The topic of development budgets in the early stages is often a matter of survival for a startup.

Founders expect developers to provide them with the ability to constantly change or even pivot their IT product quickly.

Speed at the expense of project quality, however, leads to significant additional costs due to numerous revisions and can even bring projects to a complete standstill and failure.

Modern strategies in IT development involve analytical research before the coding stage begins. Conceptualizing an IT product before developing it may not seem obvious, but it is not just another trendy gimmick – it has far-reaching technological- and business-consequences.

Conceptualizing an IT product not only makes the development and changes of the product manageable from a business perspective, but also reduces development budgets many times over.

At early stages, investors typically focus on several key aspects:

 - Team.
 - Software.
 - Technical requirements.
 - Business model.
 - Market.
 - Traction.
 - Due diligence process.

Investors usually seek equity in exchange for funding, so be ready to negotiate deal terms and ownership stakes.

A good strategy would be to create an MVP based on a well-thought-out concept. Then the MVP can be used for business purposes, starting with minimal functionality. Not to mention that development budgets are significantly reduced and better controlled in this case.

For self-financing, it is obviously useful to start earning money from the product with the very first release.

Other methods include outsourcing, partnerships, resource sharing, user focus, and crowdfunding.

A disadvantage of this gradual business growth approach is the limited availability of innovative solutions and the high probability that competitors could use your attractiveness research and easily replicate your long efforts quickly with the help of investors.

The cost of an idea for a startup is a matter of negotiation.

There's a belief that an idea itself is quite worthless.

And indeed, you can only really sell an idea if it's well-tied to monetization. For example, your idea solves a global problem, has no competing solutions, you have letters of intent and already attracted investments, you have proven market experience, and have perspectives for realizing profitability potential.

Startups often fail, even with investor interest, due to disagreements among the founders. An investor’s arrival brings into focus questions that seemed less important in the early stages.

Therefore, a valuable piece of advice is to have clarity regarding financial, time-based, and skill-set contributions from the very beginning. Equal distribution or distribution based on contributions should be justified and accepted by all parties involved.

A toxic configuration of decision-making rights can also be detrimental. The structure of these rights shouldn’t create insurmountable situations.

There are areas of activity where violations of conventional norms will carry a high risk rating, and any creativity that crosses boundaries simply cannot be implemented.

In all other cases, you shouldn’t limit the team's creativity.

However, every idea must subsequently consider existing regulatory contexts. You can always find a projection of the idea that takes norms into account.

Also, keep in mind the trend towards increasing regulation for IT businesses. Regulators always provide a grace period for applying a rule – the main thing is not to dismiss the work required to achieve compliance.

The overall trend in regulation is directly linked to the trend of returning IT products to parameters of engineering quality. Adhering to these will be preventative readiness for potential new rules of the game. Otherwise, new regulations could result in costs on a massive scale.