Creating a highly useful, popular, and monetarily successful app is the dearest ambition of many developers the world over. However, the considerations and connotations of such an endeavor are diverse and, if you are to have any hope of finding success with your app, you will have to give detailed care to each in turn. In order to help tackle these issues, this guide aims to highlight useful concerns that should be considered during the course of a detailed app development endeavor.
Why is Your App Useful?
It is easy to become wrapped up in and carried away by an exciting idea. To lose yourself in the brainstorming and minutiae of a concept. However, it is important that when this happens you are able to pull yourself back and ask yourself critical questions. The very first of which should be, why should this app exist?
A seemingly simple question but, all too often, developers get lost in the wondering of whether an app could exist, or how it could be made and fail to consider what the app itself brings to the table from a consumer’s perspective. To find success, an app must, fundamentally, fit a niche or fulfill a necessary service. Otherwise, there is no reason for the app to exist.
So, when you feel yourself being pulled into a project you must stop and ask yourself that all-important question, why should this app exist? If you can answer the question, then full steam ahead to the next hurdle. If not, well, perhaps your time would be better spent on a more useful project.
Who Is Your Audience?
Having ascertained the purpose of your app, you will naturally arrive at the next important question to mark the birth of all successful innovations, who is this for? Knowing the audience you plan to market to is, arguably, every bit as important as knowing why your product should exist in the first place. There are a number of reasons for this.
The first reason is rather straightforward. Consumers are the lifeblood of a product, especially one like an app. If consumers are not using your app, then your app is not useful. It is not fulfilling its purpose and, functionally, may as well not exist. Unfortunately, people are fickle and if something is not well designed to suit their interests, then a customer will be quick to abandon it after their initial exploration of the product. This means that you must understand exactly who will want to use your app, so that you can most easily create a product that they will want to continue using.
On top of this, understanding your audience will allow you to effectively target any and all marketing efforts towards that demographic. The more exposure effect is a powerful thing and the more effectively you can place your app in front of the kind of person that you want using it, the more likely they are to download it and give it a go. If nobody knows your app exists, then it does not matter how well made it is.
Consider Your Finances
Now that you know what you want to make and who you want to make it for, you can begin to consider the logistics of actually creating your app. Unfortunately, producing an app can be an expensive process and if you are not considering the myriad of costs that creating your app will incur then you are going to run aground of some very unpleasant surprises.
Regardless of what you spend on actually developing the app itself, you are going to be required to pay baseline costs. Anybody working on the app, even if it is just you, needs to be fed and housed while they work, meaning salaries for workers are going to be an unavoidable consideration.
Additionally, if you want to find true success with your app, then you are going to have to consider the cost of marketing it. There are a number of ways that you can go about marketing and almost none of them are free, so if you wish to create a truly successful product, then you are going to have to budget for it.
Finally, any work you need to source externally from the actual development of your app will necessarily incur additional costs. For example, art or music assets to make your app more aesthetically and auditorily pleasing. These will usually require you to commission artists separate from your own team and will likely run to a fairly large amount, unless your app needs very few assets.
Each and every one of these potential costs must be predicted, considered and weighed against the potential revenue of the product to decide whether the effort of producing your app will be, financially speaking, worth the investment. Regardless of your decision in this matter, a financial plan is a must.
How Do You Market Your App?
Marketing has been mentioned more than once in the previous sections of this article. For almost any business endeavor, and the creation of a new app is a business endeavor, marketing is a vital aspect of the overall undertaking. A good marketing campaign can ensure the success of a product but, at the same time, a poor one can doom a solid project to never realizing its true potential.
Effective marketing for your app could take many forms, but more likely than not the majority of your marketing will take place online. Because of this, a good understanding of inbound marketing on platforms like Instagram is vital to your marketing campaign. Fortunately for you, there is a relatively small search range for you to optimize your marketing efforts around, and generally speaking if you hit key search terms, then your app will gain traction.
What you must ensure, is that you understand which keywords are relevant to your target audience and that they are included in your marketing campaign and final product, or else your app will not reap the full potential benefits of the inbound marketing landscape.
Useful Tools for Your App Development
There is a wide range of tools that can be of use to the development of a new and promising app, each of which offers benefits to different aspects of the development experience.
SUSE, for example, offers a highly functional and flexible service that will allow your team to safely host, share and work on their project in a highly versatile environment. This allows your team to consistently and effectively work together regardless of where they are, so long as they have an internet connection. In particular, this helps small, separated teams to work on one cohesive project without the need to secure a dedicated workspace for it.
Services like Fiverr, on the other hand, allow instant, easy access to freelance professionals who specialize in a range of skill sets. This is a good way for your team to source professionals to deliver content that you need for the completion of your app, such as music or art assets. It could even serve as a platform to find freelance developers to assist in the creation of your app.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the tools and services available to the intrepid developer. However, it is important that you are sure to only use those tools and services which are beneficial to your app development endeavor.