How we built a mobile app from nothing
The story of how we forged our dream to build a mobile app for foodies
It’s 1 o’clock in the afternoon and it is an average cloudy day in London Waterloo. The gathering crowds grow bigger in front of cozy pubs, easy breweries and small street food spots. After a long walk along the Thames we start to feel the relentless bite of hunger consuming us little by little. It’s lunchtime. My friend and I don’t know where to eat.
I’m there for vacation and I’m taking advantage of my friend’s bank holidays to visit the city with a local. He lives in Wimbledon and it’s not like he knows the neighborhood that much. We walk in a circle for quite a long time before we find a safe harbor to fill our aching stomachs. That harbor is the Mulberry Bush.
My friend and I had the idea to build an app for foodies during a moment of serendipity. Nice projects and ideas, just like many other amazing things in life, often come when sharing good food and drinks with our beloved ones. In front of a wonderful glass of London Stout and an appetizing burger, one of us said: “Let’s build a Tinder-like app for foodies. Instead of people, users will be presented with great dishes around.” And we just started working on that.
Ultimately, we built Wonderfood to find great dishes around, without having to read restaurant-based lengthy text reviews and be eventually unsatisfied with our food adventures. We wanted to have something that was focused on food: what it looks and tastes like. No longer did we need to walk in circle before finding the best food, or be disappointed with fake reviews.
“Let’s build a Tinder-like app for foodies. Instead of people, users will be presented with great dishes around.”
1. The idea
Our journey started from zero. We had no idea on how to build a mobile app. We were not engineers, nor designers and we had no experience in marketing roles. All we had were grit, curiosity and a bit of business acumen.
The first thing we did was to build an abstract of our idea. So we stated what kind of problem we wanted to solve, our solution, who were the target users, how big the market was, who were our potential competitors, which were the uses cases, etc. We also started to design some rudimental drafts of the UI.
2. The team
We soon realized that no one was going to back our idea in any way if we didn’t have an MVP first. Great ideas are not uncommon and everyone can think about a new great startup project. The difference between successful entrepreneurs and other people relies in their capability to make their ideas come true. So we had to:
- Test a rudimental version of Wonderfood with the lowest amount of resources
- Learn quickly the technology standards and the most common business models within the mobile app industry
- Reduce the development effort to a minimum
- Build a product for early adopters as soon as possible
To do so we had two options. The first was to pay for an external software development house to build the app for us. The second was to build the app by ourselves. However, we didn’t have money to invest at the time and we couldn’t code in C#, C++, Objective-C, HTML5, Java or Swift. The only viable solution was to search for other business partners who had strong coding skills.
We searched for developers amongst our friends, and for a short period of time we worked together with some of them, but it didn’t end up well. We weren’t able to separate the personal from the professional and we couldn’t carve out clear roles from the start. We learnt the lesson and moved on.
Having a structured and well organized abstract of the project, as well as some concept drafts, gave us enough confidence to search for additional co-founders on platforms such as AngelList and F6S. We were extremely surprised when we received the first feedbacks from the community of startup enthusiast. It’s plenty of great people with awesome capabilities out there, and many more than we could ever expect were willing to work with us.
Great ideas are not uncommon and everyone can think about a new great startup project. The difference between successful entrepreneurs and other people relies in their capability to make their ideas come true.
3. A culture of mutual trust
We eventually found the co-founders we were looking for. We started a company, and managed to build a prototype of Wonderfood. However, we were soon forced to face many other challenges. In fact, none of us was living in the same country. The team worked remotely from many locations scattered around Europe, and even farther. Moreover, everyone already had a full-time job and was working on Wonderfood part time. We solved a lot of our communication struggles thanks to tools such as Slack, Trello, Google Drive and a document called “Wonderfood work tips and good practices” where we listed tips that allowed us to be on the same page on the most relevant topics, such as weekly meetings and project management practices.
But the greatest challenge we had to face was to build a culture of mutual trust. How do you become a reliable business partner of someone you never met? And how can you build a bond that is strong enough to resist the many adversities that every entrepreneur faces? One of us often half-jokes that being business partners is like a marriage. Somehow, he is right.
Being business partners requires to include everyone in every decision. Sometimes it’s painful, it slows you down and it’s not efficient. You need to be open to new ideas and be ready to deny your own opinions. It takes time and effort: but it pays. An Indian proverb that we often like to quote says: “Alone we can run, but together we can go far away.” The development was slow but rentless. We were on the right track.
An Indian proverb that we like to quote says: “Alone we can run, but together we can go far away.”
4. The closed beta
As we were approaching to the release of Wonderfood closed beta for iOS, we needed additional assets to engage a list of early adopters and beta testers. Such assets included a strong brand identity, a nice logo, a cool landing page, and a smooth user interface.
We eventually came up with strong brand guidelines and a coherent visual design system, and we also were finally able to build our website: www.wonderfoodapp.com. With a solid feature set for our MVP, a brand new user interface, and a small list of testers, we were ready to launch a closed beta version of the app.
5. The journey to the App Store
We engaged our beta testers with a weekly newsletter and one-to-one conversations to better understand how Wonderfood could be improved. A handful of people wrote to us with ways we could improve the app, many of which were great ideas. We also received interesting insights from strangers who randomly found out about Wonderfood.
We followed up with each user individually to make sure we understood what they were asking for and made sure they understood that we planned on building some variation of their feature request. The smaller features we built and released quickly. The larger features, we took our time and let the list of the requirements for the first App Store release grow. We worked for months to implement those improvements. And now, Wonderfood for iOS is finally available on the App Store.
6. The confidence to continue
After paying attention to downloads, analytics, user positive remarks and witnessing the app steadily grow, we are proud to say that we have enough confidence to build new versions of Wonderfood with or without external funding. We are willing to further improve it and make it the ultimate app for foodies.
7. What we learned
There are many challenges that we faced that I didn’t mention, such as the tremendous effort that the actual coding required, the long after-work or weekend hours of our spare time dedicated to the project, the deep study needed to fix every small detail, the frustration to understand how to be compliant with every law requirement… the list is long, but these are topics for another day.
Another thing worth mentioning is that all the industry experts tell you the same stuff about the lean startup model, which is much easier to say after you’ve done it. Every project has different needs and there is no one best way. If you have a project you believe in, just keep working on it. Just keep building stuff, be patient, and follow your dream. Never stop 🙂
Thank you for reading this far!
Shout out to everyone that has helped out along the way. Shouts to all the folks that beta tested Wonderfood. Shouts to all the accelerators and investors for rejecting our app an indefinite amount of times. And last but not least, shout out to the users of Wonderfood for giving it a chance.
