When it comes to funding a business built on a differentiated product line, the operating budget keeps the lights on — but innovation fuels growth (and even keeps products competitive with competitors). 

Too often, keeping costs down comes at the expense of innovation. Since at least some operational costs are essential to functioning at all, businesses may kick product innovation down the road, even if doing so incurs big opportunity costs. 

Companies often dismiss innovation because they assume the table stakes will be too high to accomplish anything without investing significant time and money. A proof-of-concept that costs six figures and months of work may be a significant hurdle to overcome! 

That’s one cool thing about building software in Daml and deploying it with Daml Hub: The barrier to entry drops dramatically when companies can create and ship functioning software in days. 

Will this be the start of another technology boom?

This handy chart shows us the explosive growth in the fintech industry quickly after the global financial crisis. Similarly, We believe our current crisis will be the start of the next revolution. These unfortunate situations create tremendous opportunity to improve and drive change and the coming months and years will be no different than before.

Old-school development drains innovation dollars

When you look at the cost of software innovation, most of it isn’t innovative at all. Most time on proof-of-concept projects is spent building the “scaffolding” to support features and functionality that set those applications apart. Market-testing the actual idea takes a backseat to building and deploying services end users will never interact with directly. 

What’s more, that construction work demands a broad set of skills. Few engineers are equipped to deploy and configure all the core infrastructure, manage all the security settings, and create all the necessary environments for the system — all before the first functional build. 

That means fewer resources for creating the innovative features you want and for learning how early adopters receive them. What’s more, it means key stakeholders in sales and marketing may wait months before they can see and respond to the way the product team has put the concept into action. 

The Daml and Daml Hub Way focuses on differentiation

Daml, by contrast, handles this back-end block and tackling. The only code you ever write is business logic that describes the unique behavior of your application. 

That also means Daml applications are easily portable to any compatible blockchain or database. 

When you are ready to deploy to production, Daml Hub provides a production environment with a “sandbox as a service” feel, where your development team can build and deploy new ideas quickly. 

The rapid pace of innovation lets stakeholders and early users interact with fully functional apps in days, not months. It also allows the team to try multiple approaches on an identical framework to identify the real differences among them. 

The result: Faster, more-educated decision making at a far lower cost. 

The next wave of innovation is already here

We invite those of you who wish to innovate under an economical, fast feedback regime to go to Daml.com, download the SDK, and use hub.daml.com today. Daml is open source and always free to use and Daml Hub is free to start. Don’t let the uncertainty of the markets today and the cost of experimenting with traditional software slow your company down. After all, necessity is the mother of all invention.

Please join us virtually on March 26th to discuss how Daml & Daml Hub can help you launch the next great idea. We will show you how you can build and deploy a complete application in the time it takes to host a meetup!