mobile-apps, business-plan, cloudI’m a developer and I work alone. I’ve been studying about cloud applications for some time now and have interest in developing one such app with both web and mobile clients. Although from the programming standpoint I know I can do it (the only thing is that working alone will take a little more time to finish it), I don’t know if it is feasible to launch such an app alone.
I know there are lots of concerns like: marketing to sell the product, the bureaucracy involved, there should also be tutorials for people to learn to use the app, and also it’s necessary to manage the finances. This is just a short list that I could think right now about it. Looking at this from the standpoint of a developer is a little daunting.
So my question is: is it feasible to launch one app alone? If it is, how can it be done? I mean, which guidelines I could follow so that I simplify those things until the app grows enough so that more people can be hired?
It’s feasible, but I’d personally advise not to.
This advice is based on experiencing it first-hand. I launched a software business alone a few years back. I did the programming, the marketing and sales, managed the affiliates, handled customer support, and basically everything else. And I learned this lesson the hard way: you can only stretch yourself so much.
In a nutshell, your work output is limited by your ability to get the job of two or three people done in a timely manner: where with a cofounder you’d be worrying about releasing a new version, when you’re alone you also need to worry about supporting users and affiliates and what have you all while developing, as well as worry about the documentation if applicable, pinging your affiliates, and so forth before releasing, and don’t get me started on the administrative BS or how time consuming trying to close investors can be.
Even if you hire VAs or staff to assist you in these tasks, you still need to manage them at the end of the day because you’re alone, and that takes mental bandwidth too.
My takeaway was this: be in charge of outputting the product, and have a cofounder be in charge of just about everything else. Or vice versa. This setup frees the lead developer’s mind, and allows to get things done a heck of a lot faster. Plus, it’s useful to have someone to bounce ideas off when needed.
It is possible but in general there are many different activities that happen in parallel during the process of taking a product from concept to market that it is not advisable for someone (without a lot of time and/or resources). Generally most of us don’t have enough time or are worried that someone else might come up with a similar idea or concept which makes the time to market a critical factor, so the natural thing to do is to outsource some of the activities to other people to leverage both the expertise of the person and increase the productivity. However, this needs to be weighed up against the amount of resources at your disposal, and the level of risk involved in introducing another dependency in the project.
In the end you’ll find that the complexity of the app and the scale of your time and effort will eventually dictate the operational model of your business, so the key is to plan and scale the business in such a way that the time and resources required doesn’t suddenly increase beyond what you can cope with. Of course, the amount of people that join or express interest in your app can’t be controlled exactly (unless you specify a limited quota of users), and the number of users is normally a good indication of how your efforts need to be scaled.
I am not aware of a comprehensive guideline as such, but if you are planning the business around the app then having a rough idea about the amount of time you have budgeted, the amount of users or market share that you aim to attract and the people or resources you have on hand should point you to what the biggest risk in the project is, and what the best way to mitigate/minimize those risks are. And you’ll find that a lot of the projects are time and money poor but there is usually no shortage of people who are able to get the job done. If you are not short on time and have most of the skills required, there is no particular reason why it is not feasible to go it alone… many apps start with one person and only require a small team in the end.
I’ve tried for a year, made multiples apps. The hard fact is that you’ve lot of things not familiar to do. And you’ll do mistakes that can be hard to fix.
I’ll advise you to work with someone else at least.
I have done multiple times, fully possible. You also need a website and maybe user manual, but can be done, you can write also a static HTML website in a week and will not die from this.
However to be honest I never made any money from my apps. If it is paid, nobody buys. If it is free, it is possible to get users but they numbers decline when you stop running advertisements. If it is free and open source the number of users slowly grows but monetising becomes a real challenge. User support is, really not that much a problem as nobody contacts.
Probably it is not enough to have just an app and a simple static website with the basic concept and usage instructions. You need some more infrastructure around for a good project. The idea probably needs to be more complex, and such requires a team.
Its feasible if you are willing to make your life much more complicated.
If you are the kind of guy who loves speaking to people and selling then go for it alone. You will learn a ton more. If your introverted like me, you may find that you end up with a killer product and nobody buys it. Then everything will end up becoming about sales and marketing.
My advice would be to first make sure you are solving a problem that your customers would pay for a solution. Then go on to find a somebody who can work with you on the sales and marketing aspects while you go all out developing your product.
At that stage you will already have some early customers lined up and you will be rocking!
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