The Business Value of Building Applications and Portals

Why Building Applications and Portals Is a Business Imperative

In today’s competitive landscape, one-size-fits-all technology simply doesn’t cut it. As organizations strive to differentiate, the need for bespoke digital solutions is becoming not just a strategic advantage but a business necessity.

In this LaunchPad Lab podcast, Stefanie Kulberg, VP of Marketing, sits down with Ryan Francis, President and Partner, to unpack the real business value of building applications and portals. Whether you’re leading digital transformation at an enterprise or advising clients on the best tools for growth, this conversation provides actionable insight into when and why building digital products deliver measurable impact.

Why Build Software? It Starts With What Makes You Unique

Every business has something unique about it—or it wouldn’t exist. That uniqueness is often tied to its customer experience, service model, or operational workflow. Off-the-shelf platforms are built for scale, not specificity. Bespoke software, on the other hand, is built to mirror and digitize your company’s “secret sauce”—the way you operate, serve, and grow.

“There’s a lot of good point solutions out there, but when it comes to your core value prop, especially around customer experience, you need a high-fidelity, bespoke experience.”
– Ryan Francis
President & Partner at LaunchPad Lab

The Digital Customer Journey: From First Click to Full Engagement

For most businesses, a customer’s journey starts with a digital intake—whether it’s submitting an application, requesting a quote, or identifying fit. That’s where a customized experience begins to set the tone. Rather than navigating a generic interface, customers interact with a process that is designed specifically around their needs and your data.

Once converted, customers enter a digital experience—often through a portal or app—that becomes the central hub for collaboration. This is where we see the most immediate impact of building a digital portals.

“Customers feel empowered and informed, and the experience doesn’t feel generic or useless—it feels valuable.”
– Ryan Francis
President & Partner at LaunchPad Lab

Going Beyond the Customer Experience to Drive Operational Efficiency

The value of bespoke software doesn’t stop at the customer. Even businesses relying on tools off-the-shelf tools face integration challenges. Pre-built software workflows are rarely account for the nuances of your business, and data models are often unique. Building apps act as connective tissue, integrating and automating processes across your technology stack.

“Even with point solutions, your processes are still unique. To connect those dots, building software is what gets you there.”
– Ryan Francis
President & Partner at LaunchPad Lab

Aligning with the AI Era

As AI redefines business models, the need for adaptable, integrated systems is accelerating. Just as the internet reshaped commerce, AI is shifting how work gets done. Organizations that embed intelligence into bespoke experiences will be positioned to disrupt rather than be disrupted.

Realizing the Value of Building Software

Software applications and portals are not about reinventing the wheel—they’re about engineering the right vehicle for your journey. When tailored to your business model and customer experience, they don’t just support your goals—they accelerate them.

Read the Full Transcript:

STEFANIE KULBERG: Hi, everyone. I’m Stefanie Kulberg. I’m the Vice President of Marketing here at Launchpad Lab. And here with me today is Ryan Francis. He is the President and Partner here, and we are going to be talking about custom apps and portals. So let’s just jump right in.

To kick things off, I’d love to just unpack where and why would a business want to consider bringing in a bespoke custom software solution? So where and why would you consider having a bespoke solution, bespoke software?

RYAN FRANCIS: I mean, I guess, like, my thought process there is, like, every company has, you know, something about it that’s unique or it probably wouldn’t exist. Like, there’s some unique offering, some unique secret sauce.

RYAN FRANCIS: And to me, where bespoke software is important is helping a a company to essentially digitize that secret sauce, digitize have a, has software that is not just kind of cookie cutter and generic and not really built for them, but but tailor made for the way that they wanna operate their business.

RYAN FRANCIS: And at the end of the day, there’s a lot of good, you know, sort of point solutions for various things. But when it comes to kinda your core value prop, which oftentimes is your customer experience, you know, for that core value prop, it’s important to have, like, a high fidelity bespoke experience that you’re taking customers through. So where I see this, you know, where I see this oftentimes is, like, basically, you know, starts on the website with some type of a digital intake. So what’s the process for if someone’s interested in your business? What’s the process for them engaging with you?

RYAN FRANCIS: So usually, that starts with some type of, like, a digital experience that a customer can go through to perhaps get a quote or understand if they’re a fit, you know, apply, those kinds of things. And then once a customer converts and becomes a real, paid customer, now there’s some type of a digital app or portal experience that they can the customer can log into to interact with your business.

RYAN FRANCIS: And to have and and that’s really where having that be bespoke and be unique to your business and your data is super important for that experience to not just feel generic and kinda useless, but to feel more like, oh, this is as a customer, I’m getting the information I need, and I’m I’m informed and feel empowered to, like, collaborate with this company in the way that I want to.

RYAN FRANCIS: But, you know, outside of customer-facing experiences, like, bespoke experiences still, bespoke software still can add value even outside of just customer experiences. I mean, ultimately, even if you are even if as a business, you are using a lot of out-of-the-box solutions like Salesforce or an ERP system, your data, your data model, your workflows and processes are going to be unique. You’re gonna have elements of that that are unique. And so being able to tie these things together in a smart way and create automations across your technology stack requires custom development to, like, integrate those things. And in many cases, makes sense to build a kind of bespoke experience that, maybe, interweaves those or overlays on top of those things. So there still is a lot of opportunity for bespoke software outside of customer-facing, but usually, it’s it’s really interplaying with these point systems like, Salesforce or an ERP system.

Interesting.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Are there any trends you’re seeing, especially now, like, in the market with AI? Are there any sort of, like, you know, like, it was the sort of business imperative, the business value you’re seeing given the competitive landscape?

RYAN FRANCIS: I mean, for sure. Like, you think about when to me, I I look at this kinda this this AI era as being similar to, like, the Internet era, you know, forty years ago where you have this new underlying technology that just inherently causes disruption in the sense of the way that you used to work might not be the way that you’re gonna work. And I and so with the Internet, it’s like the way you used to work is very different from the way that we work now due to the Internet. Think about all of the businesses who went out of business because the Internet and all the businesses who became in business because of the Internet that were created. Right? I think with with with AI, it’s similar where you have every business has to kinda look at themselves in the mirror and ask, how are we gonna survive in this AI age? How are we gonna still be relevant when intelligence becomes, you know, cheap?

RYAN FRANCIS: And so I think what what that does is it kind of puts people in a it it it forces businesses to reflect on how they on how they operate, and it’s it gives them an opportunity to say, let’s build something proprietary that allows our business to be an AI first company. That isn’t just our people jumping in a chat GPT and doing stuff, but us taking chat GPT and baking it into our digital software stack, right, where generative AI is not a, bolt on separate thing, but an integrated, enabled thing across all software in in the company. So to me, I think that’s where the big wins come with generative AI and and AI in general is, like, how do you actually not just kinda have people jumping in to chat GBT, but actually bake it into your entire business software stack in workflow so that you’re automating as much as humanly possible. And that’s really where you see the massive margin increase is is is, leveraging, you know, leveraging automated intelligence across your entire process.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Interesting. So now with speaking of that, let’s talk about, the business benefit of apps and portals. Like, what why do you need them?

What are you know, what what’s the point of that in terms of, you know, business need and the benefits?

RYAN FRANCIS: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a few a few really important, reasons why apps and portals are critical nowadays. The first is just the customer experience. People nowadays expect to be able to engage with an organization online. You know, if they want to, get support, if they wanna, like, buy something, if they want to inquire about something, if they want to, like, book a meeting or book an appointment, like, they wanna do everything online.

RYAN FRANCIS: And, you know, talk having to call in and talk to a human is, like, the backup backup plan. Right? So you have to be able to take your data, and you you you often hear from Salesforce about the idea of, like, customer three sixty. Like, your internal employee should have your service team should have, like, a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of your customer in Salesforce.

RYAN FRANCIS: The opposite or sort of the opposite of that is, like, your customers want a three-sixty degree view of their account and their experience with you as a business. So it kinda goes both ways. You want you want, your customers to be able to self-service and have full access to be able to do everything they need to do with you digitally, and you also want your internal employees to, on the other side of that, have full visibility into what’s going on with that customer, to be able to, like, properly service them.

RYAN FRANCIS: So the first step is cut so I would say, like, category one is, like, just in general customer experience. That that corresponds to, like, retention, and it corresponds, I think, as well to conversion because customers can kinda tell when they come to your website if you’re, like, the old school, gotta call in type of company or if you’re, like, a modern forward thinking digital first company. So a lot of customers just don’t wanna engage with a business that’s old school. They want a fresh, organization to do business with.

RYAN FRANCIS: Right? So it definitely has a revenue impact. And then on the front end of the conversion process, it also has a revenue impact on the back end in terms of retention. You have customers who maybe are, like, looking at, oh, I’m working with this bank today, but they’re kinda old school, and I might just go work with this new bank that is, like, totally digital, and it’s gonna be I don’t have to talk to bankers anymore.

I can do everything easily through an app or something. So I think I think there’s also a retention element of potentially losing customers to a more digital-first competitor.

RYAN FRANCIS: So, yeah, I think you have customer experience. You have revenue impacts. And then I think the final thing would be a cost impact, which is basically that when you give your customers the ability to take care of their own experience with you via digital tooling, you reduce the need for human involvement to resolve their, you know, jobs to be done. Right? Like, if they wanna do it you allow your customers to to handle things on their own, that’s less times that they have to email you, call you, reach out to you to have now you have man hours going to supporting what they’re trying to get done, which they could have done on their own. Right? So it’s, cost is in the form of, you know, support personnel and people that have to just, like, handle more cases coming in.

Mhmm.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Well, and it can also, at least from what we’ve talked about in the past, be, like, a revenue generator where you can essentially take in more. So it’s like in terms of you you talked about, you know, the digital intake, you can get more you know, if you’re selling something, for example, you can sell more things in theory if there’s a digital, you know, fron,t you know, digital storefront experience.

RYAN FRANCIS: Yeah. I mean, I would say, like, there’s a couple reasons for that. One is if you have that kind of digital ability to you know, first of all, if you’re tracking what people are doing online, you see a customer who’s coming into the site and visiting a certain service page or product page on your site or in your application, that that can funnel into a marketing campaign. Right? You can, like, funnel that also to a salesperson on your team and say, hey. They seem to be interested in this product. So it definitely can help inform cross-sell, upsell opportunities.

RYAN FRANCIS: You know, we use the bank example. Like, using the bank example, like, let’s say a customer visits like a page about, you know, a new credit card line that you got. Like, let’s alert the banker. Like, hey. This customer visited this credit line page on our website. You know that they did that because they’re logged into your portal. They’re visiting this page. You can track that data, you know, push it in the Salesforce and trigger a notification to the appropriate salesperson to, like, go reach out to that customer and try to convert the lead.

RYAN FRANCIS: So, certainly, there’s there are tons of revenue opportunity by having a really good digital presence and, like, being smart about how you track that. Basically, the way I think about it is, like, you have the physical realm, but then you have the digital realm. You should treat the digital realm like you do the physical realm. If someone comes into your store and, you know, asks a clerk about or asks someone about a product, like, you wanna try to sell that person.

RYAN FRANCIS: Right? Like, you’re you’re trying to you know, you probably have sellers, like, on the floor ready to go, like, ready to sell that person. I so often see people under underappreciate that their digital storefront, like, that’s a that’s your store. Like, people are shopping on your site.

RYAN FRANCIS: Like, they’re interested in working with you. You gotta take advantage of those footfalls even if they are digital in nature.

Makes no sense. So now let’s talk through, like, the pinpoints that, an app or portal can resolve.

RYAN FRANCIS: What I often see is that through the process of making a customer your customer portal or app, it forces a business to get their data in good order. Right? Because, like, your customers want are gonna need a easy dashboard view of their of their whole experience with you. You.

RYAN FRANCIS: And so what I’ve seen oftentimes is that you might have data in a bunch of different systems, and that’s hard for your internal people, but it becomes, like, imperative when you’re talking to customers to, like, give them one tool, one one pane of glass to see their data. With your internal people, they might be you might be able to train them on how to shift between different systems. With customers, there’s no training there. Like, they have to it has to be so slick and easy that they can just get in and get what they need, and they don’t have to ask questions.

RYAN FRANCIS: Right? And so it kind of forces you to go through the process of better data architecture and kind of addressing technical debt. So I think there is a pain point there of just, like, how do you make sure as a business you’re, you have a good data architecture and and don’t have data silos that are causing, you know, issues both in terms of your internal employees being able to manage their your customers, but then also your customers being able to see and understand their account with you.

So in terms of just if you were to build a an, custom admin portal for, you know, a general business need, what would what would it look like? How does it work? And who would the kind of users be?

RYAN FRANCIS: Like, the typical b to c portal to me is, like, so as a consumer, like, you know, I maybe just think about even something like ComEd. Like, alright. I have my you know? Or, energy. Like, I, need to go to maybe the first step is getting a quote for, like, what what it would look like for me to get energy to my house. Or maybe Internet is a better example. It’s easier.

RYAN FRANCIS: So, like, I’m trying to get Internet. Like, alright. I’m gonna go to Xfinity or I’m gonna go to AT&T, and the first step is I’m gonna go through a process of getting a quote. Like, what’s it gonna cost me to get Internet? How much Internet do I need? How many, you know? There are probably different plans that I’m I’m looking at researching.

But they’re looking at my ZIP code. They’re looking at my address to determine what options I have, and then they’re gonna quote you know? So there’s that digital intake process of basically gathering data from me to then open up an account. Once I have an account, now I have the ability to log in to this portal where I can manage my account.

I can see my prior bills. Right? I can pay any outstanding bills that I have. I can see my usage.

RYAN FRANCIS: Maybe I can even see reporting on, like, time of day that I have a, you know, by by time of day, I can see, oh, I’m actually using quite a bit of energy at night. I wonder why. Like, maybe I could look at if there are some, things I can turn off. Right?

So I think it’s, like, combination of being able to make sure my account is in good standing, being able to potentially, like, make changes to my account. Maybe I need to, like, maybe I want to upgrade my Internet and get more bandwidth.

RYAN FRANCIS: Maybe I want to, add, you know, some I don’t know. Something else.But, like, you know so being able to, like, jump in and just, like, self-manage your account. Right? Being able to see good, reporting, and data, being able to, like, hey. I need help. So, generally speaking, I need help. I know, my Internet’s broken. What do I do?

RYAN FRANCIS: If you have a problem, like my Internet goes down or I’m experiencing slow Internet, like, I’m gonna go to the site to try to figure out what am I supposed to do to get support. Maybe I’m looking for, like, a live is there a live chat on there? I could chat with someone. They could fix my my problem digitally. Maybe, obviously, I could call in. I could maybe submit a contact you know, a case, submit a case that someone could help resolve.

RYAN FRANCIS: So, yeah, I’m talking just like a help center. Usually, within the help center, you’re gonna have, like, articles. So you’re gonna try to, you know, help people understand, like, hey. Did you reset your router? You know? Did you follow these steps before you call in, right, to make sure that it’s not something as simple as just resetting your router?

STEFANIE KULBERG: I’d love to go a little bit deeper here and just get into industry specific use cases. If you could walk me through, you know, for example, financial services, what’s going on there, what trends are you seeing, you know, consumer business services, manufacturing or retail, health and life sciences, and just sort of give examples of how apps and portals are being used there and the benefit to businesses.

RYAN FRANCIS: So in financial services, we see a lot of financial portals. You think about, like, an investor portal where investors can come in, they can see how their investments are performing, they can download financial statements, tax documents, client portals as well for kind of similar purposes.

RYAN FRANCIS: In financial services, we also see a lot in the insurance space like, client experience. Imagine, you know, your GEICO app or something, where you can download it, you can get your policy, submit a claim. So we see we see portals in financial services a lot. In consumer business services, think about that industry as being, like, professional services companies, not unlike my own company at Launchpad.

RYAN FRANCIS: And a lot of what we’re seeing in that space is gonna be taking that proprietary knowledge and know-how that a consulting services business has and baking it into some type of digital experience. So a lot of content style experiences, a lot of communication, communicating the status of the project, allowing your business customers to upload documents and data.

RYAN FRANCIS: So a lot of kind of b2b style client experiences.

In manufacturing and retail, we see a lot of, like, sort of loyalty apps. How do you engage customers in a more unique way? And then in health and life sciences, we see portals really across the board. You have patient portals, provider portals.

You know, we think about, like, a med tech company who’s making a connected med device and needs a companion app to come alongside that. Just know there are infinite number of these types of portals.

STEFANIE KULBERG: I’d like to shift the topic a little bit here in terms of AI. That’s something that’s unmistakable. You can’t miss it right now. It’s everywhere. How is that influencing custom map development and the impact that it has on businesses.

RYAN FRANCIS: So, a couple of years ago, before GenAI, you had to handwrite every piece of code in the application. Now I would say it’s kind of the opposite. Like, most of the code is being generated. And so as you think about speed to market on custom app development, I would say in general, like, a rule of thumb, projects have been cut overall in half. So it’s about half the cost it was maybe two years ago to build the same application right now.

RYAN FRANCIS: I expect those costs to continue to to decline as we there’ll be a limit to how far that goes down, but there’s also, like, when you think about time to market, there’s, like, the process that you use for building custom apps. Like, my team is like, we’ve got that down. We’ve been doing it for thirteen years. We’ve been layering into that process.

RYAN FRANCIS: How do we make it AI first? So our process now is totally AI first. But then you have the technology, and so when you couple a great process with a great technology, that’s when you get that kinda order of magnitude, faster time to market. Couple that with GenAI, we’ve got, like, a pretty big substantial speed difference, I would say.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Wow. Thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate your time today and just walking through the different benefits, the different use cases, and the different sort of value drivers behind custom apps and portals.