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🎥 6 Things to know with for app idea

Picture this, you’re sat having a coffee and boom, an unbelievable idea for an app comes to mind and you have to have it made. What should you do first?  Well here’s 6  things you should know about getting your idea up and running. 

Lets start with some things to know at the beginning

  1. Check it doesn’t already exist, take time to do some research. You do not want to go through months of development, spending your hard earned money and right before you go live, you see that someones already done it. That’s not to say though that you cant do it your way with your unique selling point,

 

  1. If you pass step one then get your app name in mind early. Having the name of your app ready plus your branding can really help get the ball rolling. Some development companies can provide this as a service in your journey with them, but if you want to get started i recommend you use https://namelix.com/  This is a one stop shop for finding an app name thats catchy, plus the branding to go with it. You can find your ‘google’ or ‘trivago’ really easily. 

 

  1. Once you have your  name in mind you then also need to run it through a name checker. Like https://www.namecheckr.com/ This site will let you know where the username of your app is available. Having a uniformed online presence online will make sure users know how to find you. You ideally want the same name everywhere so run as many checks as you want until you find the one that fits.

 

  1. Purchase your website domain and create your social media accounts. This will take some time but having them all setup and ready to go means you have your online presence ready, you can also shared sneak peeks of the project, get your online presence up and running, share insight into your journey.

 

  1. Consider how your app is going to make money. We get lots of clients with great ideas but very few have a business plan behind it. How ill you go about recouping the investment you make in the development. Theres a few different options, you can:
  • Make the app a paid for app, which is a fixed one time payment for the customer. Its immediate revenue but it has its downsides. It will cut your potential customers to a very low % because the majority of users wont want to pay immediately 
  • That then takes us to subscriptions. Could you take a % of your apps functionality and place it behind a paywall? If your app was a camera app for example with a number of filters, could you put 9 out of the 10 filters behind a subscription or like we mentioned before a single payment. 
  • Or the final option is ads, yes i said it, those horrible ads that take over your whole screen that no one likes. They have very little upside, they pay fractions of a penny to you, they interrupt the users experience and they looks awful. 
  • Now subscriptions are the way to go if you also want long term revenue. If your model is fairly priced, users could pay you monthly for a long period of time. Picture seeing an app for £60 up front, would you pay that? Probably not, however if you break that down to a small £5 a month subscription over a year, you as the business make the same amount, give or take fees. 

 

  1. That brings us to point number 6, how much does it cost to get an going and what is the ongoing  payments. This doesn’t include the development costs as that will vary depending on the size of the app you want to make.  But once you have the app made you will get hosting fees. Now this information will vary entirely on the company you decide to go with for your development. Here at Createanet your monthly ongoing payments are for your hosting on our server, don’t panic about the jargon, this is basically like your app paying rent. You have a monthly ongoing fee, and we keep the app live and your app uses your storage allowance on our server. To give you an idea, here at Createanet our hosting for your app is £35 a month. 

 

We then need to think about the type of app you want to make, will it be android, ios or both? Google play store and the app store have a fee to create your developer account, this is around the £99 mark at the time of recording. So thats a £200 expense to create your developer accounts.This is where your developed app will be uploaded to and you manage how the app looks on the store, like screenshots, descriptions, etc plus any agreements like tax forms.

 

The stores of Google Play and the Apple App store don’t take any monthly fees, but they do take a percentage from any transactions of your app. Apple for example at the time of recording take a 30% cut. So the £5 a month subscription we mentioned earlier, would bring in £3.50 to youÂ