Things to keep in mind before investing in an app
The world of mobile apps is bursting at the seams, with reports of up to 10,000 apps appearing every day in app stores. It is easy for a company to get swept up in the excitement of all this energy and assume that a smartphone app is their shortcut.
Blinded by the possibilities, several companies dive totally unprepared into the development of mobile apps. They do not know the risks associated with the production of mobile apps and are heading for some unexpected surprises.
Here are some reasons you have to think about before building your own app.
You have no clients.
Yes, there are a handful of companies funded by venture capital (VC) that start on a napkin and invest millions before their first customer is acquired. If you’ve got the chance, go for it. But it’s incredibly hard to create a consumer base with just a smartphone app like the other 10 percent of entrepreneurs. You need to switch your current audience, not the other way around, to the app.
You don’t know your target market.
Many apps struggle because their target client is not understood and they waste so much time and money searching after the wrong ones. Virtually any aspect of the final product can be guided by understanding your target audience.
You don’t have a viral strategy for your app.
You’ll need a strategy to create visibility if you don’t have a big budget to push traffic to your app. The best currency is social media, both because it is cost-effective and sometimes free and can be positioned as educational — that gets difficult if the app is a game, of course. But social sharing, like signing up for Facebook, isn’t a development strategy. Dropbox is a better example, providing additional free storage for new customer referrals. Similarly, to attract users, you’ll need a schedule.
You don’t have any money for marketing
The whole thing is emphasized so it doesn’t have to be a lot. With a small amount, you can do a lot if it’s well spent. Facebook is capable of highly targeted users, and there are several websites that allow you to test messaging and the user interface (UI). But you need at least some money to deal with in order to do all of this.
You’ve never before designed an app or software.
It is very different from designing a piece of software from other projects you might have handled. There are many choices involved, often beyond your current understanding and many subjective decisions about language, design, and data. Also, consider the many choices with no simple or apparent response to how to do stuff. In short, building an app includes lots of ways to create errors.
Think Before You Invest
There is common wartime saying, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Plans can be the same. In the real world, what looks good on a PowerPoint slide doesn’t always translate well. If you have an idea, be prepared to spend a year or more of your life to make it happen.
You don’t focus on the customers
Business success is primarily a feature of tailoring the operation, product or offering to fulfill the client’s needs. These needs can change over time, however, and you need to build a plan to adapt or boost the experience of your client. It takes extensive preparation to win in the mobile app game to take a client from his or her first transaction to him or her being a repeat customer.
Risk of unsustainable user growth
What happens if the app is being used by so many people? What if it takes off quicker than you’d ever anticipated? You could be trapped with hundreds of thousands of users helping you. Are you ready for that?
Chance of breaches of security
Certainly, security breaches are nothing new and extend to every form of site or mobile app. The danger here lies in underestimating the need inside native apps for proper security precautions. Some businesses make the mistake of thinking that automatically stable native apps are secure, and in the process ignore proper security measures.
We are not telling you not to build a mobile app, but to think about the whole process so that you can make a more informed decision. Here at IIA, we help you deal with these problems. To make an informed decision to make sure that you don’t make the same mistakes many have made.
