Programmer as a service for small companies. Will it fly or not?

The story of a friend

One of my friends, graduating from university 10 years ago, got a job in a pharmacy network as a programmer.

The company then used 1C accounting and several more self-written programs. And all other management and accounting processes in the back office were done in Excel or on paper. The comrade was given the task of automating some accounting operations. For example, before his arrival, every day one person called 130 pharmacies and asked for a couple of numbers.

Without thinking twice, a friend realized that this is a great situation to learn how to do projects and become a professional web programmer. He persuaded management to create a corporate web portal for company management. He showed that existing solutions are poorly suited to the specifics of the company's processes. And process automation is well underway!

The tasks were different: project management, conducting business processes, management accounting, reporting. In general, what was on paper and in Excel was transferred to the web. For two years he calmly studied web technologies and automation of accounting processes. Not bad pumped in web development and went to a development company with a salary increase. The company was left with a student-level system and a bunch of noodle code. They had to hire a new developer who decided to rewrite everything from scratch.

The problem of business automation with small resources

I have heard such stories several times. Often a company does not have the money to create a serious development team, while the processes are poorly formalized. Faced with the need for automation, the company chooses from the following options:

1. Hire a developer.
2. Order a solution from the studio or hire an integrator.
3. Take advantage of the ready-made service.
4. Leave it as it is and suffer.

Our team is trying to bring another alternative to students on the market - Programmer as a service.

Essence

We create an online designer of accounting applications. The most common case for customers who come to us: the problem is to compose a statement of work and imagine what a working system might look like.

Our solution: to give the customer a chat with our system analyst, who

• ask the right questions
• help you write the first version of the TK,
• will collect on our constructor the first working version of the accounting system.

And all this for 1 month and 20 thousand rubles (this amount eliminates those who, in principle, are not ready to pay and who do not really hurt).

This is how we show ourselves to customers:

	Software development from scratch	Our application builder
The need to keep analysts and programmers on staff	Yes	An analyst programmer is paid only when he is working on your application
Server Maintenance and Maintenance	Yes	Payment for the service is much cheaper than maintaining your own server. Your data is backed up daily (saved).
Development and development time	First version: 2-3 months.  Finalization: weeks.	First version: 2 weeks.  Finalization: 1-2 days.
Ready-made function blocks	Typical blocks need to be developed from scratch, buy or search	The designer has typical function blocks ready: tables and forms, a designer of business processes, reports and diagrams.
Integration with other systems	Need to develop	The designer can load data from other databases, Excel, 1C. There is a Rest API, which makes it easy to integrate your application with other systems and services.

Conclusion

I wonder what the Habrovsk people think about this topic. Will it fly or not?

Has anyone tried to do similar services?

Our hypothesis: Small companies do not need a programmer, but a result.

We are not talking about major IT solutions that fully automate the company, we take only specific tasks to replace Excel, Access and create accounting and reporting systems on the web.
There are first sales and satisfied customers.