5 Tips to Help You Turn Your App into a Scalable Business
Developing an app isn’t hard, but successfully turning that app into a business certainly can be. You need more than a good idea and development skills to make a scalable business out of your app. Apple’s App Store and Google Play are swamped with an average 20,000 new apps on a monthly basis. If you’re hoping to come out on top of the crowd, you’re going to need more than basic skills to build a business that lasts. You’ll need to be creative and apply the right business and marketing strategies to reach and appeal to the right market.
With that in mind, here are 5 tips to keep in mind if you’re hoping your app will become more than a forgotten relic in the app stores.
1. Your app is the heart of your business
Even after your app has been launched, app development is a continual process. Once it stops, so does the heart of your business. You need to maintain the app and continue to test it for bugs, performance, and speed. It also needs to be updated on a regular basis and new content and features need to be added to keep consumers interested and enhance user engagement.
2. Quality design is important
It doesn’t matter if you are building your first app or your third one, the design of your mobile application matters. The design is not just about developing an app with aesthetic appeal. It is about designing how the user will experience it. Remember, while an app does need to look good, the user experience needs to come first. When developing your app, think like an app user. What are the features and functions that you like best?
3. Your product needs to be good enough for people to want to buy it
It only makes sense that you want the kind of success achieved by the companies that inspire you. But if you want to compete with the most experienced and innovative companies who develop amazingly popular apps, like Pokémon Go, for instance, you can’t have a mediocre or dysfunctional company or you’ll quickly find yourself running out of drive and money. It’s also about reaching your users when it matters most; at the moments of the day when they’ll find your app the most useful for their needs and lifestyle.
4. Build a strong team
If you want to transform your app into a scalable business, you’re going to need a solid company, which means having a solid team who shares the same principles and end goal. This type of success calls for a super product design team, a strong tech team, a good business intelligence (BI) team, and last, but certainly not least, a marketing team with a vision.
5. Use apps to stay organized and productive
Building a business requires a lot of hard work, energy, time, and money. Trying to manage everything that you have on the go can be difficult, to say the least. As an entrepreneur, you might find that some of the best tools to help keep you organized, stay on track, and can even make your life a little easier, are other apps. Here are some app names for inspiration: Evernote (keep track of everything), Dropbox (cloud storage app for business), 1Password (create a strong and secure password for every site you visit), Mod Notebooks (paper notebook that syncs to the cloud), Toggl (simple time tracking tool), etc.
Finally, remember to pay attention to data and listen to the feedback from your users. Take both seriously. They’ll help you refine and improve your product.
