I have an idea for an app! What should I do?
It’s true! Non-developers also have app ideas. As a developer, I am often contacted by acquaintances, friends and even family who have ideas for the next major app and want to know how they can move forward with their idea. Some are happy to share their idea, others just want to know what they should do. Over the years, I have formulated what I feel is a helpful, fair and generic response to this question. I have shared my opinion as a developer below, I hope you find it helpful and remember, its just an opinion.
A lot of people come up with an idea and expect that they will be able to give the idea to a company/developer and get a product back in a few months. While there are stories out there where people have gone to sites like Freelancer.com, found a developer, given him or her a brief and got a product back which has been a success; this may be a simplification of what actually happened. Reality is often far more complex and you need to figure out how viable the project is, show commitment to it and truly believe in it before you bring anyone else on board.
Is the project viable?
Since you have an idea, you are already the worst person to judge the viability of the project. It’s usually a good idea to do a Google search to see if someone is already doing what you want to do or if there is already something similar out there and if so, how well they are doing.
Just because it’s being done, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it
Often at the first sign of competition a lot of people lose motivation. It is true that while losing the first mover advantage will severely reduce your chances of getting investors and users on board early but your ultimate goal should be to be self employed. So you should ask yourself if you have a different take on the product or something that will differentiate you, or better yet, give you a competitive advantage.
Some times arriving late to an idea can have its advantages. Firstly, you know there is a market out there for your product. Secondly, you can see what others are already doing, identify a gap or niche and make a good living in it. The goal should be to be self employed, not to think of the next big thing. If you need motivation to enter a crowded market, keep in mind that Google was not the first, or second, or third search engine in the world, it was fairly late to the search game, same is true for Gmail and email services and Facebook and social media sites.
Just because its not been done, doesn’t mean it should be done
The internet super highway is littered these days with the dead carcases of the next Uber something or the next big Social thing. A lot of these ideas had not been done before, a lot of them had a significant amount of VC behind them. None of this helped. I'm sure the entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists did a lot of research and due diligence on the viability of the market. Yet these products failed.
My point here is that determining the viability of a product is tricky, and your opinion and even your research can be bias. Try to figure out:
- Who will use your app and why?
Ask yourself who the typical user for your app is and what the is typical use. What is their age group, how they’ll use it and why? - How will you grow your user base?
A lot of successful companies started by building a user base and did not concern themselves with generating revenue. While its true that having a large user group will automatically confer some worth to your product, potential entrepreneurs often fall into the trap of thinking that just because they give away their product for free, that people will download it and use it. The truth is, that there is a cost for every users to download an app and to create a habit of using an app. In effect, it still requires you to win a mind share with the user and you can only do this if the perceived benefit is large enough to justify the user doing this. - How will you generate revenue?
Whether you try to raise VC or finance this on your own, you’ll be surprised how quickly millions of dollars can dry up. You’ll need to have a plan to stay in business and keep paying the bills. If you plan to go down the venture capital route and then sell your business, venture capitalists and potential suitors for your business will want to know how they will get a return on their investment.
Looking at these questions, its fairly straight forward to understand how people can answer these questions quite easily and fool themselves into thinking something is viable. It’s important to not just answer these questions but then do your best to investigate your assumptions and try to back your answers with surveys and research.
Before you spend a dime, get started on your own
A lot of technical people think that there is nothing they can do without getting partners or technical resources on board. This is simply not true. Before you spend even a penny or try to pay to get technical users on board, take some paper and start sketching the screens for your apps and start planning the interaction between the screens.
Sketch your screens
What does ‘Screen A’ look like? When I press ‘Button A’ what happens? If the user is registered, ‘Awesome Feature Screen’ is shown or else the ‘Login Screen’ is shown.
The sketches don’t have to be professional, they can just be pencil outlines of features on each screen. Sketch all your screens out using a paper and pencil. Doing this will allow you to see what interactions make sense and what needs to be revised.
Doing all the screens and interactions between them by hand will take a lot of time. Once you have put the time in and have the sketches in hand, people are far more likely to take you seriously. This is because you have put the time and effort into your idea and shown some commitment to the project and not simply told someone else what your idea is and asked them to build your business for you.
When all the screens are done, this is a good time to get designers involved. It is also a good time to look for a partner.
(Optional) Looking for a partner
If you plan to get seed funding, I would recommend a partner who understands the technology industry and its business well. Ideally they have experience with technology start-ups. I’ll refrain from giving you advice on where to find such a partner, but the key is networking… lots and lots of networking.
If you plan to finance the business yourself, look for a partners who is a designer in order to keeps the costs down, plus you will need a designer repeatedly throughout the development phase so it helps if you don’t have to pay for a designer’s services.
Getting designers involved
Now that you have your sketches, you have a great platform for communicating your vision to designers and user experience experts. Ideally, you would want to get someone on board who is a user experience (UX) expert and have them finalize your sketches before you go to a designer, however, you can skip this step as time and money are both in short supply. If your designer has been working with apps for a while, he should be able to guide you as to the best practices on both iOS and Android or at least give you a design and interaction that is generic enough so as to not look out of place on either platform.
Look for a designer locally, someone you can sit with and work on the product with. It may be cheaper to go to one of the many online sites like 99designs.com to get designs done. However you’ll find communicating with the designers and getting good results is far more hit and miss than if you can sit with the designer and work with them.
The reason you get a designer involved before developers is that design often dictates a lot of the decisions that a developer has to make and they will often be held up if one asset or the other is not available. While it is perfectly feasible to give a developer your sketches and tell them to get started, keep in mind that your designer will be able to layout your sketches on phone templates and tell you whether your layouts work well on small screens.
Be open to criticisms of your layouts and interactions. Designers have experience doing this sort of work, trust them and negotiate with the designer where you disagree. When your screens are professionally laid out, this would be a great time to get developers on board and look for investors if needed.
Getting investors
This section is honestly something that I have been researching and probably deserves its own article. At present I cannot say much more than do a quick search for seed funding and incubators in your area. You could try to get venture capitalists on board, however, without a working product or at least a prototype not too many people are likely to invest in your idea and even if they do, you’ll lose a large chunk of your ownership and probably not even get enough for it to go a year. Incubators are a much better idea. Incubators will give you some seed funding, provide access to experts in your field and best yet, you can show up with just an idea without having a registered a company and they will still take you seriously. Though, you should have a start-up registered at this point if you are looking for funding so as to limit your liability.
Getting developers involved
The main reason for getting developers involved at this later stage is that your final app design and layout will affect programming decisions. It will also clearly communicate to the developers what your vision is. You’ll be surprised how ambiguous words can be.
The key at this stage is to be open to criticism and change. Developers for a platform have a lot of insight as to what works well on that platform and what does not. Often designs work in Photoshop but don’t translate well on to an actual devices and more often than not, you don’t figure this out until the work has already been done. App developers will also have input on what the API should be like and the back-end/API developer will have input on what the app should be doing (if you don’t know what I mean by back-end or API, you probably should look for a partner).
Your first task should be to find the right developer(s). You will likely need an Android and/or iOS developer and a back-end developer to develop your APIs if needed. You could have your app developer work on the API as well, but keep in mind that such a generalist may take a lot longer and might not do as good of a job as a specialists. Ask developers what they have worked on, if they have some apps or websites you can look at and if they have any references. You can look for developers locally (something I cannot recommend enough) or go to a site like Freelancer.com and look for them. Ideally, your designer should be able to recommend someone they have worked with in the past.
The second task is to sit down and estimate how long the product, as you have envisioned it will take. Keep in mind that you need to put out a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in order to test your assumptions about the viability of the product. Decide what you want your time to market to be and what’s the MVP in this period of time. Remember, you can’t launch a perfect app with your perfect features on the first go, it has to be the minimum viable product to test feasibility and allow you to “pivot” your idea if needed.
I would recommend not spending more than 3 months (full time work in Developer hours, per platform) in development. The MVP is extremely important, remove the wrong features and your app will fail. Keep too many features and you’ll never get it to market. If your development time is going over the 3 months mark, you need to refine your idea further.
Finally, agree on milestones for the project, I would recommend 2 week milestones so you can be sure that the developers are making progress and review the project every 2 weeks to ensure you are on target.
How long will it take end to end
If you follow the above steps and have no bad luck, I would expect this to take 6 months end to end. If you are super aggressive with your research, developing your sketches, getting your designer on board and having him do the final layouts and designs, then maybe 4 months.
How much will it cost
This largely depends on your app, what kind of infrastructure it takes to bring it to life, and where in the world your designers and developers are located. Look up the average salaries for designers and developers in your area, and you should be able to estimate how much the development effort will cost. Once you have your back-end developer and app developers on board, you can ask them to estimate how much the infrastructure will cost. To ballpark infrastructure cost, if you have a cloud based infrastructure, it will cost you between $0 — $50/month while you are in development and once you deploy it could go up to $50 — $200/month depending on number of users and the bandwidth being used. Assuming you don’t use any third party API or services that you have to pay for. I would recommend check out the pricing for Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Services to get an idea for how much hosting and storage services can cost.
A word on outsourcing work to cheaper markets
Disclaimer: I am an Android Developer, I work mostly on a contractual basis. Therefore, some may claim that my advice in this section is bias. However, I do have over 12 years of experience in the area of outsourcing and I’ve been on both ends of this business and here is my personal and professional opinion.
There are dozens of companies out there that will ask you to outsource your idea to them. The golden rule here is, if you are financing the project yourself, or have very limited capital, don’t trust anyone. Repeatedly, in this article I've stated that you need to find local resources. There are millions of start-ups that have wasted billions of dollars on outsourcing to region with cheap labour such as Eastern Europe, China, India, South America etc. with mixed results. Almost all of them, end up bringing development to the local market. If you’re a start-up, I would say, keep it local, deal with developers and designers who take pride in their work and their reputation.
A lot of companies will promise you that they will help you achieve your dream, they may even give you success stories. Don’t trust anyone. They have no interest in helping you achieve your dreams, they are really only interested in achieving theirs.
Finally
Best of luck.
