How to Start an App with a Step-by-Step NIX Guideline

Presently, the majority of people in the world connect to the Internet via their mobile devices, and the gap between time spent on the phone and desktop and laptop becomes more and more dramatic. Furthermore, almost 90% of the time that people spend on apps. That’s why apps are one of the most influential tools for businesses to connect with a target audience.

So as to back up this reaffirmation with supporting evidence, we want to illustrate it with a few statistics. App Store market comprises over 1.7M of apps, more than 700K of publishers, and releases more than 1K new apps daily. However, the Google Play market managed to beat the record with more than 3.4M of apps, more than 1M of publishers, and almost 2K of new apps appearing daily. 

It’s very impressive, isn’t it? However, is growing supply raised by growing demand? Far from it. It is, therefore, important to carefully consider how your product can stand out from millions of others. More than a half of users download 0 new apps per month, 13% download just 1, 11% download 2, and only 5% download more than 8 apps per month. 

In this article, you will find some tips on how to undertake the preparatory work so that the development of the app will not be in vain.

Get an App Idea

You become an app idea owner when you can identify a specific problem and find the way to build a solution for it by means of a mobile app. You can also have an innovative idea of a solution that is better than the existing one solves any problem and turn it into a more popular app. 

But what if you don’t have a concept on your mind? Where can you find inspiration for app ideas? 

First, you can research what apps appear among the top charts of the App Store, Google Play. What problems do they solve? Read the reviews. What makes customers unhappy about those apps? How can you improve them? 

Don’t limit yourself to the most popular app aggregators. Discover new markets. For example, there is Tencent Appstore – a very popular Android app store in China. Besides, there are Roku, Apple TV App Store, Amazon Appstore – all of them are great alternatives for submitting your app as they have fewer competitors and a lot of potential for small user communities. 

Don’t worry if you can’t come up with an idea of solving universal pains. Start with yourself, your family, and your friends. Think of an app that will help to:

• save time or money 
• kill time and won’t let get bored 
• makes life easier in any way

Ask potential users in social media what they think about your idea. If you get the support of the community, you can even start your project on Kickstarter and raise money to realize your idea. 

While thinking of app ideas, considering how to start building an app and make it worth investing in for the long term, look into the future customer needs, and you will manage to extend the life of your app. Think of the technologies that are in trend such as AR, Internet of Things, Blockchain, AI. Try to think of a currently popular app that those technologies could improve. In case your idea is unlike any others, is innovative and unique – patent it!

Conduct Market Research for the Application

Whenever have you thought of how to start app development, it is required to do market research to know the viability of your app idea. 

Market research usually includes 2 phases: Primary and Secondary Research.

Primary research implies a direct connection with the potential target audience. Use such modes of communication as online forums, questionnaires in social media, interviews with focus groups, etc. 

This phase will give you a deep understanding of potential users, explain users’ behavior, purchase decision journey, and what factors can lead to customer attrition and which instead guarantee their loyalty. 

Conduct competitive analysis and SWOT analysis to gather more information about features that your target audience will value over others, customer’s expectations from such an app, and if the competitors met them. 

Secondary research is customers’ data gathered by government agencies, niche industry associations, or trade organizations. This phase of research may be the only available variant for small businesses with a tight budget, as it makes the preparation stage quicker and more affordable.

The market research can help to choose the fit platform, and respectively technology and come up with a killer feature for your app. To prove your initial idea it is more rational to save resources and start with secondary research.

Estimating a Budget 

It is extremely important to allocate a budget before developing an app. This section shows how to start an app with the budget we have. Cost management is one of the mandatory tasks to deal with when we are planning to develop any kind of app. There is a table below on how the cost can be allocated for each stage.

As you can see, the highest percentage of the cost is used for the mobile app development phase as the development phase is the most crucial stage in any software project management life cycle. 

The 2nd highest percentage is for the deployment, support & optimization phase. Depending on the environment that we choose to deploy the app and the optimization procedures, we have to allocate a noticeably high amount for this stage. 

List Down the Features of the App

Once the environment to develop the app is set, we have to list down the features of the app that we wish to develop. The features of the app can be divided into subgroups as follows.

Key Features

The main features are the features that are mandatory in the app. These features should bring the solutions for the identified problems at the outset. They should be considered primarily starting an app development.

Killer Features

The killer features are the features that make your app stand out when compared with other similar apps on the market. It’s exactly the kind of feature that will encourage users to download your app. Often, killer features identified by developers of an app may be replaced by those identified by customers. For example, Snapchat disappearing messages became the feature that defined the success of the product by helping teens to keep secrets from the adults that checked their social networks, though it wasn’t expected. 

Additional / Extra features

Additional features are the features that add extra value to the product. Those are not killer features, however, they can enhance the usability and the reliability of the app.

Unnecessary Features that May Slow Down the App

There are various types of unnecessary features that customers may not need in a particular application. Don’t overload your app, it can cost your users too much data. Let it perform one or two essential functions for which it was downloaded. 

Make Design Mock-ups of the App

Regardless of the type of app is required to make the user interfaces friendly and smooth. You don’t need to have Adobe Experience Design, Sketch, or InVision skills to sketch up your idea. Use pen and paper to make the first draft of how your app should look in the future to be user-friendly. Developing a design bear in mind your target audience. Its usability should be focused on your potential users.

After that create a digital wireframe for your app. At this stage, you don’t need to focus on the detailed elaboration of design elements thinking of how to start an app, but more about the overall visual structure, navigation flow, and functions that will fill each of the screens. Run a test and find out if the visual structure, its elements, and navigation seem intuitive.

Define the Monetization Options

Every mobile app has its unique monetization strategy. Hence, it is essential to acquire knowledge regarding monetization options when getting started with mobile app development. Following is a list of monetization tools that are available for a mobile app.

Advertising

Apps can be used to promote other products and services and via banner ads, natural element ads, pop-up ads, or video ads and are a simple yet cost-effective method to get the task done. Since many smartphone users use mobile apps, these ads guarantee a high degree of visibility. Owners of such apps earn revenue when the user clicks the ad or when the user installs another app clicking through the advertisement link, but keep watching Google and Apple’s new policies on personal data collection, it may change the game.

Freemium

In the accelerating mobile application industry, Freemium represents an essential business model. Freemium models supply around 90% of the revenue generated in Google Play and Apple’s store. In general, that option implies that the basic features of the app are free, while for advanced features users should get paid subscriptions or make in-app purchases. 

In-app Purchase

This option allows users to access all the advanced content or features by one-time purchase, implementing models such as pay-to-play models. 

Paid Apps

If the developed app is marketed as a paid app, you can receive money when the users purchase the app in any app store. Paid apps usually bring more revenue per download, than in-app purchase app. However, the number of downloads of a paid app is far less and the user expectation from such an app is much higher. You need a base of users that already trust you enough to buy your app before a demo usage. Moreover, users that pay for their apps are more loyal and tend to use them longer than those apps they got for free.

There are other less popular ways to get paid for your app, among them subscriptions, sell merchandise, collect and sell users’ behavior data. 

Come up With the Best Marketing Strategy 

As was already stated at the beginning of the article, there is quite a huge competition among mobile apps. And even if you add remarkable features and use the latest technologies in your app, it can be lost in the buzz of thousands of other apps. To make a statement and let people know about your app’s advantages use the following marketing strategies.

Outline a Clear Landing Page

Create a website for your app, with a number of inexpensive website builders it can be done in just a few hours. How to start building an app fun base before even releasing it? Show your app advantages to potential users by starting a blog with expert articles that may be useful for them, use SEO to drive more traffic to your website, and increase brand awareness. 

Use Social Media

We can use social media to advertise our app and create a community around your brand to promote it by word of mouth. Best social media promo practices are focused on a few relevant to the target audience platforms, regularly updating the content, engaging users with discussions and giveaways, and gathering feedback about app features.

Influencers

The influencers can help us to market our app. We can achieve this goal in two ways. We can allow the influencer to use our app or we can pay the influencer to advertise the app.

App Store Optimization 

Make sure that the name of the app and its logo both contain elements that indicate your app’s major idea and give a hint on how it functions. App name usually should contain up to 50 characters, with short description up to 80 characters and long description up to 4000 characters. The description should contain a clear description of your app and its killer features, attract potential users with appealing screenshots, videos and contain relevant keywords.

Plan for Monitoring and Controlling

To get real-world exposure and to know how the app will feel in the hands of actual users is the main goal after publishing an app. Besides, it is essential to know and acquire knowledge in this aspect before starting an app. No matter how well an application is made, it is bound to have bugs that may be spotted only by users. A beta version should be released to get user feedback.

Testing is one of the essential stages of app development and it should be planned long before an app deployment. Rigorous testing is a complete testing process. In the testing, we pursue strict entry and exit criteria, and also we can deal with all possible combinations of test cases and test data so that every possible flaw can be found out from the system and we can remove them before the system goes live.

This includes functional, operational, performance, and integration testing of the release. Lack of resources impedes testing, resulting in releases with software bugs. These models include reliability modeling, causal prediction, and good enough to release (GETR). 

Why Should You Use NIX for Your Next Project?

NIX is the best place for you to get in touch with if you are looking for how to start an app. NIX settles and regulates both functional and non-functional requirements as you expect. NIX experts will suggest all the best practices on how to start app development in your case. This task is successfully achieved through investigating the current opponents and generating user personas while establishing technology specifications.

NIX comes up with the best design and user interface for your app by identifying the requirements correctly. The user interfaces are planned and approved successfully right after the designing phase. NIX helps you to configure the architecture of the app with the required frameworks, libraries, and other integrations.

In addition, NIX will test all the functionalities and layouts further to make sure that there are no errors arising while dealing with the app. Finally, NIX helps you by submitting the developed app to Apple App Store and Google Play.