-Ryan Campbell
As a developer, I talk to a lot of businesses who want to build a software application. And when I talk to them about what they want their app to do, I get a long list of features. Sometimes those features don’t have a clear purpose, other than the business thinks it’d be neat to have.
But the biggest problem with too many features, is that a lot of the time, those features aren’t actually being used :( and so this amazing app that’s been built isn’t very useful.
How can we avoid building low value apps? Let’s take a step back to look at how a business starts and grows.
When you start a business, whether it be by yourself or with a partner, at first you’re just doing the things that need to be done as they come up. You don’t have any process and that works well for you at this point. But after a few weeks (or months) you realize that, you need to define roles, tasks, and processes. You realize that you need to be able to hire someone for a specific role, give them documentation describing their tasks and how to complete them, and let them run with it.
This idea of breaking apart all the roles in your business — accountant, marketer, salesperson, customer support, etc. — should happen at the beginning of a business, even if you as the sole owner are taking on all these roles at the beginning. When you start to grow, you can now hire for the roles you need to fill. And once a role is struggling to keep up with the tasks/demand it makes it easy to hire more people for that specific role. You’re consistently growing your business and the number of humans needed to run it. Side note: if you’re looking for more information on why that process is important and how to do it, check out the book E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, highly recommended for any business.
All of that is a manual process, handled 100% by humans. The great news is that humans are super friendly, personable, and adaptable. Humans can learn new processes, and think up new ways to optimize your business operations. But there is a downside to humans. Humans are emotional, prone to error, illness, and are not always available when you need them. Back to the good news though, there is an unlimited supply of humans (well not literally, but there’s at least more than a few handfuls), and if your process is well documented (not locked away in someone’s brain) you can scale your business very well with humans. You can start with humans handling every aspect of your business supported by commonly available technology (email, word, excel, etc.) for quite a while. And remember: all great businesses were started by at least one human.
Getting back to the idea of building a software application. Apps are amazing and can do great things for growing your business, but you need to have the whole roles/tasks/processes thing nailed down first. Those tasks you need to automate are going to define the features you need in your app. If you don’t need a task automated, you don’t need it in your app.
A rule I like to follow is that you’ll know when it’s time to build an app when the cost of development is cheaper than the cost to hire a new human for a year (developing an app to do the task vs. hiring a human to do the task). I say a year because technology is always changing and you will need to spend money to maintain that app.
What is the business value of the app?
Add up how much time it takes a human to perform that task, how much you pay for that human’s time, and how many humans you’ll need over the year to stay on top of that task. Also consider the cost of human error associated with that task that leads to unhappy customers and lost profit.
Once you have that down, that’s when you can talk about development and maintenance costs associated with the app. If done right, you’ll have an app that saves your company money (aka, pays for itself) and keeps your employees and customers happy.
Have a process you’d like to automate? Send Ryan an email and tell him what you’d like to take off your human’s plate.
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