How we developed our mobile app in 30 Days using React Native?
After pitching Zhopout to 40+ investors, we used to get that same question, ‘Do you have an app?’. We know from day one that Zhopout will do wonderful things for Shoppers if we give it to them as an app. As we don’t have a mobile developer in our team and to avoid the huge development cost (bootstrapped still today), had always tried to get help from some of our mobile-app-dev friends to freelance the work (really free! Will give some goodies after some time). Our efforts didn’t help much and we had almost spent 4 months since we launched our website publicly on 1st June 2015.
And on one lovely day I heard about React Native (RN) from one of the fellow entrepreneurs (Vivek Durai from Termsheet) from our own city, Chennai.
That is almost September last week of 2015, from the first week of October we are searching for a friend who can lend or rent a Mac for our development since RN code development is only possible with Mac by that time. Like telemarketing executives we had tirelessly checked with friends, friends’ friends, neighbors, everyone we know for a Mac machine. OMG one month over, suddenly we got hit in our head that “Doesn’t RN community people tried code development with other platforms”.
After digging our head into the RN’s Windows environment setup for 3 full days with RN community support, we kick started the development by downloading and checking some of the Android sample codes from the RN’s github.
On 1st December, heavy rains (?) led to flooding in many areas of Chennai and app development efforts got affected for next 10 days. After those 10 days we had never stopped.
React Native team & community is very helpful in terms of fast releases, better community support with Discord group, GitHub issue tracker and Stackoverflow answers. Thanks to the Facebook for such a wonderful tool & team.
We had launched our app at play store on 1st January 2016 with merely 30 days of efforts without any prior experience. “Hey! And do you know how did we design the UI for this app?” Simple, we just referred some free designs from UI prototype app Marvel.
So you can always start with React Native, even though you don’t have any idea about mobile development and only know web development well and you don’t need to stay back or wait for your star app developer to join your team.
The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else — Eric Ries
You can always learn & implement new things faster to achieve what is needed for your startup as same as you are trying entrepreneurship.
I heard your mind voice. OK dude, What is Zhopout? Well, it is an app which helps you to get lost (am not joking) into shopping malls. It makes your life simpler by helping you to find about stores selling products or brands you would love to buy and discover deals around it.
Currently, we are on a spree to get our early users. We would love if you download our app from Google play store (if you are not from India, click here) and help us build it better by giving valuable feedback or ideas for new (may be missing) features or it can be anything starting from bouquets which smell sweeter or brickbats which hurts more.
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