Digital Venture Builder vs. Digital Studio

Venture Builders are good at... building ventures.

Corporations are facing higher pressures from startups that innovate and disrupt established industries. A large number of corporate initiatives are leading to more industry partnerships with Venture Builders and large investments on new product development with delivery partners such as Digital Agencies and Studios.

Both Digital Studios and Venture Builders can produce innovative products without a large reliance on the parent corporate organization. Although offerings are similar on the digital development side of things, similarities end when approaches and outcomes are compared.

Digital agencies and studios generally provide services that are not aligned with the business interests, as their main source of revenue is the billable hour. Instead of focusing on effective use of resources, return on investment (ROI), and long term strategic goals, agencies focus on producing a solution that is within the budget, time, and scope. The agency client relationship comes with inherent dysfunctions.

In a hyper-competitive world, the agency model fails to provide the right incentives for the creation of a successful venture. More and more products within a corporation operate as independent sub-ventures, sometimes having little interaction with established offerings and teams.

The isolation of spin out initiatives within corporations also simplify the logistics for corporate venture builders. Corporate Venture Builders (CVB) can operate independently of any of the corporate partner's inefficiencies and bureaucracies.

The ability for the spin out to run independently also increases the speed to market. Digital Agencies require continuous feedback from clients, adding numerous delays as clients quite often fail to respond within reasonable time-frames. In addition to delays, clients quite often apply subjective opinions and bypass the external expertise and directions.

Traditional client agency relationships rely on difficult scopes and expectations where clients expect full products to be scoped out, designed, and signed off. This makes true agile approaches impossible, becoming mostly a keyword that gets dropped on waterfall like projects.

Having a truly agile delivery partner is paramount for digital ventures where time-to-market is critical. Quite a few studies demonstrated that the largest impacting factor on startup success is timing -  Being too late can be more costly than having a bad product.

The Venture Builder model also provides competitive advantages from synergies between the multiple ventures built. Common technologies, platforms, and frameworks can be reused across different ventures. As technologies evolve, all ventures in the portfolio can benefit from new developments.

Venture Builders like Outroll are well equipped to build agile ventures that measure, adapt, and grow based on a continuous feedback look with market demands. This continuous improvement mindset produces ventures with better product market fit, and lower overall costs.