April 8th, 2025, posted in learning
by Miruna
Is this tech investment worth it for my business? Is a question you might have asked yourself a few times. Investing in software automations can be a big deal, and you can’t always predict if it’ll be worth it in the long run.
By upgrading a part of your business through tech, you could risk affecting your employees’ day to day life - what if they can’t get used to your new process? What if they struggle to adapt? Now you’ve not only spent money on software but you’re spending money recruiting new people who can use it.
But it’s not always bad. You can use software to automate repetitive processes that take too long and lead to endless Excel sheets. This can save time & money and let you focus your energy where it’s truly needed.
The trick is doing it right, and knowing if it’s right to do it. That means making sure you truly need to add tech into your business process and accurately planning for it. Okay, you’re fixing some issues through software - but do it right, not for the sake of doing it.
In this article, we’re going to talk about when you should and should not invest in tech for your business, what it really means, and how it can help your business goals.
What kind of tech investments can your business do?
Let’s start with the beginning. What kind of technology investments can you even do that would impact your business goals? This can go anywhere from expanding your business through software in order to reach new clients, or using technology to improve the way you do your main business tasks.
Internal software that improves your process
Through internal pieces of software, you can automate and upgrade your business process. These tools help you save time and manpower as repetitive tasks are done automatically. Such as reports, calculations you’d do in Excel sheets, CRMs and so on.
Internal software can be beneficial in the long term, especially if whatever you’re automating generates revenue to begin with. If your process is convoluted and spread across multiple pieces of software, building your own customized solution can save you time and money.
For instance, if you organize events and keep track of them in Excel sheets, various group conversations, Google Drive and invoicing software, you can build an entire app that brings all of those together - and fix your workflows once and for all. You can hear about how we did just that for a client.
Online stores or SaaS for customers
If your business is still running offline, you can extend through an online store, or a dedicated app. If you’ve already built software for your business and you want to expand your business, you can invest in adding new features, improving your UX or fixing issues to improve customer experience.
This type of investment can seem like a big move, but if you feel like your business is staggering and there are tangible results you can get, it’s worth giving a try.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
First rule of doing tech upgrades for your business: don’t do it if you don’t actually need it. A convoluted, complex business process can’t always be fixed through software. But through better management, division of tasks, employee training, and better tools.
You might have heard friends or business partners say their profits went up after they invested in tech. But what worked for someone else, especially in a different industry, isn’t guaranteed to work for you.
Before you ever jump into making software and spending thousands of dollars, carefully analyze whether there’s anything software can fix in your process. Listen to your employees or users first: what are their pain points? What do they wish you would fix? How can you assist them?
And most of all, if you invest in software, will you get that money back, and then some? It’s better to invest $50k if you know you can make $70k after launching. But not if you might just make $500. The key is making such an investment that can help you get back the money you spent on it, and then some.
Just deciding that software will fix your business process can lead to a low ROI: you’re just putting the blame on your tools instead of looking within. After spending thousands of dollars on custom software, you might realize your employees still have a chaotic way of working, they’re choosing to use their old tools, or they can’t get used to the new software and make more mistakes.
A big question you should ask yourself is: why? Why do you want to invest in technology? If you want to build your own internal software, ask yourself why. Can software actually fix your problems?
If you’re having trouble answering these questions, don’t just jump into code. Talk to consultants and especially to your employees who would be using this software. We provide a free product roadmap through which we can discuss your technical needs together and determine if you actually need to build software, and how.
How to assess tech investments’ impact on business goals
The idea of an investment is spending money to make more money. So in the short term, investing in tech, especially a piece of software that takes a long time to build, means losing a lot of money. Once you launch your new technology and slowly build it from the ground up, you’ll eventually make that money back, and if all is planned well, you’ll make more.
If you want to make this big step, your business needs to have a solid financial foundation before you jump into spending more money for who knows how long.
Building software takes a long time: delays happen, developers might quit, or you could change your mind about features and prolong the initial time estimates. There’s no guarantee you’ll like the initial designs or that the first builds will be bug-free.
If you plan on making other investments of costly launches while building your software, you might end up having to choose between said launches and your tech investment. It would be difficult to focus completely on both, let alone afford everything.
But in the long run, investing in tech properly means expanding your business, reaching new clients, and potentially increasing your sales and profits. As long as you do it well - plan it carefully and work with an experienced software team that can build what you want.
How tech investments can benefit your business per specific goals
Whether or not a tech investment would benefit your business heavily depends on what you actually do, and what you want to achieve. So to help you decide, we’re going to explain how tech can help you per specific business goals.
Increasing sales and/or conversions
The most common goal a business usually has is increasing either sales, profits or conversions. Through tech, you can provide new services or improve your current ones. Here are some examples:
- Going online. Move your offline business online through your own website, store or mobile app. This way, you can reach new customers who don’t live near you, and it’s a great way to advertise yourself and what you offer as people can easily browse without leaving their houses.
- Improving your existing software’s user experience. Your sales might be low because people are having a hard time using your software. Sit down with a few users and ask them if your app is hard to use and why. Then work with a UI/UX team and upgrade your app based on user feedback. Similarly, you can work on bug fixes to ensure your app actually works well.
- In-app personalization. Track user behavior and use it to give handy recommendations through banners, emails or push notifications. Giving people just what they need is a great way to increase sales & conversions.
- Offer a new service through software. Expand by creating something new from scratch. This has a bigger chance of failure, so it’s important to do extensive market research first.
Improving your own business process
Instead of having 10 employees spend 20 hours a week working on a particular task, 2-3 employees could do the same in half an hour through a piece of custom software tailored to your business needs. With just this, you’re saving time and money and can focus on bigger, more challenging tasks.
When your business relies on whatever you’re trying to automate, through custom software you can speed up your activity and spend more time on improving services, products or customer service.
Lowering your churn rate
You might be in a position where your app users keep unsubscribing or deleting your software. To lower your churn rate and keep customers engaged, you can invest in tech in several ways:
- Introduce personalized offers. You can use business analysis software to see how people use your apps and thus recommend products or services they’d like. Did they browse your store for hours looking for a desk chair? Send them an email with the highest rated desk chairs from your app. Similarly, you can offer discounts to users who don’t engage with your app enough, so they’re determined to come back.
- Improve your services. If people are unsubscribing because your services are buggy, it’s clear you should invest in a software development team that can fix your app. If they complain your software doesn’t work or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, you can rethink your entire user flow and use tech to improve what your business offers.
- Refresh your UI. If you designed your app 10 years ago, chances are it looks outdated. People might be leaving simply because your competitor apps look better and are easier to use.
Reaching new customers and/or a new market
You might want to expand your business into new markets through innovative software, or products sold on apps. You can use software to reach new customers either by:
- Building a new piece of software from the ground up. Offering a new type of service is a great way to reach new customers. And through software, you can make it easily accessible to a variety of people.
- Adding a big new feature to your existing software. Let’s say you run a movie streaming platform, and you decide to add a forum section. This way, you’re reaching movie watchers who want to find like-minded people and socialize about what they’re watching. Or just anyone who wants to hear people’s opinions on a movie they want to see.
The bottom line
Choosing to make a big tech investment is not easy, and you can’t do it just by reading an article. Everyone’s situation is different, and you’re the one who knows whether you can afford such an investment or not.
Tech investments can help your business grow, but they can also deplete you of money you can’t get back right away. If you’re okay with that, maybe it is a good idea for you.
If you need more help for your specific business, we offer a free product roadmap where we discuss your business and come up with a plan on how we’d build software for you.
