While many people love to predict the death of the mobile market on a regular basis, the facts indicate the exact opposite. The market for mobile apps is stronger than ever, and there are good prospects that it’s going to continue growing in the near future. And while its crowded nature can make it difficult to stand out and get your product noticed, it’s certainly not impossible.
It just takes a directed approach. These days, you can’t just rely on having a quality app on its own. The sad truth is that there are probably a dozen more just like yours already available. Or if your idea is truly unique, then better implementations are right around the corner. This means that you need to have a more unique approach to the way you’re handling the development of your apps from start to finish.
Everyone Has Ideas – Execution Is What Matters
It doesn’t matter if you’re working in a large company or a really small one. You’ll likely always have a long bucket list of ideas worth investigating. Of course, you never have the time to go through all of them properly. The important takeaway here is that ideas are not worth much by themselves. Everyone gets ideas. That random guy sitting opposite you on the train may be thinking of an app idea as he’s eating his sandwich.
What separates successful companies from the rest is their ability to actually implement the ideas they have. Even more importantly, you should also develop a sense for quality ideas. Not everything that goes through your head will be equally viable in the current market climate.
Marketing Starts at the Drawing Board
Which brings us to the next point. Many beginners in this field consider marketing to exclusively mean “promotion”. But that’s not the case at all – far from it. Marketing is the general idea of ensuring that your product is relevant to the current market, and that it will lead to satisfied customers. Proper marketing isn’t about developing a product and then trying to figure out how to promote it and get people interested in it.
In fact, true marketing should start before you’ve written a single line of code for your app. You need to sit down and critically evaluate each idea to ensure that it has true potential. You must also consider the company’s own resources in those evaluations. Sometimes, you might have the best idea in the world, but a little thinking can lead you to the conclusion that it’s simply not viable to attempt executing it in your specific company. Snapchat seems so simple in retrospect – but once you realize the cost of laying down the server infrastructure to handle its millions of users sharing pictures every minute, things can get messy fast.
Handling Complex Projects with the Right Approach
If your company is at least a moderately sized one, chances are that your projects are more complex than a simple ‘to do’ app, too. And as you’ve probably noticed at some point, this kind of work requires a completely different approach compared to regular software projects. In fact, without proper leadership in the individual stages of the project, you can’t expect things to get far at all.
And if you’re just going through the initial periods of growth that lead up to projects of this caliber, now is the right time to think about improving the level of experience in your organization. If you’re in a position of leadership, you should start with yourself. A masters in operation management can completely change your outlook on handling the specific processes involved in creating your products, and it can allow you to optimize your work on a whole new level. And that’s just one example – there are plenty of opportunities to improve the expertise your organization has for dealing with complex issues like these.
Social Media Presence
If your company has no presence on social media, now is the time to think about that too. Ideally, you’ll want to get something started before you’ve even launched your product. That way, people will already know your name and will have some positive associations with it (hopefully). There are many ways to handle a set of social media accounts, but if you don’t have the right kind of experience for that, you may want to leave it to someone who does.
Otherwise, you’ll probably still gain online recognition at some point, but it won’t be the kind you’re interested in. Seeing a screenshot of one of your own Twitter posts on a website dedicated to mocking corporations is just one example. If you want a more shocking one, look up the Ocean Marketing incident. If you’re not cut out for social media activity, just don’t get involved in it. At all.
Post-Launch Support
You should also have a plan for the period after your app is launched, but before you are working on another one. Many companies wrongly treat this as downtime, when in reality they could potentially be putting a lot of work into improving the product and keeping customers happy. No product launches in a perfect state, but software developers are in a unique position where they can easily fix problems with their work after it’s already in the hands of customers.
Take advantage of that, and don’t ignore issues when they’re brought up by your users. The right approach to customer service and satisfaction can easily make your company stand out. The opposite is true too – users tend to have a memory for companies that have wronged them in the past, and thanks to the internet, that memory can be shared with many others in just a few seconds.
If anyone tells you that success on the mobile market is all about luck these days, you can safely ignore them. The truth is that you’re still largely in control of your own results, but you need to change your approach if you’re still stuck in the old ways of doing things.
