Before you build the app

‘Let’s build an app’ can sound like a very clear next step, particularly when someone else has one and appears to be doing well with it. You have the expertise, you have plenty of material, and it’s easy to imagine that putting those things into a similar format could produce a similar result.

It might be a good idea, but I would want to understand quite a lot before spending the money.

What are people going to use it for? How will they find it? What will persuade them to pay, and what will make them stay after the first month? Who is going to keep it useful once the excitement of launching has passed?

I appreciate that these can be frustrating questions when someone has already decided what they want to build. They can feel like an unnecessary delay, particularly if the opportunity seems obvious, but answering them is part of working out whether the investment makes sense.

When we look at another business, we see the parts it chooses to show us. An app or a beautifully presented membership is relatively easy to examine; the team, budget and ongoing work supporting it are usually much harder to assess. We might have very little idea how customers arrive, what it costs to reach them or how much work goes into giving them a reason to stay.

We may also be looking at a business that has spent years putting those things in place. What appears to be a successful new product could depend on an audience, a team and a way of working that existed long before it launched. Even knowing the revenue would only tell us part of the story.

That is why I’m cautious about taking another business’s visible success as a set of instructions for your own. You can learn from what someone else is doing while still recognising that your starting point, resources and customers may be quite different.

An app might make an existing service much easier to use, or give customers something they have been asking for. If that is the case, there is a useful conversation to have about building one. But I would rather begin with what is happening in the business now, where the experience falls short and what the team can realistically support.

Then, if we decide to build it, we’ll understand what it needs to do and what will be required to make it work once it exists.