How to Turn Your Mobile App Idea Into a Reality
Shafqat Huq
Blogpost
Before you spend a substantial amount of time (and money) planning or building out your idea, it’s important you have a thorough understanding of what the current market looks like for your particular vertical. It’s possible that there is already something out there similar to what you’re thinking of. That’s okay - by no means does that mean you can’t proceed with building something yourself. Oftentimes, industries with just one or two players offer the most ripe opportunities for entry. As you identify potential competitors in the market, you should notate key data points in the form of a table: what they do and how they do it, what they do well, what they don’t do well, and what opportunities they’re failing to capture. As you develop this table, you’ll identify opportunities or gaps in the market, which will later help to develop your competitive advantage, particular niche, and unique selling proposition (USP).
For a product and business to be successful and viable, it has to be able to create revenue streams. How is your app idea going to make money to cover the overhead costs and generate a return on investment for you or a potential investor? Are you going to charge a fee for the transactions that are placed through your platform (Uber/Lyft), have users pay for a subscription with premium features (Pandora/Spotify), offer in-app purchases (Candy Crush), or sell ad space and user data (Facebook/Instagram)? It’s important to understand and pick a business model that resonates with your customer base and leverages user activity into dollars for your business.
One of the most important processes in the success of any product is identifying your target demographic: the ideal person who would use your app, and their typical use-cases. You can define this with one or more quantitative or qualitative variables. Ask and answer the following questions about your users:
Knowing these factors allows you to better and more efficiently get in front of them, understand what they want and need, and in turn design/build your product to better cater to them. Having ongoing user engagement will also allow you to continuously receive feedback and improve through the many iterations of your product’s life cycle. This will ultimately have a huge impact on the long-term success of your product, so it’s important you do this early on in the process.
The fundamental question about your app: What does it do, and what will people use it for? The best way to answer this is by creating a list of bullet points. This can be done in a Word document or even on a piece of paper. The list will change and evolve over time, and certain parts may be prioritized at different stages. The important thing is that you are able to identify the fundamental purpose of your idea, and determine how it will carry out that purpose in the form of individual features. Your list should be clear and easy to understand for a potential co-founder, investor, developer, or user reading it.
Once you’ve identified what your app will do, how it will make money, and who it will be targeted toward, you can start thinking about how it will look and feel like with these things in mind. There are a few ways to go about this, depending on your artistic and technical skills. You can create very basic sketches with paper and pencil, or play around with Adobe XD or another software. You don’t need to have technical or coding skills for this part, but you should have a basic understanding of the different pages and components your app will have to properly map out the placement of these pieces and navigation between them. If you have a very specific vision in mind, you can always hire someone to develop the wireframes for you. The sketches and wireframes, along with the features list you created in Step #4, together will serve as a great starting point and specifications for you to have your mobile app built.
After you’ve developed the initial list of features and wireframes for your application, you can start to approach developers to build it out for you. Depending on your personal network, you can reach out to friends and family, or contact individual freelancers and software agencies. Based on who you talk to, how they operate, and how interested they are in your idea, they may quote you in one of the following models:
Regardless of who you work with or the pricing model you use, it’s always a good idea to get bids from multiple vendors and compare them to determine which is the best option for you. When speaking with vendors, ask or look for a portfolio of previous projects they’ve worked on, or testimonials from previous clients. Make sure that the developers ask lots of questions and have a thorough understanding of your idea and the scope of work involved, so that they can provide an accurate estimate of the time and money required.
Once you’ve selected a developer or team to work with, the actual fun part (and hard work) begins. The first phase of building out your application doesn’t actually involve any coding, but instead focuses on flushing out the design and UI/UX (user interface and user experience), to create a blueprint and plan for development. At this stage you will decide on themes, colors, fonts, and an overall aesthetic your app will adopt. After this step, you should have mock-ups which will give you a (nearly) final visualization of the finished product, without being able to actually complete any of the functions. This phase may take an extensive period of time, and involve lots of back-and-forth discussions with your team, but will ultimately save a lot of time in the long-run. Having a finalized design, which will serve as the foundation of development, is critical in accurately assessing the timeline and costing and will prevent missteps and delays in the project later on.
After you’ve finalized your design, your developer(s) will start on the actual coding of the front-end (user-facing) and back-end (database and admin) to bring the app to life. This is where the bulk of the work will take place, and will require constant feedback from you as a stakeholder. Your developers should be sending you weekly updates and deliverables in the form of app builds that you can test and provide feedback on, and you should be able to track the progress of the project over time. In the process of development and testing, you will undoubtedly find bugs and realize new features which you may not have thought of before. Consult with your developer team and prioritize the items which need to be addressed immediately, and those which can be completed later on. Involving your family and friends to test the app can also help get feedback and insights from a different perspective. At a later stage of development, you can also conduct a beta test, by releasing the product to a limited group of people in a controlled environment before launching to the general public.
When your mobile app is ready to be used by the general public, you can launch it in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. But, simply having an app available on the market is not enough; in order for you to gain traction and momentum, you need people to actually download and use it. This is especially critical if your software is dependent on early users to adopt it and interact with one another (like a social network or marketplace). There are multiple ways to go about marketing your product. You can start off by organically reaching out to your personal network, in the form of posts on social media and direct messages/emails/texts to friends. You can also reach out to bloggers and reporters who cover tech and start-ups to write an article about your product, sometimes even for free. Having your name mentioned in known publications can be a huge credibility boost for your app, and help build an online presence when people search online, which will ultimately drive more downloads and revenue. If you have a marketing budget, you can also pay for sponsored ads and app install campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google. Other marketing strategies include reaching out to “influencers” (individuals with engaged and loyal follower-bases on social media) to post about your product/brand, or creative content like photos and videos. Both of these will require larger budgets and timelines, but they can be extremely effective in achieving viral status and overnight downloads, if done correctly.
Your app launch is not the end of the app development journey, but rather the beginning. Software development is a cyclical process, rather than a linear one. After you release your product to the market, your next step is to collect feedback from your users, and use that data to go back to the drawing board and come up with new ways to improve. The best software companies in the world are constantly innovating and introducing new features to maintain their position in the market, and yours should be no different. Essentially, you’ll find yourself going back to the beginning of this list, and repeating the process for the life cycle of your product and company.
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