The development of apps is a multi-billion dollar business. According to recent figures, mobile phones generate 52% of internet traffic. Understandably, having a mobile app is considered an opportunity to connect with existing customers or acquire new customers. Yet, finding success in the mobile app market is far from easy.
The apple store receives over 1,000 submissions a day. According to Statista, there are approximately four million apps in the Apple Store. Meanwhile, the average person has 80 apps on their phone, of which just nine are used daily.
Just considering those figures for a moment, it is clear that the majority of apps in the marketplace are dormant. This is a considerable waste of financial resources. In this article, we’ll cover five tips to consider to ensure the success of your mobile app.
We all have days when we think we have come up with a groundbreaking business idea. However, many of these ideas don’t hold water when you look at them closely. Given this fact, one of the first tips to keep in mind when building your mobile app is the importance of validating the interest in your idea.
There are a couple of parts to this. First, you need to determine if there is an interest in your idea from your target audience. You can test the interest through interviews with people you perceive would be your ideal customer. One route I like to use for testing the demand is running paid ads to a landing page to test the interest of your target audience in real-world conditions.
Once you have tested the demand for your product, you need to consider the design. Start by creating simple wireframes of your app. These are visual representations of the user interface. You can connect these wireframes using online mockup tools to test functionality.
Creating wireframes is a cheap way of testing how your app would work in practice. You should spend a lot of time on this process, both designing a simple wireframe, a visual mockup of the app itself. Get this right. Making changes after the development company has started creating your app will be time consuming and expensive.
There are a lot of good app development companies, and indeed software platforms. If you are looking to develop an app with a simple feature set, then you might be able to use an online platform to create the app for you. This would be the cheapest option for an out of the box app.
The process for finding an app development company to work with is more complicated. First, you should set a budget for your app. This will help you frame your search (there are app developers that fit every budget). Then you will need to decide where the company should be based.
Working with a local company has advantages in the fact that it’s easier to check the quality of their work, and it will be able to visit the team as they develop your product. The trade-off is costs will be higher. Working with a company you find through a freelance website or similar will keep costs down, but it’s harder to assess the quality of their work
Unless you are a programmer, developing a full-blown mobile app is a costly endeavor. The average cost of an enterprise-level mobile app is estimated to range from $100,000 – $500,000. Most companies and individuals don’t invest nearly as much. Regardless of the figure, it is a significant investment.
To keep costs down, start by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). That is a product with the minimum number of features that you need for your app to work and your audience to find it useful. This won’t be everything that you hoped for or imagined. However, keeping the features to a minimum will help you to keep initial costs down, while you test the demand for your app.
The final and potentially most important tip is to make sure you hold back a marketing budget for your project. There’s no point in investing all of that money in developing an app if you don’t have the resources to acquire customers. Most successful companies that develop apps allocate 30% of their total budget on marketing. This is enough money to see if you can get traction.
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