The app store is host to many failed consumer apps. I’ll take a guess to say that more than double that figure don’t progress past wireframe stage.
Why is the infant mortality rate so high here, and how can we increase the probability of building a success consumer product?
Here’s a brief insight into how I’d suggest gauging the potential effectiveness of your application.
When building consumer apps, it’s really important to understand utility. Everything on a user’s home screen should serve a purpose, the greater the utility of that purpose, the safer an application is from delete.
Today, the majority of mobile users download apps such as YouTube, Uber & Spotify without thinking; the utility of these apps are very easy to grasp, resonate with the user and thus win their spot on a user’s phone screen.
In less than a decade, the public perception of mobile apps have ranged from fun & games to essentially, the operating system for life. That’s a change in tone, and with that change came about a tighter admissions process as to what applications people let into their lives.
If your application cannot prove why it impacts a users life greatly, consumers will not let you in — at least for the long haul. It’s the long haul we all want though, and to be inducted into that class of applications you must have solved a problem in an area that users will continue to encounter for ideally, a good chunk of their lives.
If you’re already working on solving a problem you deem to be impactful, have you convinced yourself of it before you start convincing others? Ask yourself, will your application greatly impact the area of your life you intend to impact? Would you truly feel a void if it were taken away?
If you were honest enough to have answered these questions to be untrue, you are likely solving for ‘moments’, and you’ll get drowned out within the operating system of life.
Adopting a utilitarian outlook on building consumer products may restrict you from working on a bunch of stuff, you may even attribute the difficulty to innovate within this space to consumers’ lack of appetite to try new stuff or harshness. In which case I’d respond; all bases haven’t been covered, it’s building utility that is now more intricate.
Good luck!
Originally published at https://anash.substack.com.
