momentDo you really need an app?
These are the questions your board, your funder or your business partner will ask. Answer them honestly before you spend anything, with me or anyone else.
1. Is it for customers you already have?
An app is a way to keep and grow the customers you have. It rarely finds new ones: people download an app from a business they already use. If the goal is to be found, a strong website does that job better.
2. Will they come back to it every week?
Most apps are opened a few times and forgotten. The ones that last give people a reason to return: an order they place often, a record they keep, a habit they build. If the honest answer is a few times a year, a website serves them better.
3. What do they get the very first time they open it?
People decide whether to keep an app within their first use or two. It has to be useful before anyone signs up, fills in a profile or waits for a feature to arrive.
4. Does it need the phone itself?
The camera, location, working without a signal, reading a card or a tag. A web app on the home screen now does a great deal of this too, including notifications and payments. A store app earns its keep when the phone itself is part of the job.
5. How will they hear about it?
The app store won't tell them; you will. In the shop, at the counter, by email, on the receipt. If there's no natural moment to tell customers about the app, few of them will find it.
6. Who keeps it fresh, and can you fund it for three years?
Apple and Google change their rules every year, and both expect apps to keep up. Content that never changes gives people no reason to come back. Plan who updates it, and budget for running it well beyond launch.
7. What will tell you it's working?
Pick the number before you build: repeat orders, bookings, visits, hours saved. Compare the people who use the app with those who don't, because the first people to download it are usually your best customers already.
A tool for your own people is often the strongest case of all: they'll use it, and you can count what it saves.
1. What does it save each week?
Hours spent copying between tools, fees paid to three different services, mistakes from paper and spreadsheets. If you can count it, you can weigh it against the price.
2. Would your team choose it over the spreadsheet?
Staff can be asked to use a tool; volunteers have to want to. It has to be faster than the way they do it now, on the first day.
3. Who looks after it day to day?
Someone on your side who owns it: adds people, updates content, answers the first question. The build includes a written guide for them.
Mostly no?
You may not need a store app. A web app that installs to your customers' home screens can send notifications, take payments and work without a signal, for less, and with no app store between you and your customers. I build those too.
Discovery answers these questions with you and tells you which one fits, including when the answer is neither.
A Drunken Unicorn Productions company. momentfirst is a trade name of Drunken Unicorn Productions, LLC.