You don’t need an app for that (yet)

“So my idea is an app…”

That’s how some entrepreneurs I meet start pitching their world-changing concept. As much as we want to transform our partners’ ideas into concrete stuffs, I am sometimes in an awkward position: Should I relentlessly sell a new mobile app development project, or should I try and help them save a dozen thousands bucks?

Even then, a few of these partners are not always ready to hear what we want to say… Especially when it starts with You don’t need an app for that. I won’t mention the countless stats on apps download, usage or the probability to break through (basically, you’d rather play the lottery), and focus instead on what we think matters.

Your idea is not an app

Start with Why.

The main reason I cringe every time I hear the “my idea is an app” sentence is that an app is not a product. It’s a mean, a channel, an enabler, a tool. Your service deserves much more than a pitch around the app you want to build. It needs a Why (which some also call a story, or a problem to solve).

If you consider your service is your app, you’ll put a lot of pressure on your development team (whether it’s outsourced or not) to have a perfect “product”, add nice-to-have features along the way, even sometimes in the middle of sprints, and be really, really disappointed after two weeks on the App Store and 157 downloads to show for.

The people we worked with who were blinded by the “app effect” had a tendency to lose sight of what really mattered, and developed their app to become a swiss-army knife. Realizing the failure, they ended up putting the blame on poor development, on numerous bugs, and sometimes wouldn’t even pay the bill (true story).

Having a Why will naturally push all your initial efforts towards on single objective…

Building your community

The app won’t drive users to you.

After addressing the “my app is my product” syndrome, we move to the “I need an app to find my users” one. As soon as you start with a Why (or a problem to solve), it sheds a totally different light on what you need to achieve right now. There are countless ways to test your idea and see if other people share your cause, and Oussama Ammar from The Family explains it better than I do. Whether it’s going door to door, building a landing page, or playing with Adwords or FB Ads, what you want to achieve is to test the waters and, above everything else, build a community.

Building a community is probably the most subtle and least understood aspect of company creation, since it calls for an attitude that can’t be trained: Authenticity. You can’t fake your Why and your Story. And even as a customer, it’s often difficult to explain why a product or service feels right. An interesting case study for community building are large brands. They figured out the importance of storytelling and customer engagement. Apple mastered that skill long ago, and have sometimes shown strokes of genius with their ads (My personal favorite: “What will your verse be?”). But few actually manage to show authenticity and most of the time, their story feels wrong.

Klout (the reputation measurement app) is a great example of an idea that failed to engage its users and create a community. Users would register, and would never visit the Klout homepage ever again. The move to a content creation and curation platform was an attempt to drive traffic to their website, and failed probably because it did not establish itself as a content platform in the first place (and it wasn’t their Why).

If you’re addressing the right problem and tell a compelling story, a Facebook page can be just what you need to start finding your true followers. You don’t need an app for that… at least not yet.

So… When do you actually need an app?

You now have a 50k followers-strong community. Your story is crystal clear. But your community members’ home screen is crowded, and their “finger time” is valuable. Here is a little experiment. Grab your phone. Count the apps you use. Go ahead, do it. I would probably define myself as “your average mobile phone user”, and here is the result for me:

• Social Networks: Facebook & Cie
• IM: FB Messenger & Cie
• News: Le Monde
• Memos: Evernote, Google Keep
• Right Here Right Now: Uber, Train Times, Shazam
• Learning: Japanese

This is what you have to compete with. So unless you’re a billion dollar company or have the next killer idea to help me learn kanjis, your app won’t probably be installed on my phone. How to avoid that? There are a few “tests” that you can run to know if you actually need an app:

• The “Right Here Right Now” criteria: Do you have to be close to the hands of your users? Uber is a very good example of that test, and interestingly, they designed their service as mobile-first.
• The “Notifications” criteria: Can you drive users to your app through meaningful notifications? (other than « hey, we’re still alive! ») News apps achieve that quite well by giving you updates on topics that you can choose.
• The “automation” phase: You tried and tested all the community-building actions manually (meeting your users, organizing events), and you are now convinced that you need to move to the next step.

At this point, having gone through the Why and Community Building phases not only saved you valuable time and cash, it will also have helped you answer the critical “do I need an app?” question. Even better, you’ll have a clear view of what this app needs to achieve.

Architecting your community

Did you notice? You could read that whole article again and replace the word app by website. And for an IT services company like us, it feels more and more wrong to just develop what we’re paid to do without at least telling our partners that they may not need to spend that money with us right now.

We are convinced that a lot of startups and new entrepreneurs need to shift their initial investment — whether time or money — from IT to Community Architecture. After all, which result would you rather see after putting in 3 months of effort and burning through all of your grand-parents’ savings: Post your app on the Store and pray St Jobs that users will find it by themselves, or have a community of 50,000 active followers to show for?