Avoid These App Development Mistakes

What is up at nation? It is Steve P young founder of appmasters.com the place you go. When you want action pack, content related to growing your app downloads and your revenue. And attempt to talk with my hands a lot. So that's why you see me, but welcome to this video where we're going to talk about the common mistakes that we see first time, even really a Vance app creators make, especially the first timers who come in seeing, I want to create an app for this getting so excited, but the common pitfalls that will.

Set you up for failure? No, there's no right path for success, but there are common paths that you can take for failures. And I think what we want to help you do with this video is try to help you avoid these common mistakes as you're working with a development team. And you're trying to think through what features to build, right? So no other better guests to bring on with me today to share all the tips. Is hi, I'm from . If you're looking for an app development firm, that's going to help you with building the core features that you really need to launch with.

We'll check them out. Is B7dev.com. Hi, welcome. Hi, Steve. How are you? Thank you for calling me. Shall we get right into at home? Sure. Yeah. All right. It's more, there's one that you, I think you and I both agree on. This is building too many features. Yeah. The, the most common problem that we see when, uh, someone has an idea, they, they want to develop an app, but eh, they don't know how to express exactly what the point is.

Is they, the common pitfall is they will have one senior on features in, in the idea. So you cannot. Explain exactly what the pro you are solving. If you are 1 million things, okay. You need to focus on solving one problem at a time then up. Okay. If you have in processes like this, our customer. Th th th the, the root of this is the customer doesn't feel, eh, very it sure with the idea. Okay. Does invalidate the idea with someone else or with some professional help?

So they want to add a lot of things just in case. Okay. So the, the, the point is what is the problem that you are trying to solve? If you solve that problem, that people will use your app. Okay. Then with time you can add more stuff, basically a stick to the stick, to the, to the, the, the good, a brilliant point. You want to fix, you want to improve and then move on in the first version, shouldn't be 100 things to show because the people will get really confused about that.

Okay. You need to focus on what really is the app about okay. And nothing. I mean, lots of stuff. Lots of noise. The people want to understand in the chest 10 seconds, what is your app about? Okay. Just explain to someone else. What is your idea? If they don't understand, try to, to, to rephrase or re think about what is the app doing? An okay. Features a lot of features will come later. Yeah. And I love this graphic that we have of things that matter things you can control and here's what you should focus on.

Right. And sometimes even if. After you launched, you're starting to find that different features are being used more often. Well, make sure that people go into that and there's some failures that I can point to, but I'm going to try to show an example of an app that I feel like is doing this really well. So I'm, here's an app that we, we had on the virtual summit. One of the virtual summits we've done it's rev and they allow you to transcribe and record.

And the way that they make money is through transcriptions. They have a transcription service, love them, rev.com, but they have this app that they're like. It was very busy, you know, I wish I could show you the before, but it's very busy in the very beginning, but now it's just record. Right. And so here, I'll show you guys their screenshots so that you can see what it's all about. Record transcribe any audio. So they they're like, rather than having transcribe, you know, like all these different features, they just were like, look.

We first need you to record something and then we're going to get you to hopefully that you can save it forever if you want, but hopefully you get that transcribed and put it on wherever you want, but that's where they're going to make their money. Right. And ever since they made this change, they've seen users develop more, more like use the app, more retention, skyrocket, and also they make more money. So really simplifying it.

This design is beautiful. It really simplified it. Like this really helps out a lot, and this is all that you really, really need. And so, you know, It is just trying to figure out the core features that you need before you get into too much. I also want to show you another app Haim that this advocate collab, max, I love you here in the audience. I'm sorry. I'm picking on you, but this app allows. Influencers and content creators like myself to make money from my fans.

Like they can tip me and they can do all this stuff you wouldn't know from this app. So like at first launch it, they want access to all these things. I'm like, why? Right. Like why? Okay, fine. I'll say, okay. And then it's going to pop up another time. It's going to pop up another time, whereas, you know, Rev like they need access to my thing, but they're only asking it after I hit record. Right. So these subtle changes make a huge difference.

And with collab, max, fortunately like when I got into it became a little bit too confusing of what you wanted me to do to do right way too many features, test that MVP. I know it's commonly used, but I would say test that. A lot more. Number two Heim is not doing enough market research. And for you, you were talking about like, not really setting your minimum goal, download goals, your maximum number of goals. You talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah. You need to understand this the four, what your goal is, what you are trying to do with them. Okay. You're trying to get rich from one day to another. There is not thing like this. Okay. Not even Google, not even Apple. They have a plan. Okay. And they know that they have my stones for every stage two to know how good or bad they are doing. So if you're starting with your app, you need to know your fist of all this.

Try to talk with someone that already knows what the numbers could be already. Okay. What the, what is the amount of users that you can get after, or after a week after a month? What will be the number of users that you will get view, eh, use? Um, so it's like, like use team provides like the, you know, marketing, the SEO. Et said they're accepted. What is the, the, the number of users that we get with the service without the service?

Okay. Is this service a good enough to invest on it? Eh, can I manage to be without these kind of advanced services for marketing? Eh, should I test the, the, the, the app a little bit more? Eh, with, uh, with a closed beta Exeter, I should establish a number of steps, a number of parameters with first of all, list, discuss with someone that already knows what the real numbers could be. Okay. Because they have access to previous apps or other similar apps to know what the progression was.

Okay. I am on the right path or I'm, I would say totally. Okay. Because. I need, I don't know. I need one the first month in order to keep working and keep pounding on, on the marketing. On, on the, on the social marketing, I need 100 youth service. I need 1000 users. Well, I need 1 million users. Okay. So if I want that, what should I do? Or if I get less of this amount of users, eh, what should they do? Okay. So if we don't have parameters, we don't know where we are at on the progression line, on the, on the map.

I thought, okay, we need to settle for, or even furthermore. You can know that if you are not getting to this amount of users or this amount of retention time, the time that I use a will spend with the app, okay, we need to improve this area or that area we need professional help. We need, I mean, by professional help, I mean professionals like you, marketers, you know? No, no, no, no. I shrink it. So the idea is to Nope, where I, where I am.

All the time. Okay. Now that, you know, if I shoot the put more gasoline or just relax because we are on the, on the good path. Okay. Yeah. And I've had friends in the space who have built successful, driven depth, the guy in Apple feature. And you know, what do you, when you know, I was talking about setting those clear goals, but I also want to, I like doing the market research, seeing what apps, what kind of apps are top grossing and adapting and, you know, improving on that as well.

And so doing that type of market research is so important instead of just being like, I've got this great idea, let me go launch it. And on that point, time, number three is talking about like, Not soft launching. And when I say soft launch, I mean, getting that early feedback and so soft launch could be making the app available for preorder or just launching the app and just not doing too much heavy promotion promotion, but getting that early user feedback and just adapting and iterating on that early user feedback.

Yeah. Again, let's try to piggy tail, the big players in the industry, you know, that they Google or Facebook when they will leave very, very new or bright idea what they do. They don't release to everyone on the market. All the users, all the countries. All the, all the ages, what they do is a small group of people like, uh, you know, uh, uh, test group in order to ask them later what you think about them, what you will improve, how you feel it.

Did you understand what the, what the app should do, eh, how you manage to you to do this task or that task, or to play, or to get that this level or whatever it is. Okay. They have idea, eh, what they want is to control a small group of users, mostly volunteers, eh, that they will tell you, even you can do it with your friends or your family. Eh, they can give you a very, very precious a feedback. And then with that feedback, you.

Go if everything is okay, that is very rare that everything will be really, really two to four, the big lunch, eh, but generally what you get is some people that you say, Oh, okay. I didn't, I didn't see from that point of view. So you will back to development, you fix, or you adjust those fine tuning points and then you are ready for a, the big lunch or even more. Sure we send to the very same group, the updated up, and then you will get a better feedback done the first time.

You know, it's like, the people in Hollywood. I mean, I'll call you what they do is they do close the screenings. For, for a very small, I mean, if you don't understand how the process works, you can, you can understand when you see those small groups of people being a screening, a picture, and they think what they, they are, they, they say what they are thinking about what they were removed. What, what, what, what was bothering them?

Okay. So the process is about the same. She has this fancy. And just tell me what you think about them. Need you understanding. What should be improved, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I love it. And one of my past podcast, guests, Chris, you talking about. How I was like, how did you know this app? It was an app that allowed you to quit smoking weed. And he's like, I was like, how did you know that this app was going to succeed?

Because he had multiple failures before then he had four different apps that you launched. It didn't really do any things like, you know, what's the, I was just getting a lot of user feedback. Like people would email me and be like, this is a great app, and this is this, and can you do this? And they were making suggestions on the app. And he's like, that's when I knew like people were actually liking my app. So it's these small little things that if you're getting, you know, having a little email function that you could probably build for them, letting people.

Kinda contact you in some way in the app allows you to get that early feedback as well. And just see, like, if you're getting positive feedback, you're like, Oh my God, like people are really making recommendations to the app. And so, you know, people really liking in it. Yeah, the best thing you can get is feedback. I mean, even if they are, they are telling you, your app looks like crap, this is, this is great because at least they, they, they took the time to tell you, eh, I don't like that.

I mean, the worst thing that I know is someone that don't. Eh, back to you telling you look, this app sucks and okay. That's probably okay. But if they don't tell you anything, the next thing you will do is you will release and then you will fail big. So the, the, the, the good thing is to fail small and to get feedback and then move up. Well, the next I want to talk about too, and I would love your thoughts on this time is I feel like that people are not aggressive enough with charging.

I think, you know, for me personally, and I'll lead off to you, I always feel like this is a business and you're trying to run, right. Like we all know the subscription based apps are the ones that are going to be trending high. And those are the ones that are being taught. And right now, frankly, and so, but I just had a call with some potential client and he's like, you know, we want to make it the first a hundred thousand people for free.

And I'm like, okay, that's a lot of people, right? Like there's. Not a lot of people get to them. You can get to a hundred thousand downloads, but you might not get to a hundred thousand users and your business. We need to see if people are willing to pay for what you're building so that you can hopefully invest as we invest in that. Yeah. For paid marketing, use it to build out more features, but you have to at least charge.

Yeah. Is there the, the, the all discussion about the fine art of pricing things? I mean, it's an art by itself. Yeah. Some ideas. I mean, it's a very, it's a very large discussion about this, eh, where some people argue that the cost. It's the field thing that you, you need to watch today. Anyone wouldn't tell you that costs are a constraint for setting a price. Eh, the idea is that, um, I have these kinds of discussions with, with customers sometime because I tell maybe it's preferable to have 10 people to pay you $100.

That later, if it's too expensive, you can lower the price. Dan, go tell someone that we raised the price to do to tell someone, yeah, I will rise the price, then I will lower the price. Okay. So starting big sometimes it's there. Eh, you need to work twice. To get more users to pay less that, to get few people to pay more. And then if you have a great product or game, eh, don't worry about that. The people will pay.

What do you are asking for a again, it's a very large discussion and is The against the Ori involved on this. Okay. About what is the negotiation? I mean, the negotiation is not something that you will hassle with the customer. The negotiation is inside the customer's mind about, eh, should I pay for this this much or not? Okay. You sell negotiation inside. I mean, when you are taking a look on that price, You will think inside yourself, should I pay for this this much or not?

I mean, it's convenient for me is I can do it better with a different one. Yeah. So it's a very large discussion, but I will recommend to everyone to start high and then the people will love you. If you lower the price, the people will never love you. If you. If you raise the prices. Well, you know, we did this case study with a, somebody in the audience and we went from a dollar a day for zap. He's getting about 50 to 60 downloads, went from a dollar a day to $17.

And all we were doing was optimizing the actual paid. And so one thing that I would recommend two is having people, giving people options, he'll have one thing. He said, remove ads, choose charging, tune up two bucks for it. And so we added different options where we locked certain features, and then we had the remove ads and we had the unlock all. And then now you're starting to feel like, okay, There's a psychological trigger that we don't want to be told what to do, right?

Like it's like either pay us or go like, Oh, well I don't want to have to listen to you. But if we give people options, they feel like they're more in control. So it's always good to give people options when you're trying to get them to charge. And I'm playing around with different Cisco subscription-based apps to see how we can do that instead of just doing the. The easy monthly, yearly lifetime type of stuff, which is like daily.

Are there different ways that you can provide options with the ways to pay you so that you can really drive more revenue? And that's one of the fundamental changes we did with that case study, the geometry solver. We went from a dollar a day to $17 is lock certain features and give them options to buy different things. Not just one thing. Number five. And this is for those first time app developers who had these tremendous big, huge dreams about a million downloads on launch day and all these things.

So number five is thinking your first app will be a humongous success. Not saying that it can't happen. Just saying your odds are against you. Look, if you think about any of the big apps out there, angry birds, 51st app, you have color switch with Dave . He admittedly says it's 41st app. He built you think about Chris, where he's starting to now make a lot of money past podcast guests. It was his fourth app. So rarely is it our first app that just like poop takes off and we're like, this is great.

No, it's usually, Hey, you learn. All the intricacies that come with launching an app, working with Apple, working with Google, having to get approved, looking at all the updates, working with Jaime and his team to make sure that the app is running smoothly. A lot of things that go into it. And so what I want to say to those launched their first app and like are not seeing the success look rarely it's that first hit, it takes a long time.

It's about learning, building iterating, and then moving forward with that too, that example of the dollar day, I love it. Cause it's so small that it feels like. Anybody can achieve it. We just made a few changes to the product itself. We went from a dollar a day to 17, no extra downloads. And so these little things that make a huge difference. Yeah. Eh, the idea is like this, the overall idea is. If it was so easy to make it big.

I mean, everyone, we do it really big. I mean, a small course on, on, on developing on programming. And then the next thing you are a millionaire. It's not working like this. There is not the experience. You wouldn't get to several apps, several failures, or, I mean, again, there use cases that the, of course, like every role that people will do an app and then we'll make it big or more or less me. So X is, but it's not the, the, so the idea is to learn from mistakes.

It's slowly improving all the time. And then you will get the, the, the, to the point that you are very solid on the next ideas. Okay. Him again, eh, you need to today I think that the, the problem with the, the market is that, eh, the experience is not very valued. Okay. You, you cannot put a value on experience and the people will accept that in. Everyone thinks that it's so easy to do it. It's just, you know, a one, two, three, and then you, you, your API's is working better.

The small little leader is that you have millions of competitors all around the world trying to do exactly the same. So. You need to invest time on this, to learn, to learn how the market works, to be all the time, looking at the competitors, what they are doing, what they did and what they didn't need to get, where they are now, eh, to talk with other guys, these kinds of, eh, eh, online seminars that you do, eh, or the conferences are really great because.

You can get together with other people that they have more experience than you that have different point of view that you have. So, um, it's really important to absorb in the beginning. You need to absorb a lot of experience, a lot of feedback, and then even, even I will recommend you, you do a mockup for an app that you have an idea. And then start in. I mean, just, you know, like a, like, like a project and then you will start to show it to the people.

I mean, you want develop anything okay. You to just, eh, tell the people, what do you think about my idea to start drafting some screens to try to do some ideas and then yeah, ladies, eh, you will have a flow and then you will see what the pitfalls are. It again, sitting with people with more experience to ask how much you would charge for this or the opposite, how much you will pay for this to have a more precisely there thinking about it as a game.

It's more product. If you are starting a talk with people that they have experienced on developing a technically. On the marketing side on the enterprise side. Okay. You know, that step up is in fact it's a company. It's not just a website. I, lot of people confuse the idea of a startup. We just doing the. App or just doing a website. The idea is you need to create a company that helps people to solve problems or to accomplish something or to make it the people get the, get the entertainment.

Yeah. Or something like this. Okay. And there is a whole company. Okay. You need to think about all the factors that are company like a brick and mortar business. And they take care of, and then you will have a more accurate idea of what the, the, the, the big companies are doing to make it big. I mean, it's not that they, they just came up with an idea, a one man show, they do everything again, may exist, but it's not the, the, the, the general, the general case that, you know, I wrote.

Okay. So you need to understand that you will do a company as a traditional company, just in a digital domain. Alright. And the last one that we have for you is hiring super cheap developers. Look, I know we're all bootstrapped. We're trying to make sure that we can build the MVP as cheaply as possible behind you got to stay away from these super cheap developers everyday, maybe not everyday, but every week we'll receive a new project that is already done and he didn't work because they hired super cheap developers.

And then the, at some process or some stage, it gets wrong. It doesn't do what you want for me to do. Eh, keep crushing, eh, all kinds of issues. And we go to rescue. They are, maybe we need to rewrite an area of the code, or we need to rethink the app in a different way. We are getting this all the time. So the idea is the. Of course that in most, in this current times, nowadays, when, when this pandemic is harming the economy so much, eh, um, you need to, you need to be bootstrapping to be very money wise.

and the two, two all the time to have the cost in mind. But the, the worst thing that you can do is to go for the first offer that you get. I will recommend you to get several quotes, to ask why the quote is so different. We did another guy that he asked it for. I mean, you can ask for four or five quotes, two or three, I don't know how many developers or developer companies, you know, and then if you see something really cheap ask, these different company is asking me for different higher your prices that you, what, how you do it in, in, in the way that these so cheap.

I mean, you are cutting corners. You are a, what is the warranty on the code? For example, if we started there, we have a lifetime warranty on bags that we do. Okay. They're always their bugs. So that doesn't matter if the bag is discovered two or three years after the, the product is, is the launch. Eh, we will, if there is a bank that we did, I mean, not that they apt Alaska to upgrade it. The apprentice system there, Sean bag, we will always fix that for you.

And then we will always support you. You need to take care of stuff after the app is launch. Eh, otherwise you, you, you may start with the hallway. Okay. So you can, you can run a lot of risks. And the, people saying that they are, is not working bad reviews, etc etc., The idea is to get to a reasonable point with the cost for development. And then, eh, trying to stick with that, with that developer or developer development company, if you find a really good option, love it.

Sometimes when you find. The cheapest one, you end up paying more in the long run the website. If you guys want to check it out, it is a B7dev.com right here. I've been working with him and his team for a very long time. So if you're looking for affordable, they're not gonna be the cheapest, right? Cause they, they got a good developers out there. If you're looking for an affordable solution to help you and Heim has great knowledge in the space too, he's been doing it for a long time.

Go check it out. It is B7dev.com. If the audience wants to follow up with you in any other way, do you want to send them anywhere else? No chest. Contact me, if you have some particular questions, if I, I need to understand what the, what the idea is, what the question is. And of course I will redirect them to some other option. If I know something different. Or, I mean, we're always here always taking care of new products, sending quotes, evaluating ideas.

We also offer that, that process, that evolution polishing the idea, getting to more, there is a common problem that the, customer said to you a, I come this idea. And then when you start working on that, On this idea of polishing developing, eh, mostly on, on paper, eh, or on the screen, you will understand that the, you are missing several points, so the quote can change. Okay. For, for more of a less. So the idea is here's the fall to come with a solid idea, a Polish one.

Okay. To get a more precise quote. We are always of course, free of charge for consultations. Okay. And then we can talk more about the, what you are thinking the are, et cetera, to make some, some progress together. Yeah, love it. Yeah. Do some homework. All right, look, it's hard, but do this right. You can do that. And just from pencil sketches, you've at least spent some time on the app idea. And then go check out.

Hi and give you a more accurate quote. Once again, it is B7dev.com. Thank you guys for watching. Hi, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Now. See you on the next video.