Identifying your App’s Unique Selling Proposition
Once you become an app developer (or appreneur), lots of people come to you with their latest idea for an app. I always suggest that before marching off and putting precious money into development, they should first do some competitive research and define their unique selling proposition (USP).
So how do you research your competitors and separate your app by providing competitive features?
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it. — Walt Disney
Do a Little Competitive Snooping
To build a better app, you need to objectively analyze the competition and understand their strengths and weaknesses. You can do that by visiting their website, downloading a free trial of the product, and in some cases, purchasing their product to see how well their paid products work.
By downloading a trial, you get to see several things. You get an inside view as to how they manage their prospects. They will send you emails during your trial, they may even call you to nudge you to buy.
You can also determine how much help they provide as you are learning their product, determine how easy their product is to use, and you can see things you like and dislike about their product.
Create a Competitive Matrix
Once you fully understand your competition’s features, create a matrix so that you can more easily see who has competitive features. It might look similar to this for each competitor:
Define your Features
Once you understand your competitors, you can define your features. Here is how we defined this for our first app (a password manager called aMemoryJog):
aMemoryJog allows tech-savvy consumers that own a computer, phone or tablet to keep their easily forgotten information accessible at their fingertips. This includes passwords, account information, frequent flyer details, and an endless list of other critical info. The benefit is that this hard-to-remember information no longer has to be remembered — they can find it in seconds.
Features of aMemoryJog will include:
- The ability to enter personal information separated by easy-to-set-up categories and personal data attributes, and a large notes section to enter more detailed information
- Automatic cloud backups and encryption of all stored information
- The ability to access websites with a single click and single click copy user id / passwords
- The ability to restore a deleted entry from the recycle bin
- The ability to quickly find information by searching by keyword and by automatically showing recent items.
- Localized language support
- Friendly password generator that uses real words instead of hard to remember letters.
Our competitive advantages and USP are:
- Ability to self-destruct if the phone is lost or stolen (they can wipe out the database remotely from a web browser)
- Offer a free web edition when they purchase the iPhone edition
- Recycle bin that allows restoring of deleted items
- Simpler import feature than our competitors (web edition)
- Simple to use, easier data entry than our competitors, with fewer options to configure
- Multiple language support (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese)
- Friendly password generator that uses real words instead of hard to remember letters.
Related article: How to Build a Product Website for your App
Conclusion
We now understand our competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and have defined our feature set to provide our own set of competitive advantages.
About this Blog
Steve Miller built a software company, sold it and retired early. Steve enjoys blogging about lifestyle freedom, financial independence and technology. If you like this blog, subscribe here to get an email each time he posts.
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