Do you want the good news or the bad news first? According to a study on National Geographic, if you are on the receiving end, experiments showed that an overwhelming majority—more than 75%—wanted the bad news first. Following this study, that’s what we’ll give you first. Ready?

According to BusinessofApps, 80-90% of apps are abandoned after just one use and an average mobile app tends to lose somewhere around 77% of its daily active users (DAUs) just within three days of its installation. Gartner study shows that mobile apps’ commercial success for the year 2018 was 00.01%, which is just one successful app out of 10,000 apps.

Scary statistics, right? Wait, here comes the good news!

• Mobile apps could generate more than $935 billion in revenue by 2023.
• 3.8 trillion hours were spent using mobile apps in 2021.
• Nearly 90% of mobile internet time is spent on apps.
• There are currently more than 2.9 million apps available in the Google Play Store.
• There are 4.75 million apps available in the Apple App Store.
• Most users have more than 80 apps installed on their phones.
  

Safe to say there is a balance between good and bad news in the world of app development. How your app will perform depends mostly on your planning, project management skills, and overall knowledge. So today we’re going to talk about some steps you can take towards ensuring your app’s success.

Idea validation a.k.a Problem validation

This is the process where you need to make sure you have a well-understood and clearly articulated customer problem. There are two types of research to be done - foundational and descriptive. Foundational research is done if you don’t have a good understanding of what the problem which needs solving is. The purpose is to formulate a problem to solve and have a decent level of confidence that the problem is relevant.

Descriptive and informative research starts with a problem statement, providing a concrete problem to solve. This research is used to gain a better understanding of the context you are trying to solve and is imperative to fill the knowledge gaps with what your participants know about the solution environment.

Market research

Building your product always starts with market research. This step allows you to get to know your target audience, their needs and how to meet them. Make sure to ask yourself how your potential users would benefit from your product and what will satisfy their needs. Run your mandatory market surveys, use social media, and reach your target audience. At the end of this process, you should be able to identify your targeted audience with precise parameters such as age, gender, social status, job, expertise, hobbies, etc.

User profiles

You have validated the “problem” and you are almost ready to present your “solution” but who are you presenting to? To answer this question you need to have an ICP - ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is a hypothetical description of the type of company that would realize the most value from your product or solution.

Knowing who you speak and sell to is highly important when it comes to having the best results with minimum tries and, in the meantime, will help you maintain a successful communication approach.

The wise man learns from the mistakes of others

Assess the online marketplaces and establish how different apps are performing. Google Play and Apple Store are full of user reviews. Going through those will give you a lot of hints on how to develop your own app idea and what you should be aiming for. This is the place where you should also take notes on your competitors and get into the detail of their apps by exploring their profiles and reviews. Look at the specific tone of voice and phrases that they are using, what the category for their app is on the marketplace and how are they charting.

The marketplace research should give you a good insight into user frustrations, what features you might need to consider to make your app as user-friendly as possible, and what are the current trends. The more time you spend on this step - the better. There's a bonus - some of the information gathered will be valuable once you launch and start dealing with marketing your mobile app.

Create an MVP

All great software is crafted by practising the fundamental concept of continuous iteration, and thus we are advising you to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Essentially, an MVP is the basic model of your product that should fulfil the primary goal you want to achieve. In order to make a great product you first need to test out what works and what doesn't. And here's a hint - don't do this by investing everything you got. You need to gain feedback as cheaply, quickly, and efficiently as possible.

After you’ve done this you can adapt your idea and continue with the major steps towards building the full capabilities of your product. This approach saves you time and money and allows you to test if your potential users would actually use your product. On a more basic level, it means that you will be launching your software with the intention of monitoring user feedback and implementing updates later. The development of an MVP follows a “build-measure-learn” process, which allows you to release a product that can be then improved as you validate (or invalidate) your up-to-now-guesses, learn what your users actually want, and improve your app so that it serves your customers in the best way possible.

Marketing, launching and feedback

When the development is done, if you’re still up for it - you should be ready to launch your MVP mobile app. How exciting… and scary is that! This is also the step that requires the most planning. Even more than planning, actually. This is when marketing and communication teams kick in. Your marketing strategy should target the same segment your MVP is aiming at. Make sure you have a solid strategy and be very conscious about this final step as it is your win-or-lose battle.

During this phase, important data that you should collect is how users come to know about your app as it can give you important marketing insights. But just collecting data won’t be enough. Your marketing team should know very well that data with no analysis means nothing. So analyze everything and get as much insight as possible.

Ready to take on the path of success? Get in touch with us today and we can chat about your app idea, validate it, and build the next big thing together.