Building an App: Make Something Worthwhile (Part One)

I’ve made several apps that have failed to generate millions of dollars with millions of users.

Every failure inspires me to try again, learning from my mistakes.

I’m occasionally asked “I have an idea, can you make me an app?”. Even the simplest app can be time-consuming. There are several hurdles involved in app development, so I wanted to share some advice.

“Ideas are a dime a dozen”

Perhaps you’ve heard that phrase before. A Venture Capitalist friend of mine quickly followed that up with, “Can you execute?”

Ideas are good, but it’s valuable to have a team that can perform. He pointed out that the team is what he invests in.

Mother Syndrome

I don’t recall the exact phrase, I even Googled it before publishing…

Mrs. Doubtfire — I imagine she’ll tell you whatever you want to hear

If you tell friends and family- ex. your mother- an idea you have, they’ll probably say it’s great. They’ll say you should build it. It could be the next big thing. But will they actually use it? That’s another story 😐.

I’ve found that people are often too kind to give negative feedback immediately. Sure I’ll get the occasional devil’s advocate remark. But the bulk of feedback received is positive and supportive. Maybe they didn’t think through an actual use-case. Or maybe I’m just asking the wrong people for advice 😃.

Validate Your Idea

One approach I’ve taken is to create a survey (on SurveyMonkey) which I then post to my social networks asking for input.

Some survey tips:

• Focus on the idea itself, don’t worry about the details
• Keep it short, so people can answer in less than a minute
• Keep it anonymous, but include an optional field for the participant’s name

Of course you can always forget everyone else’s opinion, follow your gut, and just build it!

MVP

The other kind of MVP

There’s a phrase/acronym in the start-up world called Minimum Viable Product (aka “MVP”).

Create a proof-of-concept to determine, do you have a good idea?

Rather than spend a lot of time and money, just build the minimum. If it’s well received, keep adding on! Otherwise, cut your losses and stop.

Once you’ve decided on an idea to pursue, the goal is to create the MVP.

This is the first part of a four part mini-series for non-technical advice in app development (i.e. not writing code)

Part Two, focused on determining ahead of time if you can market your app, can be found here.