The #1 Way to Save Money (and Time) on Your Startup App Development
Startup founder looking for the best bootstrapping hack backed up by the experience of hundreds of apps we’ve built?
The answer may sound paradoxical. Everything starts with…
OK, here’s the deal
There are a lot of startups. It does not matter what kind of business model your startup has, what country you are from or even the type of industry you are in.
It doesn’t really matter if you want to change people’s eating trends or create the 8th version of a restaurant delivery service in your city (and hey, you can still build the #1 delivery app in the world if you do it the right way).
If you want to create a software product that will solve other people’s problems and acquire lots of users who will actually enjoy using it, then you need to create a product that is excellent in every aspect.
That’s hard, and it’s even harder to create a product of high standards fast and with minimum amount of money investments.
Let’s face it
When you clicked on this article you thought that the #1 way to save money on app development was, obviously, either about:
- choosing a low-paid freelancer who will compensate his/her rather poor coding skills with high engagement in your project;
- or finding an agency with ridiculously low rates (because you don’t have much too loose then, right?);
- or even learning to code by yourself (and by then missing your business opportunity).
I wish it was this easy, and everybody could create a great app for $5,000 that will change the world.
Unfortunately, it’s not the answer. In order to perceive what’s the #1 way and how this may change your approach to your first, second or even subsequent web/mobile application development project, we need to dig a little deeper.
By learning from mistakes of 1000s of startups that have already failed having run out of time and money you have a much higher chance to succeed.
This knowledge will help you build a better MVP, prepare for and create a full startup product or work on further development of an existing successful platform.
So, you have to start somewhere, right?
As a lean startup you create an MVP by following the Build — Measure — Learn cycle introduced by Eric Ries.
The idea is to make this cycle as short as possible, and since it’s repetitive, you build, and measure, and learn, and repeat the cycle again and again until you have the best product in the world.
The problem is that it requires a lot of money to afford this process more than 2 or 3 times unless you already get some revenue from your app.
Alternatively, you may have great investors behind your back that believe in you and your idea. We had such a case. A Finnish startup has firstly built an MVP, then reached out to us to help them develop a full product. The project was huge, their app was offering a lot of new cool and useful functionalities.
The client was a real startup mind. You know, the one with 100 ideas per minute (and mostly good ones, scary!). So each project meeting he had a handful of concepts to be implemented ASAP. The scope of the project was changing quite often, you can imagine.
Our team kept redesigning stuff here and there, digging into code to implement new features…All this translates to bigger amounts of money and time investments than previously expected. This is not the best path to follow, and you, as a successful Scrum Product Owner, will be better off avoiding this.
How to prevent it? The answer is easy: make sure you really understand your users and their needs prior to building a number of fancy features. Even if from your point of view some of them are absolutely necessary for your product.
So until we’ve all got hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw on product development, fancy offices, Bay area devs and sport cars, let’s see how you can minimize the costs, build a better version of the product faster and don’t get frustrated realizing that nobody wants the app after 6–12 months of hustling and building it.
Why do most startups fail? (reason #1)
Their ideas may be, well, terrible.
Idea matters, if it’s bad, you will have a very hard time trying to convince anyone to buy it.
If you think your idea is great, prove it. Validate it by pitching the market.
Your market is, above all, your users.
Ok, I’ll throw it at you right now:
The #1 way to save money on app development is to invest more time (and some cash) at the beginning
This is backed up by tens and hundreds of the apps we’ve built, let alone the rest of the software world…
Everything starts with truly understanding your users. Who are they? What car do they drive, do they like Apple or Samsung, banana or strawberry, do they associate red color rather with the “quit” or “continue” button?
Sit down with them and learn. Show your prototype to the test users, and learn, learn, and learn again. And there are tens of web tools to help you test your initial concept with potential users remotely.
The ultimate goal is to satisfy your users. Therefore you should create an ultimate User Experience.
The best scenario is to invest in UX (User Experience) as a process prior to starting your MVP design and software development. But in case you’ve already built your prototype/MVP app, it’s high time to review your users’ needs and wants, assumptions and struggles, and invest in creating a great User Experience.
In simple terms, UX Design is all about truly understanding your business goals and your users’ needs to create the best application experience possible.
Confronting the client’s business goals with the goals of users makes it possible to prepare a product that reconciles oftentimes conflicting interests of both parties.
Common UX design process
Here’s how a typical User-Centered design creation process looks like step-by-step if all you have is an idea and you’re about to start a long journey of turning it into a scalable business:
- Most importantly, you have to understand your own business objectives very clearly. Then do a market research, competition research (if you have any), and potential users’ research and surveys.
- Analyze the data that you got to identify design opportunities for your app, imagine its logic.
3&4. Visualize several concepts and work on designing a couple of prototypes.
5. Evaluate these options by asking test users for feedback.
Measure, learn from the feedback and repeat.
Implementing this approach allows you to not go into full UI design and software development stages just yet. You provide your users with a couple of options of clickable prototypes, and, based on the feedback, get back to redeveloping the concept. That’s gold!
In the next article we’ll discuss which steps to add to your app development process, talk more about good and bad UX, and learn simple tricks that quickly increase conversions.
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About the Author
Daniil is responsible for Business development at EL Passion. You can find him on LinkedIn.
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