K-Optional Blog Key Industry Insights

Strategy

Custom Business Software Development: Your Comprehensive Guide

Discover the intricacies of custom business software development, its benefits, and how it can revolutionize your operations. Learn when to build or buy, explore strategies, and understand how a custom software development firm can drive your business success.

Strategy

Do automation that doesn't scale: a framework for Business Process Automation

Discover a three-step framework for lean business process automation (BPA) that incorporates human-driven elements to minimize risk and improve efficiency. Learn how this method enables more effective automation by incorporating domain experts, virtual assistants, and custom software development, ultimately creating resilient systems that adapt to complex business needs.

Strategy

Local vs off-shore custom software vendors

Explore the pros and cons of local, onshore, and offshore custom software vendors to make an informed decision for your next project. Discover the impact of factors like trust, reputation, communication, price, and more on your project outcomes.

Strategy

Our rules for engagement with GPT and LLMs

For a custom software business in the year 2023, large language models (LLMs) like GPT are hard to avoid. GPT takes have flooded tech news while GPT projects constitute an overwhelming proportion of trending open-sourced software. It’s not just hype: LLMs have proven remarkably adept at writing code, generating content, and assisting with research— all pertinent to our operation. Prognosticators wonder if the shift to AI-driven development permanently alters the custom software industry. The emerging art of Prompt Engineering speaks to a shift. And so, after careful consideration, we have crafted this framework for dealing with LLMs internally.

Strategy

Is Firebase a good fit for your business?

Firebase is a wildly popular app development platform, but it comes with tradeoffs. After years working with Firebase, here are our thoughts on when it’s the right choice.

Insight

Custom software development: what every business should avoid

You’ve probably heard a success story or two about custom software development, something like “ordinary guy launches a popular mobile app” or “business cuts costs in two with a clever digital system”. Perhaps you’ve also heard of a flop— maybe a friend sank money into an idea that didn’t take off, or a colleague owned a faltering IT migration. The horror stories, though depressing, can teach the most. So if you’re considering a foray into custom application development services, get to know the points of failure. They’re less public, so unfortunately many learn someone else’s hard lesson again.

Strategy

Streamlining Your Business with Custom Software SaaS Integrations

Find out how to choose the right custom software 3rd party software-as-a-service (SaaS) product integration strategy for your business and optimize your workflows for increased productivity.

Guide

How to Implement Automation in Your Business: A Case Study

Learn how to implement business process automation with a real-world example from an appliance servicing company, and discover the steps involved in achieving efficient automation.

Insight

Custom Automation Solutions for Business

Thinking of automating a piece of your business? You’re probably onto something. Most companies, even tech-savvy companies like yours, can unlock huge gains by taking advantage of automation opportunities. Investing in custom automation solutions will pay dividends. In this introductory guide, we examine some great custom automation tools and explain (in detail) how you can implement your own automation solutions at your business.

K-Optional Handbook

How to vet and hire a competent software development firm

How do development firms price applications? As a client, what are the best ways to optimize on value? Since we get these questions a lot, we put together the complete guide. Hope it gives you a window into the software development world!

Insight

Why we’re moving away from Firebase

We’ve launched dozens of applications on Firebase, utilized nearly every facet of the platform, and designed a playbook for scaling gracefully. Suffice it to say, it’s proven an invaluable tool for K-Optional Software. As recently as March 2022, our developers were cheering innovations like Firebase Extensions. Unfortunately, three major developments in the past few months have polluted the developer experience and consequently K-Optional will shift towards alternatives for green projects.

Insight

Software start-up system essentials

Wondering what fundamental systems to adopt for your early-stage startup or idea? Here’s our definitive guide distilled from four clients that white-label K-Optional Software’s development services. These approaches range from hyper-minimal to hyper-thorough.

Insight

The perils of single-client SaaS products

Subscription revenue is the gift that keeps on giving; who doesn’t value long-term and predictable income? Multi-billion-dollar companies like Adobe have transitioned their products to subscription-based payments for good reason. Even so, product creators might be overly-disposed to conforming to this model- alternate pricing systems often make more sense depending on a few aspects of the user-base.

Strategy

When to buy, and when to build custom software

Explore the build vs buy dilemma in software development with a real-world case study, and learn to strike the right balance between off-the-shelf solutions and custom software.

Case Study

How to build an app in two days

In this article we will tell you how we built an app in two days. Hopefully you will be able to use it as a template next time you have an idea and want to test it out!

K-Optional Handbook

K-Optional Software - The Ultimate Developer Engagement

We’ve thought very hard about how to best align incentives in a product development engagement. We tried a bunch of things over the years, cataloged what worked, and relentlessly iterated. We’ve landed on what we believe to be the fairest and most sustainable deal for our clients.

K-Optional Handbook

Building MVPs with K-Optional - The Pipeline

Through dozens of minimum viable products, K-Optional Software has mastered the craft. We know the things that tend to pop out at you during the process, and how to handle them. We've distilled our experiences into a robust pipeline optimized for helping you launch your vision in a timely manner.