From the idea of a mobile application to the MVP in which investors will invest / Sudo Null IT News

Before we begin

You should start organizing a business with a thought-out application idea and a developed concept. Your application should be interesting to consumers. The demand for the application among potential users is the main condition for the investors you will look for to implement your developments.

A person who knows programming languages will be able to create an application without much difficulty. If you don’t have this knowledge, look for a competent programmer and interest him in your idea. An extremely important point is a simple, convenient and beautiful interface. The search for specialists from whom you can create a team of like-minded people should begin even before registering a company.

How to create a game for Android?

Select the type of constructor (a recent development of Russian startups - the Victorin constructor)
Select game type
Edit your design using simple tools.
Add your questions and answers to them.
Create a game icon using the mini-constructor.
Come up with an attractive name.
Generate game.

At the same time, domestic developers offer designers that allow you to create games in Russian.

After all the above steps, you will receive a ready-made game for uploading to Google Play with all the necessary attributes - an icon, screenshots and banners.

Main risks

The competition in the mobile application market is serious. It's important to create more flexible, convenient and innovative options to make a profit. Don’t try to cover the entire market at once, focus on working with a narrow target audience. Also, you should choose one platform. To work with applications for Android devices, development in Java and XML is recommended; applications for iOS are best created in Objective-C. Start small, test your application on one platform. Having achieved some success, you can start adapting the application for different platforms.

There is no need to talk about strict compliance with copyright law yet. Everyone who promotes their services and products on the Internet is well aware of the massive free downloads. The risk of losing planned income from the sale of the application is extremely high. Experienced programmers and a reasonable cost for downloading the application will help you solve this problem.

Statistics say that most startupers give up and give up due to lack of investment. The main requirement of investors specializing in working with mobile applications is the demand for the idea. A person who invests money in a certain project expects to increase it. You must see for yourself and clearly demonstrate to a potential investor that the application will be of interest to customers and will generate income. Refusal is a reason to improve your creation.

Business valuation

Let's calculate how profitable everything turns out. The cost of Android is on average 200 thousand rubles, with the right advertising, this can pay for itself quite quickly.

Business valuation

The price for the application should not be more than 50 rubles or $1 (what a very necessary application, if the moment the application is placed the dollar increases, set the price less, not very low, but not very high).

For IOS, everything will be an order of magnitude more expensive, namely, the cost of the application will require at least 400-500 thousand rubles, but this needs to be approached even more responsibly, since everything here is more complex as described above.

With the right approach, with a good idea, you can be very successful in this area, but here you also need knowledge and experience, the income from the first application may be very high, and in some cases you can even go into the red, but as they say, everything comes with experience, The main thing in this area is to try to create your own brand, so that new parts are expected more than ever.

Location

A team of mobile application developers communicates with potential clients on the Internet and by phone. The location of the office does not matter at the initial stage. It is important to find a room with the ability to connect high-speed Internet, install and ensure uninterrupted operation of powerful computers. Having reached a certain level of payback, you should look for office space closer to the city center.

The most important thing is to choose the platform on which you will host your application. At the moment, the choice is limited to three stores: Windows Store, App Store and Google Play. Each of them has features. When choosing one of them, decide what your goals are:

If you want to quickly make money from app sales, pay attention to the App Store. It is better to display a demo version on Google Play, and monetization occurs by displaying advertising. There are still few advertising networks on the Windows market; it is suitable for sale at a fixed price. In terms of profit, the App Store is currently the best store, but Google Play is actively gaining momentum and showing rapid growth. It is recommended that only experienced developers work with Windows 8.

Earning money from mobile applications for Android and IOS

In the modern world, it is difficult to find a person who has never held a smartphone, iPhone, or tablet in their hands.

This article will discuss the types of applications, as well as the nuances of adding them to the Google Play (Android Market) and Apple Store, we will provide illustrative examples and cost calculations, and we will talk about profitability and payback.

Smartphones and tablets

Most popular apps

Quest
Action
Action games
Information application (news, articles, etc.)
Application for everyday use (maps, traffic jams, translator)

And so let's look at the action movie. The very first thing we need is to find a developer (preferably one who knows how to write for iOS) if you know how, you can write it yourself.

But, it is best to create informational or applications for everyday use, since games can quickly get boring and people will not return to this game, and an informational application is suitable for both older people and minors, and download statistics will only grow and grow.

Equipment

The only necessary things for a developer are a powerful computer, professional software and access to the Internet. You can purchase furniture for comfortable work and receiving clients; a minimum set of office equipment can be purchased at sales. Do not rush to immediately spend large amounts of money on purchasing the most advanced computers. As you work, you will be able to assess your needs and expand your equipment set.

Marketing Features (web vs mobile)

The most interesting part begins when you have already created your application. It needs to be uploaded to the store, as well as fully configured and promoted - if you think that you can do everything by analogy with the web version, believe me, you are very mistaken. It is marketing and analytics for mobile that, when set up, are very different from web versions.

Let's start with marketing. In the application, all traffic is divided into two parts - paid and organic.

With paid traffic, everything is clear - these are all channels where you pay money. The main well-known sources in the world are Facebook, Google. Next come advertising and affiliate networks, local sources for each specific country (for example, myTarget in Russia).

The purchase of traffic itself is not very different from the web, but it has its own characteristics.

You need to select creatives, segment audiences and optimize bids in the same way as in the web version. But the peculiarity is that the applications almost completely lack the usual contextual advertising. Recently, Google Ads switched to UAC (Universal App Campaign), where you can only influence the ad text and the rate you are willing to pay for the action taken inside. In turn, the Yandex context does not provide large volumes in mobile.

Organic traffic largely depends on brand strength and page optimization - ASO (App Store Optimization), an analogue of SEO in mobile. ASO includes working with store page metadata:

keywords;
icon;
screenshots;
description texts;
user reviews.

There are services for testing meta data, for example, Splitmetrics or Storemaven. They help you understand which options for icons, screenshots, and descriptions give the greatest conversion.

To analyze the positions of a mobile application by keywords, you can use ASOdesk or AppFollow. The services are paid, but there are limited trials. For clarity, I am attaching an ASOdesk screenshot below.

Taking into account the peculiarities of building marketing and analytics for a mobile application, companies need to either have a separate person on their team who understands the specifics of the processes, or learn to independently build all the stages from scratch.

Personnel

At the initial stage, a team of talented programmers is important. Managers of successful companies specializing in the development of mobile offers do not recommend turning to recruiting agencies for help in finding specialists in this area. Look for employees on thematic forums and other resources. Conduct interviews in person. Mobile application development is a team effort. Mutual understanding is extremely important here.

A talented web designer is also necessary. A successful application design must meet several criteria:

Large icons, buttons and fonts. Clear and error-free. The design needs to be tested on all screens. You should hire an experienced designer for this job. You can pay employees a fixed salary or break the work into stages and agree on the cost of each. In mobile application development, it is common practice to pay a certain percentage of profits from sales.

At the initial stage, the business owner must work with clients. As you expand your product's customer base, you should hire an account manager.

Enter into an agreement with a law firm specializing in transaction support and document preparation in the IT field.

Recession

Somewhere in 2020, despite good passive income, I suddenly lost interest in mobile. Nowadays this is called “burnout”. This was due to various reasons.

First, there were the first rumors that Adobe would stop supporting Flash and later AIR. This upset many and the motivation to create something new disappeared.

I tried to find other technologies (Haxe, JS), but all of them did not allow me to convert existing applications and games without months of dancing with a tambourine, and writing in these languages was extremely unpleasant, unlike AS3.

In addition, I was fascinated by other projects and sites, browser automation and various “gray” methods of making money online.

I stopped updating apps, responding to reviews, creating new ones - even though I had a lot of great ideas that would have made me millions.

For example, already at that time I made a prototype of a fortune-telling application, one might say, with augmented reality. I ordered an extension from an Australian developer to read QR codes, which I planned to place on real maps.

By pointing the phone at a card layout, in a couple of seconds I received the positions, meanings of the cards, interpretation, combinations and analysis of the layouts.

No one is doing this yet, but the idea is 100% winning, because I could make money not only by selling such an application, but also my card decks or QR stickers for existing decks.

This idea came to me in the wake of criticism on the forums, saying that my applications are stupid machine random, although this is not entirely true, in the flagship applications I added a “Subconscious” mode - the user moved his finger over chaotically moving maps, the algorithm recorded the slightest changes in directions, speakers and selected the card after some calibration, if the user’s subconscious reaction was recorded.

There are millions of fans of card fortune-telling, but many treat virtual fortune-telling with a fair amount of skepticism, using applications only as a reference book of layouts and meanings.

Therefore, this solution with a combination of real decks and a mobile application still seems very promising to me and, perhaps, I will return to it.

Communication with users took a lot of time. At first, I honestly tried to respond to the stupidest reviews, after all, the main audience of my applications are women, so there were a lot of questions, criticism, and psychosis.

Later, tired of the regular “isn’t Pachimu working?” I sometimes began to openly troll users, which was even noticed on some large resource and they gave me free advertising.

Now applications bring in about $300-400 per month simply because they do not always run on the new operating systems of modern phones.

The last updates were in 2014-2015 and now on a good day it happens like this (screenshot for Android only):

Documents and licenses

To get started, you should register an individual entrepreneur with the tax office and choose a favorable tax system. Activities: software development and other types of communication services. The development of mobile applications is not subject to licensing, but the legal regulation of this area in Russia is not yet perfect. Drawing up an agreement with an experienced lawyer will allow you to avoid troubles with the law.

An important point is to grant the right to sell your application to intermediaries. Copyright is automatically assigned to the creator of the application. These points should be clearly regulated in your company between the owner and employees.

When transferring a mobile application for sale, it is recommended to draw up an agreement that clearly indicates the rights and obligations of all parties.

Production plan

Registration

If a business is not registered, it is an illegal business activity. Therefore, business legalization is the first thing the life of a company begins with. To do this, you need to contact the Federal Tax Service.

Registration options:

Registration of an individual entrepreneur (individual entrepreneur). Suitable for small and medium businesses.
Registration of a legal entity. For large companies.

Let's focus on the first option, because it is best suited for registering a mobile application development company.

What you need to do to register an individual entrepreneur:

Decide on the registration method. There are two options: at your place of residence and via the Internet. The second solution will save the entrepreneur from long lines and paperwork. Registration via the Internet is the fastest and best option.
Select OKVED codes - indicators that provide the tax service with important information about the registered business. The codes encrypt the areas of business activity. The law allows you to select several OKVED codes at once - in order to save the entrepreneur from the need to re-register documents in the future if he expands the range of services provided.
Choose a tax system. Individual entrepreneurs are recommended to work according to the simplified system (STS). It's simpler, more convenient and more profitable.
Write an application in form P21001. Detailed instructions, an example and a template are available on the website of the Federal Tax Service. Requirements for completing the application are in the “Registration of individual entrepreneurs” section.
Pay the state fee.
Send documents to the Federal Tax Service.

ATTENTION! It is important that the application contains no errors or typos. This may lead to denial of registration.

Documents required for individual entrepreneur registration:

application (form P21001);
passport;
TIN code;
receipt of payment of state duty.

Room

When choosing an office, you need to focus not only on clients, but also on employees. It is important that everyone feels comfortable.

General recommendations for choosing premises:

easy to reach (not only by car, but also by public transport);
there is parking;
there is furniture;
Conveniently organize workplaces for employees.

The minimum required area is 100 square meters. m.

Equipment

The IT company office is equipped with:

modern computers;
by fax;
printer;
interactive whiteboard;
telephones.

The main thing is computers. They must be powerful, reliable and easy to use.

Required furniture:

tables;
armchairs;
sofa;
filing cabinets.

Staff

It is impossible to build an IT business without a good development team. Therefore, special attention should be paid to finding qualified personnel.

Where to look:

in the Internet;
in IT companies;
lure away from competitors;
in universities, at faculties of IT specialties.

IMPORTANT! Before hiring a person to join the team, it is necessary to check his competence. A portfolio is not enough and may contain inaccurate information. The best option is to ask the applicant to complete a test task - for example, write a simple program, fix bugs in an existing one, improve one of the products.

Another important point: the team must be friendly and work harmoniously. There should be no conflicts in the office. The productivity of the team depends on the cohesion of the team.

Marketing

Find a reasonable balance between the desire to earn money and being annoying. If you distribute the application for free, try not to bore your visitors with too many advertisements.

It is necessary to update the application - this allows you to maintain the user base. Provide customer support and be sure to communicate with your audience.

When talking about the application, add screenshots. Create high-quality selling text, make a video and try to promote it as much as possible.

Create pages on social networks. Popularize them, regularly add fresh content, provide live, interesting communication to your subscribers.

Work on getting backlinks. The more quality sites and other platforms are involved in the SEO promotion of your application, the higher your position in the ranking system will be.

catalogue of articles

In this article we will talk about creating a strategic marketing plan for a mobile application and ways to promote it. Our company has extensive experience in drawing up business plans, marketing and bringing mobile applications and online services to the market. This market is quite specific and has a number of features that require a specialist to have good experience.

Marketing analysis of competitors

It's no secret that the first step in any strategic marketing plan is to research your competitors. You need to find all applications similar to yours and find out a few things:

How popular these applications are, how many downloads they have (in order to find out, you can turn to special applications with statistics). This will allow you to understand what volume of downloads and sales you can expect, build a sales plan, and, accordingly, determine whether the application will be profitable.
How do your competitors promote mobile applications?
What is the pricing of these applications and their in-app purchases so that you can be more profitable for the consumer?
What is the quality of these applications, what functionality do they lack, do they have errors, at what level are the graphics made, how does their technical support work, etc., because to enter the market you need to be significantly better than your competitors. Reviews and purchasing this application yourself can help you find information.

The sales plan is basically always built on the basis of this data (unless, of course, we are talking about a unique development that has no analogues on the market) and takes into account seasonality, since some applications are related to the seasons or holidays.

Building a marketing concept

In the second step, it is important to understand whether the application will be paid and whether it will offer in-app purchases. This decision depends on your goals. If an application is required solely for advertising a particular product or promoting a brand (for example, a collection of culinary tips advertising kitchen utensils of a certain brand), then its main task is to attract as many users as possible; only a completely free application can cope with this. If the goal of the application is to earn money on your own, then, of course, you will need to take money from users.

However, most developers today make free applications that first interest their consumers, and only then offer in-app purchases, for example, for additional functionality or expanded capabilities. This allows you to attract more users. The third option is to make a profit by placing advertising inside your completely free application. It is clear that it is possible to start advertising only after winning a certain audience, since the presence of advertising in itself irritates the user and often leads to negative comments on this matter, which is unacceptable at the stage of launching the market. There are, of course, more interesting options, for example, unobtrusive advertising of your partners within the application through joint promotions. Such methods require the constant presence of a marketer on your project.

Mobile application positioning

The next stage of developing an application’s marketing strategy is its correct positioning, defining a unique selling proposition, as when developing a strategy for any other product. First of all, it is necessary to decide what user problem the application is intended to solve: it could be an interesting game for entertainment, an aggregator of information on a particular narrow topic, a practical solution to a particular user problem, a service. Today's user is very spoiled by a wide choice of applications, most of which they are already bored with, so your application must truly solve an important problem for the consumer. In any case, the functionality should be better and more convenient than that of competitors. In fact, for applications that have many competitors, the essence of a unique selling proposition comes down to a succinct formulation of your advantageous differences. We will tell you how to form a brand for your mobile application or other product in the next article on strategic brand management.

Prospects for the mobile application market

The main trends that currently exist in the Western application market and which are gradually coming to the Russian market:

Environmentally friendly, focused on helping consumers preserve nature
Wellness, focus on a healthy and exciting lifestyle
Focus on improving the quality of life of consumers - landscape and interior design, style, gastronomy, travel, etc.
Business, speeding up work and providing the opportunity to conduct business remotely
Education and development
Additional applications for communication on social networks, narrowly themed social networks.

Target audience of the mobile application

The next step, as when planning a marketing strategy for any other product, is identifying the target audience. Typically, we can know the following about the target audience: gender and age structure, interests, profession, education, place of work, health status, region of residence, etc.

Improving the mobile application

When developing an application, it is very important to understand that in order to maintain constant contact with the consumer, it will constantly require updates - adding new functions, improvements depending on customer requests, and qualitative expansion of functionality. Otherwise, the user gets bored and stops using the application. It is very important to plan future app updates in advance and discuss this with your developers, as they need to be very regular and frequent, otherwise an unsatisfied user will go looking for competitors' apps. In addition, it is much easier to sell an update or any additional functions to a user who has already purchased and actively uses your application once. In addition, it is important to generally set up an effective communication channel with your users who have already downloaded the application so that they do not delete it and use it constantly.

The update plan does not imply correcting errors, since they simply should not be in a good application, and if detected, they should be corrected instantly, since any bad review can cut you off from most of the audience.

Mobile application promotion

Application promotion is carried out in two main ways:

Promotion through the AppStore (if we are talking about an application for IOS) is the main goal of getting into the TOP 10 or at least TOP 100 rankings in the required categories. This is the best promotion option, which will then attract users in arithmetic progression.
Promotion through a website with a product description - in this case, all standard methods of promoting online resources are applicable.

Since purchasing an app is an impulse purchase, it is very important to immediately make a good impression and convince the consumer to make this purchase in just a few seconds. Let's list the basic rules:

The icon and name of the application should not only attract attention, but also reflect its essence and key characteristics.
The name should be simple and easy to reproduce.
The app description should actually reflect your unique selling proposition.
At the beginning of the description, you can place information about benefits, special offers, or a very good short review.
The description should be as short as possible, divided into paragraphs and lists.
A photo app should clearly display its most beneficial features.
The application website should be as simple as possible, it should have compelling text and graphics similar to your application.
The application should be easy: only the most persistent buyer will wait several minutes for the application to fully download, and most of them will simply go in search of competitors.

Collecting feedback on the mobile application

An important part of promoting an app in the AppStore is collecting good reviews. To do this, you can offer the first customers a gift or a discount in exchange for leaving a review, and also turn to reputable specialized sites and blogs. The most important thing here is the impeccable quality of your application. It is important not only to write the application press release correctly, but also to choose the right time for its release: it should not coincide with the release of updates for high-profile applications or applications from large developers, otherwise all attention will be given to them. It is necessary to time the release to coincide with the launch of your application on the market, the release of a new update or other key event. This will make the press release interesting.

Email marketing of mobile application

The second stage of app promotion can be a mailing list to the subscriber base of your app’s website. It is very important to create a competent structure, design and concise text of the letter. In the newsletter you can talk about updates to your application and good reviews received. However, the key disadvantage of mailing is its cost.

In addition, users gradually developed a blindness to advertising emails, and spam is completely prohibited by law. Therefore, before you start sending letters to your clients, you need to take care of the personal data policy and the legal purity of the subscriber base you have collected. Our company has extensive experience in this matter, so we recommend that you seriously study all the necessary documents, since Roskomnadzor has now become very active in fining companies that violate legislation in this area.

Mobile app advertising

The next step is direct advertising of the application. You need to factor the advertising and marketing budget into your app business plan and figure out whether it will be profitable. This method is also very expensive, so its use must be carefully calculated and a special business plan must be created, because your main goal is to recoup the costs of creating and promoting a mobile application at a profit. For each media channel, it is important to take into account the cost of contact with the user, the cost of each download of your application, the ratio of advertising costs to project revenue, the capacity of the media channel, that is, the size of its audience, and the effectiveness of leads. Only a specialist can write such a plan for you initially.

We consider specialized publications for your target audience, as well as online advertising and promotion in social media, to be the most acceptable options. A more direct method of app advertising is to post information in other apps to your audience, as well as participate in online app listings. Such channels have the lowest cost per lead according to statistics. As support, you can use offline advertising for applications with a mass audience. We recommend using a QR code.

Mobile application business plan

Promotion methods highly depend on the cost of the application, its audience and the actual market capacity. Any application, whether it is aimed at promoting an offline brand or making a profit directly, is a business project in which it is important to take into account every detail: the cost of high-quality development, the cost of subsequent updates and technical support, advertising costs, your time to develop ideas updates, texts and photos. Application sales, unfortunately, are falling every day due to satiation of consumers and enormous competition, so often, with an illiterate approach, creating an application is wasted money.

However, the market that will open up to you if you do everything right is simply huge, and we know a lot of examples of its successful conquest. Therefore, do not waste money in vain, contact professionals and we will help you create the right marketing strategy for your mobile application and make this project profitable.

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