Without a doubt, the app market is one of the fastest-growing markets today. As the industries are expanding, so is the need for different mobile apps. If you look at the current state in the app stores, you will see that there are already many mobile apps being built covering many markets.
The biggest advantage of building a mobile app is the increased visibility of your brand while getting user attention and feedback. So the question is, what is the right way to invest time and money in an app idea in order to minimize risks and maximize profitability?
Let’s dive into the steps you can take to validate and increase the profitability of your mobile app idea.
First, when it comes to building software, it is important that your execution is fast and agile. If you consider the high competition in the different sectors, the sooner you execute your app idea, the better it will be. One other thing to note is that you should always try to reduce the “waste” and try adopting lean principles that can help you achieve that mindset.
While it is very important to execute your idea as fast as you can, you need to take into account other steps when validating your idea. The steps I am going to cover will help you find out if an app idea is really worth investing in and if the financial return will be as expected.
Let’s start with research
Having an app idea is extremely exciting and if you are like me, your creative flows are bursting with different ideas of what the app will do and how it will behave. Before you do anything, let’s take a pause and do some research.
Doing research is the most important step and it will determine if you are going to continue with the execution of your idea or go with something completely different. Gathering some knowledge about the market, current apps and customer problems will allow you to monitor the market you are interested in investing, see the risks you might have and design an effective marketing strategy.
With millions of apps in the app stores, don’t be surprised if your mobile app idea already exists. Due to the fact that the industries are growing, you might be lucky to have an app idea that doesn’t exist. However, it is important to remember that competition is part of any venture, and it could even be something healthy, depending on the situation.
When you have successfully analyzed the market, you have to check does your cannabis app idea has something unique that no one has or something that no one did so far. If the answer is yes, the chances of your idea being successfully recognized are pretty high.
Understanding the ins and outs of the cannabis market you want to operate in is a big plus and this is something all good entrepreneurs do. After all, you want to learn everything you can about the key players, your future prospects, and partners.
Get feedback from as many people as you can
You have done your research and think you are good at investing in your idea? Your next step is to start talking about your app idea with your friends, colleagues and other people. This is an issue for many people since they are afraid their idea will be stolen.
From my experience, you don’t need to worry. No matter how good your idea is, no one will take it from you because for someone to steal your idea they have to really believe in it, be excited about it, have the vision and most importantly, execute it. Remember that people are full of ideas, but very few actually make something.
While it is important to get feedback, please note that your friends and family can do more harm than good since they will try to be polite, and most likely will always say YES. The best feedback is coming from the people you don’t know and that have problems you are trying to solve. Finding a group of those people will be hard, but they might be your early adopters, so it will definitely pay off.
One important note is that your initial idea might change and you have to be open to any changes that might occur from the feedback you get. Having this openness and agility is what will increase your chances of success in the execution phase of your idea.
Build an MVP
For those who don’t know, MVP stands for the Minimum Viable Product. Building an MVP is a good strategy to prevent further expenses with the development of the product that is not fully defined yet.
The idea behind MVP is that you should build a minimum set of features, just enough to test a product with a certain group and learn from their interactions with your product. This will allow you to learn what works and what does not so you can make all the necessary improvements to your product before it hits the market.
The goals of the MVP are pretty clear. It is purpose is to learn as much as possible, to validate ideas through user feedback, to minimize the amount of effort and investment in ideas that are doomed to fail. This will clarify if your idea is good enough for other people to pay for it.
Build your brand and story
Once your MVP is successfully built and you are getting all of the metrics you need to improve your MVP, it is time to start building your brand and define your brand story. First, let’s see the difference between those two.
As you already know, building a brand is a way of differentiating an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer, but the brand story is the cohesive narrative that encompasses the facts and feelings that are created by your brand.
This difference is important to understand because, while your brand is making a difference in the eyes of the consumers, your brand story must inspire an emotional reaction. A reaction that will make your users come back and become customers.
Checking the stats from the App Store, you will see that users use around 20% of the apps they install, and those apps are the ones who create feelings, tell the story and help users solve their problems. It is important that you think of your graphic design and tries to make as many visuals as you can. A beautiful graphic design will not only attract users but will help them easily grasp the functionalities and value of your app idea.
Create user acquisition plan
Finally, before diving into writing a business plan, it is important that you have a plan for how to acquire new users, and retain existing ones. Remember that without the users your business means nothing. Before defining an acquisition plan, you have to make sure you researched where your users hang out and what is their consumer profile. This will help you to share your message on the channels they use and start getting the constant flow of users to your app.
The steps above are very important to follow when validating your app idea, but this is also just a start and a good path towards achieving success.
