PaperDesk

The stories of app developers striking it lucky always make the news. Yes, perhaps Ethan Nicholas can make over half a million dollars in a month (iShoot) by writing a game because he thought it was cool, but I bet for every Ethan Nicholas out there I can show you 1,000 developers that spent an enormous amount of time and money making an app nobody wanted. Unfortunately, it’s really easy to get carried away with your own idea, and this is the rabbit hole so many people fall down when they come up with the ‘next big’ app idea.

You need to validate your idea!

Have you found 100 people that will buy your app… 10 people… or even 1? If the answer is no, then why are you willing to bet tens of thousands of dollars of your savings that people exist that will want to pay money for your app!?

There are several things you can do first that will cost drastically less time and money then building an entire app to answer this exact question. Call it the DIY customer discovery if you want. Chances are that the idea you have is related to your interests, worries, hobbies, etc… so chances are you are connected to a group of people that have similar interests, worries, and hobbies.

How I validated PaperDesk for $0…

Before even building the first mockup screen of your app, talk to the people you know that are a likely target audience. Work on being able to describe your idea to them in a few seconds. If you can’t do that, then you need to simplify your idea. You’re the entrepreneur, which means you have the vision to see how an idea will look, feel, and act in the real world. This means you can get excited about something very easily, but most people won’t/can’t/don’t get excited over just an idea. They need someone like you to tell them a tale of how their life will be different -what pain will go away- if they buy your app.

When I first heard about the iPad coming out, I realized people would want a way to stop carrying around dead trees and sticks of graphite to take notes. At the time, I was finishing my degree in chemistry, and also did website consulting for people that regularly attended conferences and meetings.  I noticed a lot of these people also carried laptops with them and kept some discombobulated mess of word documents in a folder for typing, and a legal pad for drawing things. So I was surrounded by a ton of people that regulalry took notes on dead trees and laptops.

Now talking to these people about my app idea was a little difficult because the general consensus about whether the iPad would catch was still up in the air, so I worded my questions carefully. Rather than listing off a ton of features and emphasizing the iPad too much, I asked things like, “You know how it’s easier to type on a laptop than handwrite words on a pad of paper, but you still carry a pad of paper so you can draw things? Would you pay a couple of bucks for an app that let you do both on the same page and share notes easily?”

The general response was very positive, and people seemed excited about it. Then they would ask if this was going to be an iPhone app or something else, to which I would say, “No, this will be an iPad note app for use with a stylus.” Then the response died off a bit, with half the people still thinking very highly of it, and the other half saying the iPad was fooey and no one would buy the iPad. That didn’t matter to me, if the bottle neck was wether people would buy the iPad and not my app, then that was the best news I could have gotten. I knew Apple would be able to sell the iPad, my app was just a few bucks tacked onto that $500 price tag.

I probably spent about a total of 10 hours talking to people over two weeks before writing a single line of code, drawing a single mock up screen, or even coming up with a name. In that amount of time I validated my idea of an iPad note app for use with a stylus in front of my target audience, and got a lot of great feedback that helped me shape the app. The best part is that it cost me nothing other than a little bit of my time. Let me know if you’d like to talk to me about your app idea and want help validating it.

It’s absolutely ridiculous how many apps are available for iOS. 600,000. Stop and think about that number for a second. If each app were made by a single person, on average, then one out of every 12,000 people on the face of the earth would have made an app. Statistics like this lead many to believe that the app market is simply over-saturated. I disagree.

Let me explain…

Spend five minutes perusing through the new app section in any one of the App Store categories. How many pages do you have to browse through before you find a new app that looks useful, has good reviews, and is well designed (as apparent in the app store screenshots)? See my point yet?

So often, when I introduce myself as an app developer outside of the tech/startup world, people say something like, “You’re an app developer! Let me tell you about this great idea I have for an app…” And I’m sure you can imagine where it goes from there. Being the first to think of an idea has nothing to do with success, it’s all in the execution! And, trust me, there is a very small chance that you are actually the first to think of the idea. Don’t believe me? Back in January I met a developer named Georg with a startup named FiftyThree at the NYC iOS Tech Talk. He showed me the prototype of a beautifully designed drawing app. Several months later, FiftyThree launched Paper for iPad. Now, Paper was certainly not the first artistic drawing app, far from it. Point being, FiftyThree executed the idea of a simple drawing app better than anyone else… even though it was two years after the launch of the iPad.

But how on earth do I break into a market with 600,000 apps if I know that I have a good idea? Well, there’s really no secret. In my opinion, the illusion of a ‘secret’ stems from so many people with a “great idea” failing at step one: validating their idea.

Unless you are intimatley involved in the niche you are trying to make an app for, your idea is probably due for a lot of refining. Even if you are heavily engrossed in whatever market you are wanting to tap into, you are one data point of thousands, or even millions. I could probably write an entire blog post on customer discovery (which I eventually will), but the point is, you need to do some research to find out if any of your potential customers would see your app as a solution to their problem, and if so, how much will they pay you for it? Don’t be disappointed in the fact that your idea probably sucks, read Jason Cohen’s (WPEngine) post on this.

Once again, the app store has 600k apps. If you make an app, don’t expect people to find it magically. You need to take a large percentage of your total budget (probably upwards of 30%), and devote it to marketing. There are obviously a lot of well-known app marketing firms out there, such as Fiksu. I recently partnered with Fiksu to sponsor PaperDesk on FreeMyApps.com, where end users can get free credit on FreeMyApps.com by downloading sponsor apps, and then use the credits to redeem paid apps, such as PaperDesk. Unfortunately, Apple recently pulled the plug on this. A lot of marketing you can do yourself. In the past, we have used app reviewers as a wonderful resource. About once a year when we do a major release of PaperDesk, we email about 50 reviewers every promo code we have on hand. This almost always results in a steady stream of 20 reviews or so over the course of a month. Carter Thomas (BlueCloud Solutions) has an excellent blog with a ton of app marketing techniques, and also offers marketing services.

So yes, you can still make money developing an app. However, the days of building a crappy app that barely does anything and cashing in on it (iFart) are over. You need to be humble enough to edit your idea, invest heavily in the execution (UI/UX… hire a real designer), and budget enough time and money to market your app. If you have a mobile app idea, let me know if you’d like to work with my team.