I have an app idea, now what?

— written by Dylan van der Merwe

Many people fail to realise what it takes to turn an idea into a reality. That is what I wish to go through today — help prepare you to turn your idea into something that will either benefit your clients or make you [more] money.

The Idea

This is often the fun part — imagining a world in which your idea comes to fruition and makes a difference to your life and those of others. To be honest, this is the easy part and the part where most people get stuck. I have heard many times how people had the idea of Uber before Uber was a thing. It just shows you the powerful ideas that are out there that many people have and do not know what to do with.

My suggestion is to document your idea as thoroughly as you can. Once documented, it becomes something structured that can be worked from instead of random thoughts in your head.

Remember, the idea is only the tip of the iceberg!

Business Case

What is the point of your idea? Is it to make your company money? Is it to make you money? Is it to inform users? Is it to help communication within a community?

Whatever your idea is, firms often want to know the answers to certain questions before they will take you seriously:

• How does your idea generate revenue?
• Who is going to manage/run the systems?
• How do you envision people finding out about your system (marketing)?
• Are there any competitors doing something similar? How is your idea different?
• What roadblocks are there?
• What have you identified for the long term survivability of your idea?
• How is the development of the app going to be funded?

You may not know the exact answers to the questions, but in attempting to put effort into the business case of your idea shows that you have given thought to the more ‘real’ questions and are ready to begin making it happen.

The aim of putting together a business case is for any third party (or yourself) to evaluate the risk involved in taking on your initiative. I have dealt with many people who want to get started on their idea when they have not given much thought above the journey ahead.

Expect your idea to change in areas when you engage with third-parties to further flesh out your idea. Hopefully this will be for the best, but always make sure you are comfortable with the input provided. But whatever your do, keep an open mind.

Preparation

Business analysis is the process where the high level objectives are broken down into smaller ‘chunks’ of work. Many people often do not understand the complexities required in order to accomplish a task and by breaking the requirements down, the complexities can be mapped and managed. Putting together user stories, functionality matrixes and development specs may not seem very important at the time, but when it comes to delivering the solution they are vital.

Two other aspects will be evaluated and prepared (hopefully by professionals like us) with regards to the solution architecture and user interface journey. Both of these are highly dependent on what the identified objectives and pieces of work are.

The user journey process is important as users today expect high quality interfaces and experiences. The user journey defines how the user will engage with the system. How do they move through the solution? What are the best ways for them to use a feature? Also part of the user journey is the user interface design of the system — how everything will look. At 86 Degrees we put together many wireframes of the solution which map out where all the buttons go, what the text labels say, etc. The designs and mock-ups are then created on top of the wireframes to effectively show what the final solution will look like.

The solution architecture is the combination of technologies required in order to make the system functional:

• What technologies are best suited to solving the problem?
• What is the flow of data? Where is data stored?
• How will the solution be hosted? How will the solution handle high volumes of traffic?

The architecture will outline all the very technical components that the developers will build their code around.

Development

This is the part of a software project that everyone wants to dive right into as it perceived as where the ‘work happens’. We know from reading above that a huge amount of work is required before the development phase begins.

Skipping all the steps above may work temporarily, especially if just to put together a proof of concept. However people do not want their idea to burn out after a few weeks and would instead have a solid platform that is around for a long time generating revenue.

Developing something properly from the start is incredibly important!

Many times I have seen companies throw a solution together, only to use the wrong tools or technologies which drastically limit their ability to iterate in the future. When developers have to rip apart solutions to replace them with more suited technology or are fighting with their tools to implement new functionality, they are wasting valuable time (and money).

Sure, you are never guaranteed to have everything built 100% correctly the first time, but having a solid, well thought out roadmap will ensure your product is developed in a solid manner minimising the money required later to fix bugs and implement your game-changing new features.

Release

Often I see incredible solutions that are planned and developed correctly by companies, but then fade away into the ether. Sorry to be dramatic but it happens.

If you build a website and do not index it properly on Google (SEO), how is anyone ever going to find it? If you build an app but do not have a proper marketing strategy how will your users get the app on their phones? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is an incredibly important aspect of the software lifecycle, if not the most important, as even the most meticulously planned and developed apps can fall short and not reach their potential. Effort is required here, often by the idea originator, to ensure that there is a marketing and utilisation strategy in place.

In future blog posts, I will further detail the various aspects of planning, building and releasing a successful mobile app.

At 86 Degrees, we specialise in working through all the steps a company requires to take an idea (especially a mobile-related idea) from the drawing board into user’s hands and beyond. Get in touch with us and let us work together with you to bring your idea to life!

The author — Dylan van der Merwe — is the Director and Founder of 86 Degrees.