Obstacles You Can Expect – and Overcome – When Building an App
September 16, 2014

You’ve heard the adage, “the best offense is a good defense.” A quick Google search yields unclear results as to who the author is, but the meaning of the saying is as clear as a sunny day in Los Angeles. Wait…

Essentially, if you can anticipate the challenges you may run into in any endeavour, the chances are much better of conquering victoriously. With football season well underway, we have offense and defense on the brain and naturally want to help you with your defense.

So what issues can you anticipate when you hit the ground running in building your app? Let’s go:

Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

Yeah yeah, we aren’t fans of using hackneyed idioms either. But this one felt appropriate to get the point across in a way that (hopefully) doesn’t revive nightmares of childhood teachers. Those finger wagging tyrants who scolded you to get preparation work done for papers you never wanted to write.

Well now that we firmly revived those memories, those ladies and gentlemen were right. You must have a plan detailing where you’re going before you get to work in almost any part of life. Same goes with building your mobile app. What is the purpose of your app? What kind of a problem will it solve and how is it going to do so? Have a plan in place and the obstacle monsters will digress.

Nice to Niche Ya

Some cold hard reality: Someone may have thought of your mobile app idea already.

Now that this devastating information has sunk in and you’ve peeled yourself off the floor, it’s time to get to work. What is going to make your mobile app different from the rest? Facebook has been done and done well (you can argue with that but you’d be wrong), and the world doesn’t need another Facebook.

Too many entrepreneurs want to build another version of [insert app you know and love here], but that’s not what is going to make you a success. Figure out your niche and stick to it.

The Name of the Game – Competition

It’s no secret that there are a ton of apps out there. And the competition continues to swell with 2,000 mobile apps published each and every day. Understanding what your competition looks like and what makes them special will help you find a way to differentiate your app.

After building an app that separates you from the rest, you must ensure a skillful marketing strategy to get your app off the App Store/Google Play and into users’ mobile devices. We talked about this at length in The Best Mobile App Marketing Techniques, but as a quick overview remember to:

We have some more tricks in the aforementioned article, but there’s a start.

We Pledge Allegiance, To Your App

Say it with us: “We want loyal users. We will take care of them and meet their needs.” It doesn’t matter if your raving fans are your best friends in real life or Aunt Sue from across the street and isn’t really your aunt but she makes the best brownies so she’s Aunt Sue. They are the humans who will gab about your app to everyone they know, and you want to encourage their loyalty.

This is helpful for a couple of reasons, one being for marketing purposes. The second is their frequent use of your app equips them to find your flaws. As strange as that sounds, this is great for you. Having users out there who will take the time to let you know how you can improve enables you to grow your app so it can transform into a product users will pledge their allegiance to – and ultimately make you more money.

Get To Work

If everything were easy, everyone would do it. While the competition is hot and finding loyal users in a unique niche can be tricky, you can do it. And we can help you get started – let us know how we can help here.

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