I am venturing into a mobile app business for the first time. Where do I begin?
I am venturing into a mobile app business for the first time. Can anyone give me a step-by-step approach? What should be my first steps? Should I hire the team first? Or run through my idea with freelancers to see the possibility of making it happen? What kind of costs do we need to consider? Any advice?
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Feb 25, 2016
Hi Shravan,
Nice to know about your plan to explore mobile app industry.
Do it all at the same time..
Start the hunt to search a better team but don't decide to get started
unless you find a productive team/company with great customer reviews & work history.
To find out the possibility of making it happen, ask your development partner to complete a Proof Of Concept (Prototype) first to be sure about the successful functional implementations, rather directly diving into development & investment.
At the same time, a survey (market research) could tell you about the possible product outputs. How does it solve the customer problems & fulfill their needs ?
*Ask customers to register/subscribe for your business & MOBILE APP (through an initial web page/blogs/Linkedin group announcements, and social media platform profiles etc)
Try to figure out is it worth building that mobile app with a customer survey than dive into the development & marketing phase once you receive the desired feedback.
Hope you found it helpful. Please do not hesitate to connect for any additional help.
Best,
Deepak
Oct 2, 2015
I highly encourage you to read Lean StartUp by Eric Ries. Building the product before you do customer validation is a big mistake when it comes to building applications. Doing wire frames or a 'mock app' to test your market is an affordable way to go. Write out what the app will do (features you see as valuable) then test your market to see if they too find them valuable. You may be surprised what others deem important.
My background, I am part of a company, Business2Mobile Communications, that builds mobile applications for industrial companies. We have gone both roots, product first or customers first. Lets just say our 'million dollar' product is still sitting on the shelf with no customers and it burned up about 70% of our resources ( and we were running very lean ).
As a side note, one of the things our company specializes in, is helping build apps that people like yourself want to have made but don't necessarily want to hire a staff to do it.
Oct 11, 2015
It is a whole different ball game when talking about intellectual rights and copyright etc. Honestly code is one of the hardest things to try to copyright. The chances of someone within your target market stealing your idea is pretty slim. I have heard this over and over again. Fear of someone stealing your big idea is what prevents many people from developing it in the first place. I understand it is your baby but not sharing it with people is pretty much a guarenteed failure. I highly recommend looking at joint an accelerator program or some kind of mentorship program to guide you.
Oct 2, 2015
Answer this three questions:
1) What exact problem does this app would solve in a sentence?
2) To how many persons this app would solve their problems (potentially)?
3) Does the app does the two previous questions exactly the same regardless if it´s a web site nor an app? It doesn´t, why?
4) What is the least amount of features your APP and/or website will need to fulfill the previous three questions.
With this three questions answered you can pinpoint:
a) Native or HTML5
b) Website only or WS+App or just APP
c) MVP (Minimum Viable Product) so you can estimate (depending of your money and your launch time frame) how much time and money this is going to take if you hire an external or internal team.
I would love to know if this help you or not.
Regards,
JLP
Oct 2, 2015
You could save your self a lot of time and money by using Xamarin.Forms which enables you to build native user interfaces for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and website using 100% shared C#.
Oct 1, 2015
I would probably build it up first on something like Dupal then go out woods right the app so it integrates back to the web site.
Should not be that expensive.
I would concentrate on the main markets android and ipohones
Oct 1, 2015
Try developing it as a website to see if anyone has any interest. A few hundred there lost to no interest is much more affordable than tens of thousands lost later on a dead app with no built in audience.
Oct 1, 2015
Shravan,
If you know what you what and have a scope of work or description already made then it really doesn't matter which direction you go. You will want to have an idea of what your budget will be.
You may want to look into putting together some wire frames for the app as well.
Do you know if will be a native app? If so, which platform are you deciding to go with or will you go with both?
I'd love to speak with you about the app if you'd like as this is a field I know since we develop mobile apps.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Regards,
Rodkem
Oct 1, 2015
Rodkem,
We want to focus both on iOS & Android platforms, also have a web version of it. We are debating interms of taking the app to some freelances or develop a prototype inhouse. But are confused interms of the costs either way & ofcourse confidentiality issues.
Regards
Shravan
Great points Cheryll, My only concern is on building a prototype & going to customers is what if my app idea gets stolen? what if my app idea in the concept stage can inspire someone with existing capabilities to build sometime similar fairly quick & maybe quicker than us? as we are at the starting level. How do you suggest us to go about in that case?