How a Facebook developer ruined my app idea

Facebook developers are quite good in developing web games. The language they use to develop Facebook apps is PHP. I knew a friend who has a lot of ideas for Facebook app developers. One of those ideas is to build a baseball game for Facebook. Matt is really curious about building games and apps. He kind of thought himself as the next Steve Jobs. He thinks he lacks a platform to propel his ideas.

The other day when we were hanging out, he asked me what it takes to make a baseball game that could go viral on Facebook. I had no idea, but what I know is that if a person knows programming and able to write all the code, then the price of developing a Facebook app reduces drastically. The idea was good, and worth a shot. So, we decided to launch the project with our own savings. We didn’t seek any kind of assistance through app development projects as it was out of the question due to our low budget.

So, we started to look out for Facebook developers that could turn our idea into an app through his Facebook app developer’s skills. We initially thought to launch it as a web app, but then we realized the potential of a Facebook app to reach million of people if advertised correctly. So, we contacted several application developers for Facebook, most of them were indie developers cutting their way through different online portals for freelancers like Elance, ODesk, and Freelancers.

The idea was to get a Facebook app developer at a cheaper price and use the remaining budget on Facebook advertisement to propel our app. It took us three (3) months to find a suitable Facebook developer for our app and it took another three (3) months to launch our app to the Facebook.

The app didn’t come out as we expected, there were a lot of bad experiences with the Facebook app developer during the development of the project. Once,we got our hands on the app, we launched it immediately and started to advertise on the Facebook.

We advertised for a couple of weeks before quitting. It was a depressing end to an enthusiastic effort. We learnt a lot of lessons through this campaign. The first and foremost lesson we learnt was to spend more money on a Facebook app developer who could create a user experience that could engage people more effectively. The other lessons were related to the marketing efforts.

I would advise anyone looking to market his app idea to invest more in the app development as compared to the marketing. The important thing is to create a user experience that will garner more users through word of mouth and game players.