It’s Just an App

I’ve been hearing these words a lot recently. “It’s just an app”.

Or, early on in a few meetings recently, I’ve had entrepreneurs address this issue head on in the first 5 minutes, and defensively say something like “don’t worry, this is more than just an app”.

My response has been pretty consistent - “what’s wrong with building an app?”

6 or 7 years ago, I heard a lot of this. But is sounded more like this: “It’s just a website”. “It’s just an application”. So instead, entrepreneurs and investors talked about trying to build “platforms” or “marketplaces” or something similar.

There is nothing wrong with building applications. A search engine is an application. Youtube is an application. Evernote is an app. So is Dropbox. Most of the “platform” companies we think of started first as applications, and gained early scale that way early on.

So, don’t take the skepticism around consumer companies as a reason to be sheepish about building an application. Applications are great. But, applications don’t typically monetize very well, which means that you just need to have a huge number of engaged users to build a meaningful business. But that’s nothing new either. When you hear someone dismiss a company as “just an app”, that’s code for:

“I don’t believe millions of people are going to use this product every day for a long time.”

That is the question that you need to figure out, because chances are they are right.

But that is the question that matters. It’s not a matter of whether apps are good or bad. And it’s not like the challenges of building a big (non-app) company isn’t significant either.