Hey friends and welcome to the small tech podcast from Éphémère Creative. I'm your host Raph. And this is our very first episode. In this podcast, we'll dive into the world of small tech development. We'll bring you the latest in tools, strategies, and technologies that can help you build a technology product.
So whether you're a startup founder, trying to launch a world, changing platform, a nonprofit building, an app to serve your community, a small business, trying to augment your existing services, or just curious about the future of building technology. You're in the right place.
On today's episode, we'll break down some core concepts about building technology as a small organization, we'll go over the importance of staying agile, how to maximize your tech budget and why it's crucial to stay focused on people. This is the kind of stuff we'll touch on in every episode. Though we'll be more focused on the specifics down the line. All righty, let's jump in. First thing's first agility. This is absolutely key.
As you navigate the ever changing landscape of technology, it's important to remain open to new ideas and be ready to pivot when you need to. Often this can mean embracing cutting edge tools that help you stay ahead of the competition to do that right, you'll need to stay informed about the latest trends and advancements and be prepared to learn from your successes and your failures.
There are times when you'll spend a lot of effort getting set up with a new technology that seemed promising, but if you see that it's not bringing you the rewards that you were expecting, you have to be ready to drop it and move on. To do that effectively, you'll need to think about how tech fits into your processes and how you can plug things in and remove them without completely throwing you off.
But most importantly, it's about building a culture that embraces change and is open to new things. That applies to your organization, but it also applies to you as an individual . limited resources, every dollar counts. So it's crucial to prioritize your technology investments wisely. Start by identifying your most pressing needs and then researching the tools and services that can best address those needs.
Prioritizing is definitely the hardest part, but as you experiment, you'll figure it out. Don't be afraid to explore open source solutions or less expensive alternatives to popular software and always consider the longterm value of your investments. Think about how they could benefit your organization, not just today, but like years down the line. With that in mind though, make sure to consider that cheap tools sometimes end up being more costly.
If they require technical staff to spend more hours getting them to do what you need. If you're spending 50 bucks a month, for example, on tooling. But spending 200 on the human hours required to make it do what a hundred dollar tool could do out of the box, you might want to just switch and spend on the more expensive tool.
Similarly open source can be really compelling and is often a great choice, but you need to have a good sense of how much money it's actually going to take to run both in terms of server and staff costs. Sometimes the trade off makes sense. And other times it just doesn't. Finally, let's talk about one of the most important aspects of building technology, keeping people at the center of your tech strategy. Technology ultimately serves people. And it should improve their lives.
Always ask yourself, how is this actually going to make people's lives better? You can and should keep track of quantitative metrics as you build. But ultimately, especially in the early stages, the human element is what's going to keep you going. So listen to feedback and be willing to adapt your approach if necessary, by focusing on people you'll foster loyalty, you'll drive engagement and set yourself up for longterm success.
Technical folks in particular and I'm technical and I'm guilty of this tend to get lost in how cool their systems are. We're building cool tech. We like the shiny new thing. But in the end, we're all just building products to help people. And we've got to remember that if you're not serving a human being at the end of the day, what are you really doing?
So that's it folks to recap when it comes to building small tech, remember to stay agile, optimize your tech budget and keep people at the heart of your strategy. And that's all for the intro to the small tech podcast. Thanks for tuning in, in our upcoming episodes, we'll be diving deeper into specific tools, strategies, and technologies that can benefit you and keep you up to date on the latest innovations.
Don't forget to subscribe if you want to keep up with this stuff, I've been your host Raph and remember, we all want to do some good in the world so go build something good out there, friends.