If you want to make an app for that, stop.
Take a breather and think before you commit your budget to that.
Before you make that app, before you hire someone to make that app, and especially before you outsource app development to someone, make sure to ask yourself this question:
What will this app help its users do better?
Coming from my experiences in game and product development, I can assure you that in the next 6 months, your app will be delayed, your mind will change about the features, and your costs will start to get out of control. You will then start rushing your partner or development team to get things done.
Within the same year, your app may launch, but because it took too long. And because it wasn’t clear what it would help its users with, it will tank within the first month of launching. My point?
Be clear about what the app’s purpose is.
The app’s purpose can give clarity to what form it should take. ‘App’ is short for the word ‘application’, and has recently been used as a simplified term for something that describes a program that does something (ideally, it helps people or users do something better).
To give a better picture, there are many kinds of ‘apps’ — a mobile app, a web app, a desktop app, etc. Without defining exactly what you want the app to let its users do better, you may end up spending to make a desktop app, when what you needed was a web app. Or, maybe you initially wanted to make both a web app and a mobile app, so you hire a team to do both, without realising that for your feature, a mobile app would have been the more relevant and practical choice! Then you didn’t need to spend more for the 2 teams developing the mobile and web apps (also a note: just because someone is a programmer it doesn’t mean they can make both web or mobile apps! Programming is a vast field with many applied jobs).
I even have a side project that’s 3 years old (to my friends who read this, yes, it’s that project), and I never got to launching it because it had a very limited use case for very few people, where I live. I also wanted to make a mobile app out of it, but I quickly learned that it as too complicated and too costly for something that I had no way to make money off of (or at least recoup my costs). I eventually realised that a good web app would be better for it, temporarily, until it gets enough traction. Identifying your app’s purpose will help clarify what kind of app it should be, and will direct who you should hire to make it.
Giving purpose to your app will let you resist shiny distractions. In a past job, we were making a game, and we couldn’t launch it because our publishers thought it wasn’t good enough. It didn’t do certain things better than other competitor games in the market. We ended up keeping trying to implement new things, in shorter timelines, burning out the team, only to shelve the game in the end (it never launched). It was a fault of both the publisher, and us, who started the game. We didn’t have a clearer vision of what it should have been like.
“So you see, I want one small change to the app. Did you see app X lately? It had this really cool thing where…”
I hear so many horror stories of this in corporate / brand apps, too. Client hires agency to make app Y. App has no clear purpose. So many sign offs before anything moves. Client changes mind every time agency shows progress or feature for approval. Client sees something another trendy app does and wants to add it into the project. Project ends up 1 year late. App tanks because marketing is basically riding on trends to get more eyeballs on your product, and 1 year later, the app is irrelevant, or too complicated to be relevant. Give your app purpose, first.
Purpose helps you focus on the key problem your app needs to solve. It is always very, very, tempting to just add in feature upon feature into your app. Because, why not? The Swiss army knife did it, and it’s iconic. Everyone who has a Swiss army knife can basically do everything except cook rice. Except, apps are not Swiss army knives. They’re specialised tools. Apps exist to help users do something more easily than without it. Apps do not need to do everything well.
Most of the time, we get carried away about what we want to add into the app. Sadly, not everyone will use the new feature you added in. Especially if you’re on a deadline and on a budget, you want to avoid the amount of things your apps do, only to the most crucial of tasks.
My hypothesis for this behavior is that we aim for virality, because after all, we do want our work to be useful. So, we think that adding in everything will help the app be more viral! Unfortunately, it works very differently. Snapchat got viral because it allowed users to send messages that self-destructed. It didn’t create messaging threads or messages that synced quickly across laptop, phone, web. Dubsmash became viral because it let people do one thing well: dub over video clips. Don’t maximise costs and return on investment by trying to make it do everything. It’s a bigger waste of money if you get delayed and it doesn’t launch on time because you wanted more things in it.
The app’s purpose can give insight into a more important question: is this app needed at all? I’ve had some people talk to me about an app idea that they have, how it would make task X easier for people like them. (Some have even said how it would be great if I was in the app development business because I could make tons of money easily, if “I just released one app”. Unfortunately, while I’m quite technical, I’m no engineer. Second, I have tons of other reasons I ended up not explaining while hearing them, or else we might not end up as friends afterwards.) They haven’t released their app idea yet, and they’re still alive. Last I checked, they’re still doing well, and they haven’t felt the insane itch to do anything about it. It turns out, their app wasn’t really needed.
“Why not get into app development? If you just make one app, you can get rich!”
Back to the side project: truth be told, the side project, while nice, isn’t really a game changer. Googling deep could have solved the problem my side project was trying to solve. In fact, some competitors with tangential products have already encroached on the benefit I wanted to focus on.
So, again, before you start hacking away at that app development project: give your app some clarity and purpose.
