Not on Web = Out of Date
We live in a technological era when the Internet influences the market daily, allowing us to give life to any innovative idea and create a successful business within several months. The IT-industry offers a wide variety of choices for billions who do not intend to work for someone else. Some of them have succeeded as startup creators, while others have chosen freedom of self-employment combined with a decent income working in the IT industry.
This innovative boom created new requirements for businesses willing to satisfy basic customer needs, and an online platform is one out of that list. Also, it brought strong competitive advantages to flexible know-how startups and made the old-school business model outdated. Thus, the demand for sites to represent the company on the Web increased considerably, and many enterprising businessmen have already opened their own IT companies to facilitate that.
Easier said than done
In view of the growing frequency of this demand, many entrepreneurs believe that they could set up a site easily, relying on IT-pros' experience in web-industry gained within the last decade. Thus, they don't even think that any preparation is needed to represent their idea to the executive IT-agency. However, they usually approach site developers without any preparation or a technical specification, even though it might help keep unqualified contractors away.
The IT-market is full of incompetent developers who will leave contracts unfinished, since they are used to throwing promises before task analysis. We will return to this topic later on, but for now, let’s get back to our entrepreneurs. Obviously, whenever they get interviewed, they realise that the first challenge is to describe their concept to a manager in an agency without any references or even a cheat-sheet with the main points. Therefore, IT-firms familiarize entrepreneurs with Technical specification (TS or TOR) requirements, and offer them to start cooperation with TOR development, which is a prolonged process.
So, if you are ready to set your business idea online, don't lose the opportunity to do preliminary research: try to think of possible Web instruments to serve your business, think what site interface you may need and get as many references as you can to describe your vision to a manager of an IT-firm. Prepare this cheat-sheet and you will be surprised how easy an interview about the idea with a potential contractor will be for you!