What does it take to build a mobile app that makes money?

Have you ever dreamed of building a mobile app and wondered why nobody on this earth has ever thought of this idea before? Well, if you are like me and can’t sleep at night because of your “freaking 24h a day internal creativeness factory”, you might even get in trouble if you don’t do it anytime soon. What is Mobile App development about, and what does it takes to make it happen? Let’s find out more about it in the following lines.

The first ingredient for achieving success

You might think that mobile app development is something related to mobile apps, programming, and other fancy technical stuff. You’re right from the technical perspective, and W-R-O-N-G form the business side of things. There are certain things you need to clarify before even starting to develop a mobile app or a web app. Programming skills are not really a must. You can always pay a company or a freelancer to develop an app for you.
Now the first thing you should do is to ask yourself what the problem your mobile app is solving. It could really be anything from: time management, helping connect with friends, editing photos, memorizing stuff for your next big exam. Anything. Just about anything. If your mobile app can solve an old problem of humanity, then you might have a winning mobile app. Nobody wants to build something useless, so again, the first thing is to address a problem that you would like to fix using your mobile app. One more last thing: Does your app fix a problem?

Testing. Testing. Testing…

Ok. In the previous section, we learnt that the first ingredient for success in the Mobile App development business is identifying a problem that your app intends resolve. As soon as your app has a designated problem that intend to solve, you need to ask yourself three additional different questions. Is your product feasible? Is your audience really going to use it? Is your mobile app intuitive and easy to use?

• Concept Testing – the second most important thing to do in order to make another step towards successful mobile app development is testing your concept. I don’t really know about your mentality, but here in the Eastern part of the world everyone tends to always be afraid of sharing business ideas. Given that, we tend to be quite secretive about our ideas, because we don’t want anyone to steal the golden fruit of our minds. The thing is that you really need to share your ideas if you want to receive feedback from someone else. In our creative heads, everything looks just about perfect, while it’s not the case. Share your ideas and ask for feedback. Don’t be afraid, no one can really copy your concept entirely. The second question you need to ask yourself is: “Given the intended to solve problem, will someone really use your mobile app anyway?” If your answer is “Yes”, go to the next section. Otherwise, you really need to find another problem that needs to be solved.
• Feasibility Testing – at Isidor’s Software Solutions when we develop an app, we are constantly asking ourselves this question: “Is someone out there willing to pay for our app?” If yes, we are advancing to the next phase of our product development cycle. I personally know a few guys that when asked if they would pay for such an app responded positively, but when asked how many app did, they ever pay for, responded “none”. You really need to make sure that your answer to this question is valid and not just some random phony words.
• Usability Testing – the aim of the previous question is also to help you build up the requirements for the next one. You need to find out more about the demographic profile of your audience. In other words, you need to discover who you are addressing to. As soon as get an idea of how your audience looks like, you now need to design the user interface in such a way that it appeals to your audience. If for example, you build an app that is designed for children, you want to build a more jovial interface with a lot of vivid colors, right? However, if you are addressing a corporate group, make sure you make it look classier. Likewise, you need to make the interface easy to use. Should a child be able to use your app?

Use case driven design

Our new design approach here at Isidor’s Software Solutions is the use case-driven design with UML. What we are doing in the first place is to build the business domain model which we extract form the high-level requirements of the app and then imagine all the possible use cases and alternative course for the actions we want our users to take while using our apps.
On each use-case we build the redundancy analysis diagram, the sequence diagram and eventually update the domain model if necessary. Also, we are continually drafting the static class model of the app. What’s cool when working with use case-driven design and UML, is the fact that you write a project that is void of any ambiguity, design errors, and you can build test cases for each use case. Everyone knows exactly what to do and we don’t have to always review the project documentation at each development phase. It saves us a lot of time.

Deploying and Launching your app

I can’t recall the name, but I think it was an English entrepreneur that said, if you launched a perfect product, it could only mean that you launched it too late. Of course, you should create awareness on social media or your website in anticipation of your app, but don’t wait till it’s perfect. You need to learn soon what is your audience thinking about your product, and ultimately give them what they really need.

Ways to monetize a mobile app

A lot of entrepreneurs are dreaming of how to make an app and score one million sales. At Isidor’s Software Solutions we are rather client oriented than profit oriented. We want to solve one million problems one at a time. Of course, money will follow if we do our job well.
When it comes to monetizing you can basically make money three ways: paid app downloads on Google Play, Microsoft Store or AppStore, Use AdSense to promote ads, or sell your app. Keep in mind that you cannot use any monetizing option with any app. You need to find the best monetizing option, the one that suits your kind of app.
Alright, don’t forget to subscribe if you liked this post. I hope you have learned at least a single new thing. See you next time!

[ Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash ]