6 things you should keep in mind while making a mobile app.

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:

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. 

How to build a business around buying and selling pre-owned (used) mobile games and apps.

Everyone loves a good bargain, isn’t that right? When you have pre-owned cars, phones, console games etc, then have you ever thought of owning a ‘pre-owned’ mobile game or app? This may sound weird and an unfeasible business model to a lot of people, but give it some thought (and read this article completely!) and such a business might actually make sense. I am surprised that no one in the industry has fully explored such a model.

First of all, what are the reasons people buy or sell pre-owned goods? Let’s run down a quick list. Let’s call this List A:

1) To save money.

2) To get rid of a product that they don’t use that much.

3) If they are not satisfied with the purchase and the return period has expired.

4) They just got bored of using the product after a while.

5) They found a better product.

6) In the case of a console game, they basically completed all the levels and finished the game.

Now what if you took the same principles and business models around the pre-owned goods business and applied it to mobile apps/games? Such a business has the potential to become a huge industry if it’s done the right way. By the way, I am using the terms ‘Apps’ and ‘Games’ interchangeably in this article. They both mean the same thing here.

First of all, how would such a system work? I did some research over the weekend (yup, my weekends are pretty lame) and came up with a plan that could potentially work. So here it is:

1) A user (let’s call her Norah) buys a mobile game named Rockstar for let’s say 99 cents. The game is built by a company called Bringit Studios.

2) She plays Rockstar for a while and then for reasons explained in List A (or some other reason), decides to sell the app.

3) She then puts Rockstar up for sale for half the price (49 cents).

4) She either sells it directly to someone she knows, or puts Rockstar up for sale through a third party pre-owned apps seller (like an Ebay or Craigslist mobile apps equivalent).

5) The sale goes through in a way that she gets to keep 50% of the sale, 40% goes to Bringit studios and 10% goes to the third party seller. Or if she sells it directly to someone she knows personally, then she gets to split the revenue 50:50 between herself and Bringit studios.

      Now if Bringit Studios sold a 100,000 of their iPhone game apps for a dollar. The revenue is $100,000 The 70:30 revenue split with Apple gives Bringit $70,000. This is the studios initial revenue. Now if let’s say 30% of the buyers decided to resell it for half the price. After doing the math, the studio would make another $7,000 to $10,000. And I am not even considering the revenues from in-app purchasing and advertising. That in itself would bring about a decent amount of revenue to the studio.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But obviously it’s not as simple as that. So what are some of the issues here?

1) The first one is the app store policies itself. Apple or Google will obviously not allow such a system to work because it can potentially cannibalize new app sales. One reason they might consider such a model is if they were getting a share of the sale too. So if Norah sells the app and a portion of it goes to Bringit Studios as well as Apple/Google, then it’s a win-win situation for all of them. But the mobile gaming industry in general is still in its infancy. So I feel it will probably be a long time before Apple or Google (or Microsoft) even consider implementing such a system.

2) The bigger and more successful studios would not want to do this for their popular games because they are anyways making a killing from new sales. Such a system will work best (atleast initially) for the less popular games and studios.

3) The biggest criticism of this concept would be that studios in essence or not selling the app itself to the consumer, but they are selling a license to purchase the app. So Norah only gets a license that gives her an instance of the app on her phone. Well, a license is always transferable to another user  as long as the eco-system allows it (case in point: Serial Key Numbers). Thats the primary reason why bigger platforms like the Apple app store or Android won’t be interested in this now but smaller gaming platforms like OpenFeint, W3i or Playphone can make such a system work because they build their own policies and all their apps are downloaded from their own app store. I have built games for the Playphone App store and they have the resources to implement such systems. But the main catch here would be that app developers will have to work through these platforms to resell an app.

The best example is products itself like MS Office. A user can download a trial copy for free, and then all he has to do is purchase a serial number in order to validate this application. Millions of users use MS Office and then sell these serial numbers to other buyers. And since only 1 instance of such a serial number is legal, the new buyer gets complete ownership of the license. This is exactly the premise that I am basing my idea on. An app can be serialized, and then only 1 instance can be allowed. This gives a chance to a license holder to resell the app. My whole concept deals with a business model that helps studios generate extra revenue. And I am discussing a model that in real life has worked for every single industry known to mankind. If the pre-owned business works elsewhere, then why can’t it work here?

4) As always, there will be resistance to such a system, because the pre-owned goods business has always been looked down upon by product creators. In the end, the customer always wins so sooner or later, someone will start doing this (if someone hasn’t done it already).

      Alright now let’s talk a little about its advantages:

      1) This method can actually benefit Bringit Studios. Most mobile games/apps have a very small shelf life. By giving Norah a chance to sell this app, they are making sure that the game is still being circulated within the gaming demographic. And every new user brings with him/her a new revenue making opportunity.

      2) Most mobile games don’t have a lot to offer in terms of in-app purchasing. There is only so much that Norah could potentially buy within the game after which she would either get bored or would not want to buy anything else in the game. And at some point, she will probably move beyond this game and play other games too. By giving her a chance to sell the app, Bringit gets to make some money, and when the new buyer starts playing the game, Bringit has another chance to make more money through in-app purchasing, advertising and as well as from the actual sale of the app itself.

      3) Let’s just put it this way, how many apps do you currently have on your smartphone that you haven’t used in a while? And how likely is it that you will actually ever use them again? So how about selling them off the same way you sell your other used stuff on Craigslist or Ebay? Sounds compelling? I am sure it does!

      

      4) With this method, Studios will actually encourage higher spending habits among its demographic. Because if Norah has the opportunity to sell an app after she has used it for a while, then there is a higher likelihood that she will actually buy it in the first place.

      5) And of course, this is software we are talking about here. So the buyer is getting a product that’s basically as good as new.

So what's the best way to actually implement such a system? There are definitely some nuts and bolts here that need to be tightened in order to make sure this model can succeed. Based on my limited intelligence and experience, this is how the system can work:

1) The best way to build such a business is through 3^rd party gaming platforms like Playphone, W3i, OpenFeint etc. These companies can build an online pre-owned apps store within their platform and encourage studios to work with them and make their apps available for sale in such a store. So all the transcations will happen within the realm of this store itself. It can function pretty much like eBay where users can buy/sell their apps. The ideal scenario would be if Apple or Google themselves allowed it, but they won’t do it unless this becomes a really lucrative industry. It’s best for smaller gaming platforms to indulge in such an initiative and become leaders in this space before the big boys start encroaching in.

2) Paying actual cash to a user is always a legal headache for companies. So instead of money, Norah can get paid in ‘digital currency’. So the approximately 25 cents that she made on one sale can be equivalent to 25 digital coins. And she can use this currency to buy other games/apps in the store itself. This way, the money will get circulated back into the app store, which would be awesome for the gaming industry itself because the money never leaves its ecosystem.

3) To make sure that these apps are not being constantly sold off multiple times at increasingly lower prices and also to avoid unhealthy competition between sellers, Studios can put limits on how many times their apps can be re-sold. So Norah could only sell it once and then the new buyer is not allowed to sell it again (because he/she already got it for a discount).

4) Once Norah sells this app, the app is automatically disabled or deleted from her phone. Only one instance of this app can be available for use at any time.

5) Now if the game itself is free and depends completely on in-app purchasing. Then Norah can find out the exact value of the app based on all the purchases she made, and then sell it.

6) Norah could potentially ‘loan’ this app to her friends too. This is a whole different story but the same business models that I have explained in this article can work for this too. I would be happy to explain this system in a future article.

If pre-owned goods can do well as a business in other industries, then what's stopping companies from incorporating the same mechanics into the apps industry?

I try my best to keep these articles short but that doesn’t seem to happen. I am happy to explain this concept further and clarify any questions you have. And of course, I would love to hear your comments/criticism about this idea. You can mail me at aabidsiddique81@yahoo.com or Follow me on Twitter @aabidsiddique. My personal site is at www.aabid.me.

An entirely different technique to advertise a mobile game.

In my last article, I laid out a different method on how to market a Facebook game. The basic premise was simple: Instead of paying Facebook or other media companies to advertise your game. What if you PAID THE PLAYER directly to do this? I have tried my best to explain how companies can do this effectively without any legal or logistic hurdles. Here is the article (http://bit.ly/vixmo1)

In a similar vein, mobile games can be marketed the same way using referrals but with a completely different technique. To my knowledge, I haven’t seen a mobile game in the app store that uses “in-app-texting” to market its games. Not sure what this means? Then read on.

The concept is simple: Let’s say there is a game in the app store that sells for 99 cents. Under this technique, a player (let’s call her Jane) initially starts playing this game by downloading it for free.

After she has completed the first few levels, a window pops up that offers the complete game for free if Jane sends an Actual Text Message (SMS) to 5 (or more) of her friends inviting them to download the game.

If Jane agrees to send the text message, then the app directly accesses the native text-messaging system present in the phone. This way, Jane can access her phonebook and decide which friends to text the invite to. As soon as Jane sends these text messages, she receives the full app for free.

Such a technique hasn’t really been explored before. But the advantages here are quite a few. I will list some of them here.

1) Game studios could charge Jane for sending these text-message based invites. The way this would work is that these text messages could be charged 5 cents per text message sent. I know you might think “Why would Jane want to pay for these text messages?”  Well, it’s simple: If Jane can get a 99 cent app that she really likes by sending 5 text messages that will only cost her 25 cents overall, then why wouldn’t she?

The cool thing here is that studios are completely getting away from the freemium/paid model and relying on an entirely new system to generate installs. And this system is basically giving every penny to the studio directly without having to share it with anyone else.

Studios could even partner with carriers like Sprint, Verizon and have the 25 cents billed directly to Janes monthly cellphone bill. This way, Jane does not even have to use her credit card.

One issue here could be that in the future Apple or Google might not allow this feature because it deprives them of any revenue. Well, this system can be built in a way that the same 70:30 revenue share can be applied here too.

2) Jane can also be rewarded for her behavior so as to encourage her to send more invites. So if Jane refers this app to 5 of her friends, she can actually make money every time each of these friends refer the app to 5 of their own friends. For example: Jane spends 25 cents to invite 5 of her friends. Then she can get paid 2 cents for every subsequent text invite that is sent by her friends (the remaining 3 cents go to the studio). This obviously is not gonna make Jane a millionaire, but if she can make enough money to buy another paid app, then isn’t that a good enough incentive for her to send these invites?

3) In the same way, the reward structure can work for installs too. So if Janes invites 5 of her friends, then she can expect to get paid 2 cents for every install that happens as a result of these invites. If you do the math here, the studio will never have to pay a single dime on advertising because the studio earns 3 to 5 cents on every referral and also manages to distribute its app to a huge audience.

4) Using this technique, studios don’t have to rely on interstitial ads too. Ads generally use up some real estate in the game and it can be distracting a lot of times. Studios could provide a much more cleaner looking app which is also technically “free” for all to play.

Some critics may point out that if Jane doesn’t like the game at all, then why would she even spend that 25 cents? Well, again the answer is simple: She has the opportunity to get her money back if enough of her friends accept the invite or install the game. So technically, she can potentially end up paying nothing for the app.

This is an abstract idea for now. But I am confident of its prospects because it uses the power of incentives to encourage sharing of content. And ultimately, the best form of advertising is one in which the customer himself recommends a product to his friends.

I am happy to clarify any questions you might have or delver further into this methodology. I personally feel that this technique can do well as long as its implemented the right way. Companies like Playphone and Openfeint have the resources and the knowledge to develop such a system.

You can follow me on Twitter @aabidsiddique to stay updated about my latest blogs. In case of questions, please reach out to me at aabidsiddique81@yahoo.com.

Please note: All the numbers/prices I am using here are purely for understanding how the system works. Studios should have their own pricing models in place.