There’s been a perceptible change which has been sweeping the VC funding landscape for technology companies for sometime now. This in turn has ground-shaking implications for how new products are built, the timeframe in which they are built, and the way development teams need to respond to this change.

Earlier, software start-ups used to be in the incubation mode for months on end. Business plans and financial projections were made for 5 year periods. Initial seed funding was typically in the $5mn range. But in today’s fast-changing world, companies can no longer be in stealth mode for years.

Hardware is cheaper, web infrastructure and cloud computing rule the roost, software libraries are ubiquitous and new technology/languages have crashed development timeframes. With the advent of Web 2.0 and social media, users have also become less technophobic and are willing to try products in beta mode much more and much earlier than ever before. Start-ups comfortably take a product to the market with seed investments of $100-500K in just a period of 4-6 months today.

The end-result of all this is that the rules for building software are changing. And, software companies have to understand and adapt to these changes before it’s too late!

Join the Producteering teleconference on 30th April: “Why are great products so rare? What does it take to build one?”