> Developing an app... How is one going to be competitive doing that?
I tried to do it with a friend and failed. With apps looks are the more important than UX, and I was mainly working on usability features. Also market research and understanding your target audience without data is really important.
At Google, understanding the user / customer was really easy, it doesn't need that much empathy: just give the user more quality clicks by changing the ranking and give the advertiser more conversions per dollar spent.
> Maybe this fits for some types of businesses, but I suspect it's probably better just to build the thing.
9 out of 10 wantepreneurs that approach me with their SaaS/app idea can validate the offering by building a web site. Instead, everyone wants me to spend months on building a prototype. Which isn't even a prototype, they want full-blown product. "How am I going to sell it when there's no product?!". Dude, here's a landing page with ALL the features YOU THINK people want listed on it. And here's a "Buy now!" button. If you can't get a decent conversion with that, I'm not going to build your app ever. And guess what? Most of the time nobody clicks on the button, because nobody wants that product.
> Some kind of platform that matches a developer and an initial customer in a way that rewards both. Finding these people is a challenge, but I think it's possible, and the person who figures out how to do it is going to have a MASSIVE business on their hands. I could go on about this a lot further, but I wholly recommend exploring it.
I'd pursue it, but I wouldn't know how to go about finding a first customer for the platform :)
>> is insistence of various companies to own the platform.
Well , not everything in tech is 100% determined by powerful companies. For example python don't owe it's success to powerful friends. It was mostly bottoms-up.
So maybe there's a strategy that could succseed in creating a better app platform , just using developer support ?
> The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed.
Yes. We bought into it and did a proof of concept app with Famous. We did get it to work, but it cost way too much effort, there were way too many bugs, and it ran on way too few browsers.
We decided to not use Famous again. The proof-of-concept app lingers around, it's still cool and we're hoping for a new chance if a community version of (in)famous becomes somewhat more mature.
> The users of the first app didn't really get what it was for.
Whenever I'm venturing on an idea, I have a pretty clear goal and a pretty clear intent of use from a users perspective. However despite that, I'm always asked by
people (who, by the way, I often figure would be the target audience for this new thing I'm building), "why?" or "what's the point?" or just blatantly "no one's going to use this over [facebook/twitter/etc/etc/etc]"
I remember when first diving into twitter 11 years ago. I remember diving into Facebook when it cracked open to the general public. I remember telling people about these platforms, and the response always is "why?" or "I don't understand what this is for or why I would use it"
I keep that in mind everytime I'm asked the same question about my own projects. Not everything is going to be a massive hit, of course. But you never know when one of these wild ideas becomes successful, and it will usually be something that the people didn't know they wanted until you show it to them.
> I promise I didn't have my expectations too high, I only had a few core principles
Proceeds to list 6 pretty high requirements.
The author’s not wrong, those are good requirements, but not to be expected from any standard app these days.
To dig on the first: “ Offline support”, this in itself requires a lot of work.
Going the technically easy way will often go in direct opposite to your business model (mobile ads or access info sales). Going for subscriptions or other mechanisms will have you do harder technical solutions, making that specific innocent requirement a decently high hurdle.
> Overall, we have had little traction on the platform and that is because the idea will result in a huge cultural change so it will take a lot of effort to mobilize customers to try it out.
Or it's a bad idea and nobody wants the product. Not every startup deserves to survive.
Sorry for the harsh words, but is sounds like what everyone involved in this project needs most is a brutal dose of honesty. There is no potential upside to miss out on. Just walk away.
> Pls remember, unlike consumer app, companies won't be willing to use the app as Beta if there isn't decent integration with their system and decent UX
This is wrong, you don't even need a frontend to get deals, a python notebook can close, hell, even slide decks can close deals.
The most important thing is to start talking to potential customers to see if your idea actually solves a problem. Until then, you only have a hypothesis. Don't spin wheels building EE ready applications, it will take a long time and your best early customers will be patient and put up with the gap.
The key is to demonstrate that you can solve a top 3 problem they have now.
> Firstly, you need good product people to be working on these things.
Firstly, you need a company who actually cares about what its users want. Otherwise all the product and UX people's skill gets directed into things like "optimising engagement" which tends not to result in a good experience for the user.
"What's needed are apps tied to real business models that have real ROI. And,companies should build apps with their eyes open about what they should realistically expect to accomplish with what they develop. Having an app for an app's sake is not enough."
> But is it possible you spend time building something without validating it's a solution people actually need and pay for?
Absolutely.
The service I provide is also available in a free form, but lacks some of the features I offer. It definitely is the case that those features I offer are - apparently - not as valuable as I had hoped for the target demographic.
If I were to do this whole thing again, I would probably lead with finding product market fit, rather than blindly building something and hoping for the best.
>when all they did is provide the platform, and store the data.
Is there not significant innovation and benefit that was designed and implemented in the first place that caused users to contribute their time, thought and energy?
I think the real problem here is when organizations that rely on a crowd-sourced business models decide they just have to be billionaires or solve all the worlds problems with their platforms, instead of just staying true to their model. I don't see what's wrong with just running a highly successful business that makes money for it's founders and doesn't have to go out and strive every day to be the next Facebook or Google.
Make no mistake. Platforms like Reddit and Stackoverflow are real, serious businesses. But why can't they exist and be a general successful business like your local mom and pop restaurant or toy store or whatever?
I run RadioReference.com and Broadcastify, both which are significant businesses but also rely almost solely on crowd sourced data and content. We're wildly successful - but I've never seen the need to hire 3,000 people, or IPO, or do series raises to expand into solving world peace. Our premium subscription pricing has been the same for 15 years. I completely eliminated advertising on one of the platforms last year. We make a lot of money. We provide a lot of value to our communities, and we carefully innovate and expand to provide value. It's a nice happy life for everyone involved, and I don't have to deal with a VC who will be determined to either make a trillion dollars or torpedo my business.
Which is a big ask, since
> The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can't do that.
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