New businesses have been popping up all over since the pandemic began. Many crave the flexibility, independence, and fulfillment that only comes through running your own company. Yet the failure rate has remained the same– 50% of new businesses won’t last beyond five years. And local ventures are not immune. So how do locals set themselves up for success in their new ventures? Here are a few of our top recommendations.

Building an MVP is one of the first steps in proving the market feasibility of your product, but it can be tricky to make the most out of it, partly because an MVP is two things. An MVP is a Minimal Viable Product that, for most companies, is an app. However, it is also, at a more fundamental level, a proof of concept. For founders, writing (or getting someone else to write) your code is usually easy but getting the MVP in front of people and measuring the value they get out of it is not.

Staff augmentation is the most recent and most complete recruiting solution that tech incubators are turning to because of its high return on investment (ROI). Staff augmentation allows start-ups to have access to top talent within the tech industry without the high cost of in-house recruitment or the quality assurance risk of outsourcing and freelancing.

Unfortunately, many startups will burn through a large chunk of their budget right at the start on a team they cannot fully utilize. Or at the other extreme, startups will “make do” with teams that do not have the necessary skills to build MVPs that do their idea justice. But now startups have an affordable yet comprehensive solution to recruitment — staff augmentation.

Most small businesses, startups, and even enterprises to some degree, cannot always divide resources equally between software development and cybersecurity. But do you even need to? Modern application design is changing and there’s a way that companies with limited resources can leverage cybersecurity principles to make security a part of their design.