5 Key Challenges To Your Billion Dollar Startup Club Membership
The Billion Dollar Startup Club has a small but growing membership. It’s an exclusive group with very lucrative ideas accomplished through building outstanding applications and products. The newest members are Divyank and Bhavin Turakhia, brothers who created and parlayed the creation and sale of Directi and Media.net.
Every startup wants to join Uber, Snapchat, What’s App, Spotify, and the club’s select membership. You may already be able to envision the payoff for your startup business plan. But, you still face at least five challenges to your Billion Dollar Startup Club membership, problems that only can be solved with a help of a solid engineering team.
Not so fast
A look at the Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club reveals a lot of information. For example, it took Uber 7 years to turn its $11.46 billion funding into its current valuation of $68 billion. AirBnB took 8 years to roll its $2.95 billion into $25.5 billion. And, Slack has quickly turned a half billion into $3.8 billion.
And very few people know that some of these unicorns were building their early apps with a help of agencies. For example, Slack has done that — proof.
For starters, you need to assess the way you want to grow. Your app itself could be your business, or your app could serve operational or administrative processes.
There are many startups that are perfectly happy holding membership in the half-billion club, and the Uber target is awfully high.
Many individual members have settled for a strategy to develop, sell, and begin something new. They turn sweat equity into a seller’s market and then turn the sale equity into another startup triumph.
The Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club does let you explore histories, profiles, and funding track records. This alone should give you some sense of perspective when you are thinking big — as indeed you should.
Making innovation transformational
Some business owners succeed because they improve service at their dry cleaning establishment or reduce inventory at their retail store. Entrepreneurs contribute something more. They contribute something transformational. They introduce something that alters their market, changes market expectations, and/or redirects the entire community experience.
You may want to change the world with your ideas in virtual reality, speech recognition, augmented reality, or the Internet. But, developing the app that gets you there means facing some real challenges because the transformational is rarely do-it-yourself.
1. Time is not your friend
If you’re thinking world-class competition, you know success is a fast-track business. The marketplace needs apps now that it has become used to their potential, and the market’s attention span seems insatiable.
Tim Merel of Digi-Capital, speaking of the billionaire rainmakers as “first movers,” says, “First movers have delivered unprecedented value at an unheard of rate, so dominating quickly is worth its weight in gold.”
It’s a common recommendation to enter the market early with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a simple version of the ultimate plan. The idea is to whet the market’s appetite and work out the kinks before notching up the performance or features. But, contributors at Prado point out three problems to that strategy:
1. Smart customers can see through things, want the solution to your problem, and will wait for the better version.
2. Customers are not patient when competition is everywhere and unrelenting.
3. Everybody is an expert, blogging their appreciation or demeaning the result. These are opinions that can crush you.
So if you are to move quickly, it makes sense to look for agencies’ / professional remote developers’ help to build an MVP. Slack and many other companies applied this tactics successfully.
2. Backend
If you building a mobile app, it has to be Android-friendly, as well as iOS fitted. In the current environment, you also need a cloud-based backend.
As technology pulls innovation in every direction, you risk catastrophe if you trust everything to a single developer. You need a team of distinct, but related individual skills. You need a responsive, collaborative team that has already proven its ability.
3. Build it pretty
Potential customer engagement begins with the app’s interface and experience. It needs vivid visuals: Illustration, logo, typography, and so on. It has to present a first impression that prompts the shopper to look further, to purchase, or to download.
The first impression must provide intuitive access, and that depends on your team creating a user-friendly interface.
4. Start small; think big
If you want the business to grow, you have to build scalability into your operations and into the technology. Growth on the business operations side means planning for increases in human capital, talent management, equity funding, and the like.
The potential of product aging and shifting market tastes requires you to engineer applications that have room for maturity, adaptation, and change. Again, this sophistication calls for an experienced dev team with relevant experience building successful projects before.
5. It takes some money
Entrepreneurial passion and energy can make you a little crazy. Caught up in the romance of working out of your garage, you may lose perspective on the very real cost of getting your app on the market.
Preoccupied with funding business operations, you lose perspective on the necessary cost of developing the app effectively. But, it’s a mistake to let price drive your decision on the selection of a remote app development team.
You can find the cheapest developers and they will deliver nothing. In opposite, you hire a most expensive dev team and there is no guaranty they will meet your expectations. The right way is to hire the developers with the most relevant experience. Those are professionals who have helped many companies and entrepreneurs before you. That’s whom you should hire. Once you get your app out of the gates and (hopefully) start growing the business, you can start hiring inhouse developers which takes time and effort.
What can you do?
In the face of challenges to your joining the Billion Dollar Startup Club, you can still realize your dream objectives. In How to Build a Billion Dollar App, George Berkowski offers 10 steps to build your app:
1. Identify a people or systems problem that applied technology can solve.
2. Find a team that understands how to design, build, and deliver the app you envision.
3. Target your business model as SaaS, iOS, or other.
4. Brand the app with some clever name that indicates its key function.
5. Build a prototype based on your storyboards and narrative.
6. Test the app to exhaustion with every possible user behavior.
7. Host a soft-launch to seek local use and immediate feedback.
8. Spread brand identity across channels and platforms.
9. Raise money.
10. Grow as market demands.
But, you are not going to do this alone and, even with competent techs on board, you all have too much to do to get it right.
For example, raising money takes your full-time attention. And, while you should remain significantly involved in each of these steps, it is far smarter and more cost efficient to outsource the duties you can. While ideas like yours will see the light of day thanks to your bootstrap ambition, developing your best product demands collaboration, feedback, and unique expertise.
In a search for hot unicorns, Forbes contributor Karsten Strauss writes, “What we learned was that technology is transforming industries the world over and investors are backing young companies that promise to change the face of e-commerce, food tech, financial services, and the enterprise.”
You could add a score of industry sectors to Strauss’ list, but the markets have plenty of room for your app development. Still, a well-selected remote app development team may be your best option to beat these five key challenges in the way of your Billion Dollar Startup Club membership.
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