How to Build an App that Makes Money

A bad app is something you absolutely cannot solve with money. For example, a poorly-designed flight search app or an extremely slow banking app will have negative bottom line impacts on your brand, compelling your potential customers to look for other options.

On the other hand, a well-thought-out app, whether it’s focusing on social media, music, food ordering or any other, will lead your customers to interact with your brand more, rocketing you up to the top of their preference charts.

So, how do you go about building a good app that has the stickiness and encourages the user to use it often or stay longer?

Well, we’ve jotted down a few points to help you dig in:

Hire The Best Engineers – Both Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs have stated that a good engineer is around 10x more productive than an average engineer. Let’s face it – the best way to create a good app is to hire a team of really good engineers. Tech giants like Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft compete to recruit the best engineers who possess niche skills. A good engineer has deep knowledge of code reuse, automation, sophisticated cloud services, and the latest engineering tools that can speed up the development work and cut down on mundane tasks. A small team of best talents can create smart, secure and immersive apps. Regretfully, a large team of average engineers can commit mistakes that snowball into massive issues. So, to pull off a good app, recruit intelligently.
Develop Your App’s Wireframe – Once you have the best engineers on board, get engaged with visualizing and sketching out your app’s wireframe. Identify each element like header, footer, sidebars, content, and navigation. Have a clear idea about the number of screens that you want and how your target audience will use them. It’s only after you’ve developed your app’s wireframe, which is your app’s blueprint, can you think about kickstarting the design process. Use wireframing tools like Fluid UI, Balsamiq, InVision, JustinMind, and UXPin, to make your UI edgy.
Design Your App – Next comes the designing aspects. Let’s not deny that humans are visual beings. We process information based on what we see. So, strike the right balance between your app’s fonts, colors, themes and other design elements to increase the number of app installs. Remember that an app isn’t good enough if it doesn’t have easy navigation. So, go for awesome navigational elements, pick pixel-perfect visual details, and choose animations mindfully to ensure that your app is intuitive and usable.
Start with Simple Designs – A well-structured and simple app always scores the point over a large and complicated one that looks clunky. So, start with a simplistic design and then add the critical features that offer high values. After adding the essential features, add the nice-to-haves and deprioritize the less important ones. This would help in lowering the tension during the app development process. Even successful apps like Facebook and WeChat started out with simple and specific functionalities and expanded only after strengthening their market position.
Seek Out Problems and Iterate – To build good software, try and identify the issues related to the app and then troubleshoot them one by one. Test interface designs through non-functional mockups and try different features through semi-functional mock-ups. After you develop the final product, begin testing the app with a small group of testers who can spot obvious bugs quickly. As problems get addressed, open up to a large group of testers who can spot more esoteric issues. The aim is to track problems and iterate, that is, repeatedly refine the final output, and sand down rough edges until a good app emerges.

Keep the above pointers in mind to create an app that gives your brand a significant weight and your audiences their Aha! Moment.

After all, a value-based app can serve as a catalyst for increasing your brand’s recognition and acceptance.

The Key to Brand App-ceptance

Never forget to create an app that serves your audiences with value. If you think value first, your user engagement will get a boost and your brand position will gain prominence.

In the end, you not only need an app that survives but one that thrives. One that connects with your audiences on a deeper level. Isn’t it?

So, to create an app that strikes the right chord with your customers, keep a note of the above facts and watch your software take the app store by storm.