Getting Inspired: How to Find Your Next Big App Idea
Merchants come in all shapes and sizes. BigCommerce serves small business all the way up to the Enterprise segment. Depending on the stage and complexity of the business, their needs can greatly vary.
For our partners, that means knowing your audience and how to most effectively communicate and work with them.
BigCommerce provides a robust foundation — and the App Marketplace serves to solve for the extended and unique use cases to help make a business succeed.
The Opportunity for Developers
As a platform, our primary motivation is to give merchants the most powerful admin tools we can to manage their day-to-day business as easily and efficiently as possible. On the other hand, like any good software provider, we focus on what we do best — ecommerce.
But of course every business owner and website administrator inevitably wants more than that. How can they market that site more effectively? What tools can they use to retain their customers? Or gain new ones? These areas are where we welcome our partners to fill in the gaps.
As our platform expands, so do our third party capabilities. Over the past 6 months alone, we’ve released several new API resources to interact with shipping, carts, themes, and even the checkout experience. With every new API we build, more possibilities are opened up for the developer community working with BigCommerce.
With all the new tech we’re releasing and the breadth of merchant using apps continuing to expand, now is as good a time as ever to start building your own app! But the question many developers struggle with is: what should I build?
Determining What to Build
Choosing a path and getting started on it can often be the biggest hurdle to success with development. There’s a lot to consider before spending time and resources on a project without knowing how successful it may be, but research and knowledge can empower you to be our next rising star! Consider the following when you start to plan your project.
1. Get to know BigCommerce.
Although it may sound obvious, one of the best and most overlooked paths to creating a successful app is first becoming a BigCommerce expert. Without knowledge of the underlying platform, it will be very difficult to create a meaningful add-on for it. Understanding how our admin panel works, how users interact with their store data, how the front end is built — all of these things should inform the way you develop your app, and even what you decide to develop. Identifying the gaps yourself gets you leaps ahead in developing a solution than hearing about it second hand. Even small storefront apps or simple integrations can benefit from a deeper knowledge of BigCommerce — think of the upsell opportunities!
2. Discover merchant pain points.
Every merchant is unique in how they run their business, but many times there are larger themes to the struggles they face even with a robust platform like BigCommerce. Listening to merchants talk about what they want out of their ecommerce site can give you great clues about what might be the most critical features to build. Get involved in our Community forum to see what merchants are talking about right now. Go even further into the discussion through our official (and unofficial) social media channels where users love to share feedback. Maybe the best resource for identifying a successful feature to focus on would be our Ideas page, where BigCommerce merchants submit and vote on requests for the platform. There are TONS of great ideas here that are ripe for the picking.
3. Get inspired by ecommerce trends.
It’s easier than ever today to stay on top of current trending topics, especially in the world of technology. Sites like Medium are giving thought leaders in every space a new platform to share ideas, and following their lead can be a great way to develop your own new and exciting blueprints for success. Commerce and tech news outlets like Forbes and AdWeek give a pulse of the current hottest topics in the industry, which may seem like a stretch from app development but in reality can be very insightful in understanding what problems merchants face today and solutions that are having a positive effect. Our own BigCommerce Blog is another great source for current ecommerce trends as well, especially those topics closest to our platform!
4. Look out for new API capabilities.
One of the easiest ways to find an original idea for the Marketplace — an option that developers frequently overlook — is simply staying up to date with our API and feature releases. Now more than ever, BigCommerce is focusing on extending our platform and opening up every piece of the software to external integrations. Some of these new resources are as straightforward as our Wishlists API, giving you the capability to really transform our basic wishlist functionality into a product all its own. Others, like the Customer Login API, the Widgets API, or even our Checkout SDK, open up a world of possibilities that have never been available to our merchants before. All of these new releases and potential integrations are ripe for the picking and ready when you are!
5. Put yourself in the merchant’s shoes.
As easy as it is to get focused on solutions, it becomes extremely easy to forget about the problems you were trying to solve in the first place. Beyond all of these tips about finding a good idea for your app, the most important thing at the end of the day is to make sure you’re asking yourself, “would I use this?” If it’s not feasible for a merchant to add to their workflow, or if it requires significant changes to the way they run their business, it may not be worth your time and effort to build it. Which leads to our next topic…
Validating Your Idea
Now you’ve settled on your idea. How do you validate and make sure you’re moving in the right direction?
1. Ask yourself: Will BigCommerce develop this natively?
Use the resources and outlets BigCommerce provides to get an idea of whether or not it’s a feature we’re planning on building natively. Use our monthly Town Halls and the Ideas page as a way to gain insight into our announced, planned projects, and what features those may entail.
2. Get feedback.
If you’ve got business through an existing app or Agency services, ask your clients — would these features be beneficial? What else would they want to see in this app? If the response is less than what you’d hoped for, iterate on your idea and gather more feedback from other sources like social channels and the Community.
3. Conduct market research.
BigCommerce provides a platform for a wide range of merchants. Which segments of the market make the most sense for your app? Take a look at the features and 3rd party tools our Enterprise merchants use today versus our SMB clients. Does your app appeal to everyone, or is there a vertical that would be most useful to focus in on?
4. Build a proof of concept.
Build a functional prototype to validate that what you want to build is possible, and walk yourself through the user experience you’ve envisioned. Have a colleague look at your wireframes or prototype — are they following along easily? Getting lost? Brush up on your UX/UI Design knowledge and make sure you’re not blocking your own shot with a poor interface.
5. Do competitive analysis.
Are there other apps in the BigCommerce Marketplace or the greater ecosystem that aim to deliver a similar solution? Research what they’re doing right and what they may be missing by looking at user feedback in their app reviews, the Community, or on social media. Learn from others’ mistakes and successes — don’t reinvent the wheel!
Conclusion
Regardless of what app idea you land on, success will ultimately rely on the journey through these important milestones. The best app idea in the world can still fail if it’s not built with the user in mind, and not developed with usability as the core concept. Take your time in deciding on what you want to build, and once you’re there, put everything you’ve got into building it right — and I’ll see you on the front page!
