Making a mobile app can be a fun experience for some, and a financially painful experience for others. It’s like the gold rush of the last century. Everyone wants to dig, very few strike gold, and almost all of them go broke. And yet, the mobile apps industry is expected to create more millionaires in the future than any other industry.
Most Indie developers who are just starting out on a great app idea don’t necessarily have a lot of funding. Hell, most of them are selling their own stuff to generate enough money. I got lucky with my first mobile game. I built it out around the time I was finishing up college and then managed to sell it to a bay-area studio. This helped me launch my career in the industry. I have produced about 3 mobile apps and some Facebook games till now and am now working as a games producer.
Anyways, based on my experience making my first app (with extremely limited funding), here are some things I feel a new mobile app developer should keep in mind when he/she decides to take the plunge.
1) Costs: It generally costs between $5,000 - $30,000 to build the first iteration of an app. If you are building a game, then the costs can start from as low as $10,000 and go into hundreds of thousands of dollars based on the type of a game you are building. Once the first version of the app has been built, you could work out a monthly app maintenance plan for as low as $500 in which your developer will do 1-2 updates a month and also manage the app on a daily basis for technical issues.
Some of the cheapest (yet good) app development companies that I have personally worked with are either from India, Latin America (Colombia, Argentina) or Russia/Ukraine. Indian studios always come up with the cheapest quotes but they require a much higher amount of supervision and time-management. Russian companies are slightly more expensive but their work tends to be of a higher quality overall. And they are definitely better at time-management than their Indian counterparts. One of the biggest issues with Latin American companies tends to be the language barrier (unless they have a representative in the US).
The most expensive quotes I received were almost always from American/Canadian companies. The quotes were normally about 50% higher than the rest. But I have to admit that their work quality overall was generally much better than other countries.
One good way to offset your costs will be to offer some equity to your developer. I succeeded with that one (even though my developer got a majority stake). This may not always work but it’s worth a shot. This can help in getting the developer focused on the project too since he knows he has a stake in it now.
You could also save a ton of money if you decide the build the app yourself. There are a lot of software tools floating around that don’t require programming knowledge. But these can mostly be used for building more basic apps with limited functionality. As the complexity of your app goes up, at some time you will require the use of an expert.
2) Schedule: No matter how well you plan out a project schedule, it’s more than likely there will be some delays. A lot of times, the delays can happen because of the app store itself. Apple is notorious for rejecting apps for the smallest of reasons and then not providing clear cues on why it was rejected. My team would spend days just figuring out what went wrong. Even if it's approved, Apple can sometimes reject it after a few weeks or months if it finds something it doesn’t like (bad language, violent images etc). Other than that, programmers can get stuck with a bug which will completely throw them off track and take up a majority of their time.
One way to offset this is to make sure that developers are using pre-built code libraries to build all basic features of the app. It helps immensely because these libraries have a lot of online support, are bug free and most of them work well for any kind of an app. I have seen a few developers who try to write their own code for basic features and functions. Avoid this behavior.
If you know Agile project management, make sure you follow that. It's a good tool for assigning short sprints and building the app one small step at a time. The best tool I ever used to manage my projects was Jira. It’s a very effective tool and helps you manage multiple teams and assignments without any hassles. For online storage and sharing of files, nothing beats Dropbox.
3) Multiple Platforms: This is becoming somewhat of a norm now. A lot of developers are now building one piece of code that can automatically work on multiple platforms like iPhone, Android, Windows Phone etc. The way they do is by using industry leading app platforms like PhoneGap, Appcelerator or Xamarin (Mail me if you would like a technical comparison of the three). They are excellent platforms to build your apps on because you can easily port the app to almost every emerging platform out there with minimal investment in additional programming and time. And these platforms offer excellent support and one of the most comprehensive set of libraries for creating good, clean code.
I am sure you can yourself see the benefits here (wider reach, less coding, bigger markets etc) so I will stay away from talking about it.
4) Graphics: One of the biggest drivers of traffic to your app will be the user experience and the graphics. This can literally make or break your app so spend a lot of your time perfecting this part. Draw up a ton of graphical wireframes and also research some of the top apps to see what they do right. In terms of graphic design, I can confidently say that the best graphic designers I have worked with are almost always from the US. Indian designers are generally the cheapest but they follow a very different coloring/design aesthetic that for some reason doesn’t seem to always gel well with American clients.
You can get a decent graphic/UI designer in the US for about $70 an hour and most of them can finish designing an app in about a week. You can easily find cheaper graphic designers too. I have worked with some who charged as less as $20 an hour. But the quality suffers drastically. There are a bunch of graphic design studios in the Vietnam/Philippines area who are actually pretty good and charge about $35 an hour.
5) Testing: You can save up on this part by testing the app yourself. Dedicate atleast 1 – 2 hours a day just going through your app to look for design/technical flaws. You can also use an online tool called Testflight which is pretty helpful.
If you feel the need to get it tested by a company, then get ready to shell out about $10 an hour for testing. There are a handful of American companies who will handle your app testing needs but they generally charge upwards of $20 an hour. Indian companies charge about $10 an hour.
An app generally requires about 3-5 full cycles of testing before you can safely say it’s ready to hit the app store. In case of my games, I would allocate 2 testers who would do a 1 day test drill on the app. That’s 2 testers x 8 work hours = 16 hours of testing in 1 day. This in my view is enough to do the first round. Once you get the results, give yourself some time to go through the whole bug list and prioritize each major bug. Once your programmers have cleared them out, it’s likely that new bugs are introduced while they are tweaking around the app (trust me, this ALWAYS happens). Keep running through this cycle till you are pretty confident that the app has no major bugs. Don’t worry about the minor bugs too much because they have this uncanny ability of showing up or sticking around no matter what you do to get rid of them (like a jealous ex-girlfriend).
One last suggestion would be to scour the internet for freelance testers (I know a bunch of them). These are high school/college kids who are surprisingly good at testing apps and are willing to work for pretty cheap.
6) Marketing, PR and Distribution: So now you have a working app. Congrats! Time to hit the app store (and hopefully not get rejected). A few things you can do to market your app effectively (and for cheap) are:
I hope this information helps. Please understand that these are all views based on my personal experience in the industry and they could differ widely from person to person. I am happy to hear any comment/criticism regarding this article.
a) Get into social media marketing yourself (Google+, Facebook, Twitter feed, Blogger etc). This is by far the best way to market an app and its totally free.
b) Get into App distribution: Talk to companies like PlayPhone, W3i Technologies etc and partner up with them for distribution. You will probably lose some portion of your stake in the app (unless you have the money to pay them for distribution), but these platforms are great for distributing your app to a large demographic.
c) Include in-app advertising - Implement popular ad-servers like Admob, iAD etc. These can serve up a decent revenue stream once your app hits a few thousand downloads.
d) Create a Youtube/Vimeo video that demo’s the app. DON’T LET THE DEMO GO BEYOND A MINUTE. People just won’t watch it after the first few seconds. In my opinion, the sweet spot is 30 seconds. This is an excellent marketing tool that lets users see the app first hand and understand how it works. You can keep it very simple by just focusing a camera on the app and navigating through it (while a voice in the background explains each screen). Get a female voice-over (it helps).
e) Start attending a LOT OF Meetup groups and talking to people about your product. You will find a bunch of product/technology meetup groups in and around the city. I have noticed that the best Meetup groups for mobile apps and games are generally in New York, Bay Area and Austin, Texas. This is a great place to showcase the app and get some much needed free media coverage.
f) Try to get your app featured in the app store. You can directly request Apple to feature your app and if they agree, this will literally double or triple your downloads while it’s in the featured list.
g) Reach out to app review sites and request them to review your app. Most of the smaller sites like PocketFullofApps, Inside Social Games or iOSappsgonefree are more responsive. All you need is one good review and then you will have boasting rights. But of course, reach out to a bunch of them (I can help out here).
I hope this information helps. Please understand that these are all views based on my personal experience in the industry and they could differ widely from person to person. I am happy to hear any comment/criticism regarding this article.
You can also follow me on Twitter @aabidsiddique for updates about this industry.
