In brief
Prepare for app growth by planning for global markets, preventing fake accounts without disrupting users, supporting relevant social platforms, measuring user data and estimating lifetime value to guide spending.
Mobile app developmenthas long since evolved from a novelty into an established industry.
• Usage growth: Mobile phone usage has grown fourfold over the past four years and accounted for one fifth of media consumption last year.
• Revenue growth: Mobile apps will generate annual revenue of 70 billion by 2017.
• Investment growth: Investment in mobile apps is gathering momentum. A total of 10 billion was invested over the past 12 months, double the level recorded from the third quarter of 2013.
However, once an app venture gets underway, five areas need attention:
1. Plan for global scale
Smartphone adoption is growing rapidly in emerging countries, with India and China set to play increasingly prominent roles. These markets can bring large numbers of new users to emerging apps, but they also require more carefully considered investment—for example, spending more on preliminary analysis to ensure products are localized, including the languages an app supports.
2. Prevent fake accounts while maintaining a good user experience
As in any rapidly growing industry, a host of spam-related problems follows, and an app can easily attract large numbers of fake accounts in a single day. To maximize registrations while maintaining trust worldwide, an app needs unobtrusive ways to verify users, such as mobile phone verification.
3. Ensure your app supports sharing across multiple social platforms
It is important to let users easily share app content on their preferred social platforms. Geography often determines which social platforms should be integrated into an app, so careful planning tailored to each market is necessary.
4. Focus on measuring and collecting data to improve the user experience
After launch, an application needs ongoing updates that add new features and improve performance. Data is the most effective way to understand how users use an application and whether they stop using it. Planning, collecting and measuring key user data points is therefore essential to improving product performance.
5. Estimate the application's lifetime value (LTV) to forecast costs and expenditure more accurately
Many apps have excellent ideas behind them, yet fail because they quickly run short of funds before gaining widespread adoption. A comprehensive understanding of business revenue and profit cycles helps determine how to make effective long-term investments without being forced to sell equity to raise cash.
The First Step in Starting an App Business: Prepare for Growth