Digital First

As a business owner you have a wide choice of apps to support, accelerate and improve your operations. This is both a blessing and a curse. There are some areas like accounting, warehouse and email marketing that are standardized and you can find a solution almost exactly for your budget and needs.

However, the real core of your business is your secret sauce. Now, obviously, since you are doing it your way, there is no ready-made product you can buy (ok there is excel…). So what now? Well, you can continue fighting with informal rules; paper, excel and emails.

Or you can go digital first.

But surely it is slow, expensive and tiresome to digitize until things settle down, and there are more people involved, right?

Myth #1 An app takes too long, cost too much

Truly one-of-a-kind apps built from scratch (what is called green-field) are a thing of the past. Just like you wouldn’t make your own bricks when building a house, software is built from larger components - called a platform.

Yes, with traditional business platforms like salesforce, hubspot or dynamics, your bill is quickly hundreds or thousands of euros in per-user licenses, and you haven’t even started adding your secret sauce.

No matter which platform you go with, you usually pay upfront for “analysis” which is that you tell the external consultants what you need. Very few will actually listen and try to understand what you do, challenge your assumptions, help you adapt your way to better align with digital tools or (god forbid!), discuss options, prioritise and cut expensive, but maybe not really needed, bells and whistles.

Then they bill you for a few months of development. Then you get a solution that doesn’t fit. Because your business evolved, you were not able to explain how your needs translates into a digital experience. So you pay again…
Why is that? Mostly because whoever is talking to you first, will not be actually building your solution. And it will surely not be the same person when you need any changes.

Myth #2 It is better to wait

In our experience paper-based and excel-based data is 'write only', you collect the data and never use it. There will be too many lost documents and the rest will have too many errors to be ever useful. If there is no standardization enforcement, you’ll end up with dates and numbers in various formats. Names that are sometimes firstname-lastname, other times just the last name or even just a nickname. And typos, typos everywhere. It is far better to standardize and digitize the core of the process and then review and update often and regularly. What you get is an early buy-in from users, because they can give you feedback and they’ll see they can influence the solution and the process.

Myth #3 Digital will tie us down

You probably heard this before: it is not possible or it is very expensive to change the app. Or this variant: it doesn't matter if it is expensive because once we find “the way” to do it, we will never change. Sure, that's a nice theory.
Truth is, we have to constantly evolve our businesses, because customer needs change, competition never sleeps and the world just keeps turning. If it is difficult to change the way and/or difficult to update the digital counterpart of it (the app), then you’ll be stuck. Stuck in the past.
Change is inevitable, embracing rapid adaptation of your workflows - and the digital-side of it - will improve your business.
As we see everywhere in nature, being the first to adapt leaves your competitors in the dust.

The way

Digital first is not a product or service. It is a new way to operate your business.

With Inuko as your strong partner, your business operations can be digital from the get go. Instead of informal or paper-based workflows, the workflow is designed with a phone, tablet and or laptop in the loop from the start. We at Inuko will support you in the design of the workflows, what can be done and how, reusing our or 3rd party components to get the right balance of speed, cost and long term maintainability.

Digital first requires fast response - analysing what to do, then deciding how to do things and finally building the digital tools. Inuko is your fast response team. Our experience and ultra rapid development platform will give you the confidence that going digital first is the right choice, a viable choice and not a bank-busting choice.

With 16 hours, or more than two weeks of 2-hour sessions included for free, you are only investing your time.
We are confident that, whether we move forward with our cooperation, this will be worth your time.

Sounds too good to be true? Check out what our customers say.