sufficient venture capital, and a growing audience. However, the company went bankrupt and was sold to First Data Corporation in 2001 due to the struggle between its founders, mismanagement, and the project team’s inability to ensure high product quality. The absence of well-coordinated teamwork led the company to a failure.

5. Test the software: Testing reveals bugs in your software and ensures its quality. This way, you increase customer satisfaction, which adds to your profit and reputation.
There are several testing options to ensure you offer a quality product:
• Outsource testing to the same company that does the development. This company already understands your project. Besides, the developers and testers inside one company can cooperate easily to settle your project related issues. What is more, developing and testing conducted by the same company may cost less than delegating these efforts to different companies.
• Outsource testing to a separate quality assurance company. This way, you bring new testers with a fresh perspective into the project. However, it will take some time for them to study your project’s specifics.
• Do testing yourself. You will have to do some acceptance testing anyway, but the testing during development is rather time consuming. It will probably take around 30% of development efforts.
It is always cheaper to do testing yourself. However, factors such as time pressure can make you delegate your testing efforts to others.

6. Create a prototype: Software prototyping allows you to get an idea of how the final product will look like before investing time and money finishing it. A piece of software enough to enter the market is called an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Users test it, provide their feedback, and decide whether they opt for it in the future. At this stage, correcting mistakes is easier and cheaper that doing if after the product final release. That is why you should come with a prototype as early as possible. After you assess how it goes with your software prototype, you can make all the necessary changes. Once you have a prototype, or better yet, an MVP, you may attract venture capital, grants, and loans, find investors among your acquaintances, or attract online funding resources.

Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath