Find A Problem First – An Idea!

Create A Way To Fix It Next – An app!

Mobile apps are an integral part of our daily lives today.

Do you have a mobile app idea?

Do you have an idea that can change people’s lives and solve a problem and thus helping people around the world?

Keep your user in the center:

Identify what problem needs solving first and foremost. You need to keep your “end-user” in your mind and then start thinking in their shoes to get to the bottom of their pain points. Your solution should address this pain point effectively.

• Is it going to be viable?
• Talk to people for initial feedback,
• Read books on the subject matter and
• Try to evaluate if your business is a good idea in the first place.

In other words, listen to your users and focus on delivering an awesome user experience. It won’t cost a lot, but the number of users adopting your product will definitely be significantly higher.

Believe in your product:

• Is your Idea worth spending long days and sleepless nights bringing to life?
• Problems will happen, bugs will happen, you need to be ready to face it.
• Believe in your idea, believe in yourself, and others (Such as investors, those sound important !) will believe in you.

A simple solution is better than a well-made problem:

• If you have no idea whether the product you’ve built for your potential customers is the product they want – MVP to the rescue.
• Creating a quality minimum viable product (MVP) requires quite a bit of research, planning, and effort.
• But, properly implemented, an MVP is one of the best methods available to entrepreneurs to deliver quality products that customers want.
• The first version of your product doesn’t need to have every single possible feature implemented fully. It just needs to have a minimum subset of features that allow it to be usable by a portion of your potential customer base.
• MVP Products are developed with only those features that are absolutely for the savvy user to get it and give us feedback on how to proceed.
• After multiple iterations, each round improving existing features and adding new ones for testing we arrive finally at a finished product that does exactly what it needs to in exactly the right way. We know our customers will buy it because they helped to develop it.

Factors preventing the majority of app ideas from becoming successful:

• Apps are expensive.
• Apps are plentiful.
• Apps are often free. These make it hard to monetize apps in a way that stimulates profit.

Three categories where failures may occur:

Development-level failures, which happen before an app goes live,

• Cost issues
• Timeline issues
• Bad tech
• QA test
• User unfriendliness

Execution-level failures, which happen as you take an app live,

• Demand and desire
• Cash shortages
• Monetization woes
• Team issues
• No secondary or complementary plan

Support-level failures, which happen in the weeks and months following a launch,

• Placement and description problems
• No initial audience
• Unclear
• No marketing or advertising strategies
• No review or rating optimization
• Minimal branding

Things you shouldn’t do to make your mobile App idea real:

• Developing a Mobile App When There’s No Real Need
• Not Doing Your Research
• Setting an Unrealistic Budget
• Unclear Briefings
• Having Too Many Features and Functionalities
• Not Developing a Cross-Platform Strategy
• Focusing Too Much on the Appearance While Forgetting the Customer

So Building a mobile application is not the easiest process.

The Business of Mobile applications: Mobile applications are a business, and that’s exactly how you should treat the process.

Give Enough Attention to The Following before you begin:

• Understanding each type of app (native, hybrid, or web)
• Different app platforms (Android, iOS, etc.)
• Qualities that make or break an app
• How to develop for the ULTIMATE user experience
• How to test and optimize to ensure longevity in the market
• What you need to understand about effective monetization
• The importance of developing a guiding strategy

And so much more…

Deeply research your market:

• Do your research to find a gap your app will fill and serve a fresh, complete solution to the problem you’re solving.

Extensive market research should help you discover about your,

• Competitors
• Their strategy
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Their customer’s reviews and on social media
• Their unique selling point.

If you know about these you will be able to avoid your competitors’ mistakes, double up on the strategies that work, and clearly define your unique take on the problem and the path to solving it.

What makes your app stand out? How will you get your app to the user?

Define your app’s specific purpose to the target audience. Is your app for everyone? Who is going to be using your app?

• Narrow that audience and target a more specific group and figure out how to appeal to them.
• Now that you’ve picked the audience and know how to reach them, it’s time for you to clearly define your app. This definition will give you a general direction, purpose, and goal.
• Doing this will also help you brand your app, which we’ll get to shortly.

Can you articulate your app’s specific purpose? be precise and clear with your app’s purpose early on.

Pick a Platform:

You’ve got to understand the differences between the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Of course, ideally, your application should work on all platforms and all devices. Therefore, it may be wiser to act gradually, step by step.

Create a brand, name, and look and feel:

A beautiful, recognizable, and memorable icon can lead to your application success, while a “lame” one may become the reason for the failure (at least, one of them). You should have a clear understanding of your branding before you start to develop it. That way you can begin promoting your app with that brand name and image before your app officially launches.

Now you’ll have users lined up and ready to download your app once it finally gets released. Waiting until development is finished to do this is an inefficient use of your time. But you’ve got to have the brand’s image squared away first.

Device Adaptability:

There is a large number of devices people can choose from these days. So device adaptability should be one of your top priorities.

Users are going to use more than one device to access your app. So by making your app adaptable for multiple devices is going to expand your user base.

There are a couple of factors when it comes to device adaptability of your app that you need to keep in mind. These are,

• screen size and resolution,
• network bandwidth of different devices,
• connectivity issues,
• storage capacity,
• configuration details.

When you are trying to get your app suitable for a device, make sure to have a complete understanding of the functionality of the device before you start custom coding for it.

The File Size:

No one wants to download and install an app that is too big in size.

Mobile phones may have become more improved over the ages, but they still don’t have as much space as a desktop computer. So making your app file size smaller is really going to pay off.

Localize Your App:

• Localization of your app means translating your app into multiple regional languages specific to different countries.
• Localization of your app is a great way of getting global recognition. But what comes before localization?
• Before you translate your app and localize it, you need to internationalize it. Internationalization is a process through which you optimize the code of your app so that it can be used globally. After that, you can go ahead with the localization of your app.
• Localization is going to give you a larger base of users from different countries. But does.

Estimate the costs:

• So you’ve got to have a clear budget set before you get started or you’ll risk running out of money before you’re finished.
• Keep in mind, everything won’t always go smoothly.
• You’ve got to plan for some unexpected hiccups or speed bumps along the way.
• Don’t invest every dollar into development either.
• You’ll need money for marketing, testing, legal fees, and other expenses associated with operating a business.

Assemble a team Who builds it:

Here are some of the people that you’re going to need if you want to be successful.

• A person (or people) to build it
• Someone to help with your branding (look and feel)
• Someone to write up your business plan
• A person who can sell it
• Someone to make sure that everyone else is doing their job and keep it all together

Hiring different people for each position? Is it cost-efficient?

• If you’re not the person who has all of those skills, putting together the right team is essential. Ideally, you should find a developer that wants to be part of your company. That way they can help you manage the app, work on updates, and fix any bugs after it launches.
• You can find a freelance developer, small development shop, or large development agency if you want to outsource it.
• There are full-service app-building companies that can take some of the pressure off of you.
• They specialize in creation, building, and development. It’s more cost-efficient for you to go through a full-service agency than hiring different people for each position.

Time is money:

• Good apps take time. That’s the reality.
• You’ve got to recognize that the longer your app takes to develop, the more it’s going to cost you.
• There are lots of factors that can help you determine a realistic development timeline for your unique situation.
• Quality and size are two of the biggest elements that impact time.
• You’ve got to budget yourself accordingly so you can afford the features that are related to the basic purpose of your app.

How to make a mobile app that satisfies your users?

Through beta testing.

• Beta testing is having your final product tested by a group of experienced testers.
• Through beta testing, you can get an idea of how your app is working.
• You can also find out what other optimizations need to be done to make your app ready to be launched in the market.

Writing The Right Kind Of App Description:

• You need a good app description to make people want to install your app.
• Google Play Store and Apple app store both display only two-three lines of description before the read more option.
• You need to make sure that those initial lines get the potential user hooked.
• Keep your description simple but interesting, telling the user what exactly is the app’s purpose and why they need it.

Get your app out in the world:

• Set up social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn
• Create a website
• Collect email addresses
• Set up waiting lists
• Try using platforms like Betalist to help you target early adopters

Managing expectations – Continuous improvement:

In fact, creating an application isn’t the end, it’s the very start, and there is still a lot of work to be done. Competitors are on their guard, users want constant improvements in the program, and indeed, even great app ideas can lose relevance if you aren’t paying enough attention to them.

So keep in mind these simple rules:

Once the app is launched, you need to make sure that the app still functions well. Along with that, you also,

• Need to roll out updates,
• Fixing the problems and bugs the previous version had.
• Follow the trends in web and mobile design and be ready to update your app interface according to the dictates of the time.

• Listen to the wishes of users, respond to their feedback. Your target audience knows best how to develop an app idea and make it as up-to-date as possible.
• Take advantage of new technologies whenever possible.

To make your app successful,

• You need to ask as many questions as you can about the app and its development, test the app, again and again, to make it perfect for launch, and then keep up with the quality of the app even after it has been launched.
• You need to know how users are actually using your app and are able to confidently make decisions from that data.
• Without reliable data on your app users, you’ll be conducting complete guesswork when it comes to assessing the traction of your app in the real world.
• By personally tracking your app’s performance and user behavior, you can determine the next move for your product with a higher level of confidence and understanding.

Let’s build mobile apps that’ll make users fall in love with them!