Common app development mistakes and how to avoid them to ensure your app's success from the start

 Bumble's Whitney Wolfe Herd founders have become billionaires through app-centric business models. These businesses have enabled physical product companies like Simba Sleep or Peleton to create engaged communities and attract new customers. It's possible to make a great mobile app. Apart from e-commerce or Chrome extensions, apps are one of the most profitable types of the startup. But they can go wrong.

Quibi is one of the most prominent failures. With close to PS1.2bn of investment, a group of top-status entertainment and tech industry veterans built a short-form rival to Netflix, iPlayer, or Amazon Prime Video. Unfortunately, many low-profile apps fail every Quibi. You can be right when you develop your app. Here are the top 4 mistakes that app buyers still make (often without fault of their own) and how you can avoid them.

You may be able to strike it big like Johnny Boufarhat, a Manchester billionaire who created Hopin's meeting app and quickly earned unicorn status.

Product-market fit needs to be there.

Every day, thousands of new apps become available due to high demand from the market for new functionality and content. However, this high volume creates intense competition, which makes it more difficult for even "good apps" to make an impact. According to research, one in two installed apps is deleted within 30 days. This could impact both your initial investment and your ongoing expenditure. Poor product-market fit is often the reason. For example, Quibi, the 10-minute video application, needed to be recovered. After their free trial, more than 90% of Quibi's users left. Media critics also complained that Quibi didn't understand Quibi.

An app's product-market match is when it is placed in the right market, and it can satisfy specific needs or address end-users pain points. For example, fortnight Studio has a client called Bumble. Bumble is a dating app that allows women to make the first move. Before Bumble, men would often be the ones making the first move. This was an excellent solution for both women and men. Bumble helped both men and women feel more comfortable using the platform. This increased their chances for success in the dating world. How can you find the perfect product-market match for your business? You can also read my other tips to answer that question.

Start with the complete vision - an all-singing, all-dancing version

You may have heard Mike Tyson's quote: "Everyone is organized until they are punched in the face." Unfortunately, the app version of this is unable to be agile.

Many startups have a vision about where the product will end. This is often the version with the highest level of functionality that has been operating for years with millions upon millions of users. It might sound great, but it can also be dangerous to start with a fully-realized and expensive product that does not reflect the original vision. Quibi did it. It's possible that Netflix and YouTube need a fully polished product rather than a minimum viable version ('MVP'). Or, it's an excellent method to lose PS1.2bn. Unfortunately, many companies are still hoping to make this same mistake.

Start small to understand the market response and adapt accordingly for success. Fortnight Studio's client Simba Sleep was an online mattress manufacturer with a tremendous product-market match. Simba wanted to be more than their incredible products and to be their customers' (and prospects') personal sleep coach. Our sleep coaching mobile app software company was created. We used our insights to determine the problems that were digitally solved. Obviously, the app's core functionality would have to track sleep.

After creating the concept, we worked in weekly sprints. We quickly moved on to wireframes, user flows, and user journeys. We completed each stage in two weeks. This allowed us to test the components and ensure that they worked. We wanted to avoid the frustration of working on something for months and not trying it. Instead, we wanted to be able to solve a problem that no one else had or create something that no one wanted. Each iteration allowed us to solve more minor issues more quickly than with a full-blown application and ensured that the launch version would succeed.

Quibi didn't waste PS1.2bn because of a hunch or inspiration. But they could have tested product market fit and iteratively solved more minor problems through many development stages instead of trying to solve one huge, unsolvable problem, which led to Quibi's rapid and spectacular demise. The lesson here is always to start small and iterate often.

Prioritize monetization above user value

Your mobile app development agencies can make the world better or make you wealthy. It's my wish that it does the same for you. It's okay to make money. However, if you begin from a position of monetization instead of user value, you will likely have less revenue.

Products should not be built with monetization in the first place. Instead, you should focus on creating a product that people love. Then figure out how to make it monetizable.

Spotify's freemium model, which allows users to test the product while upgrading to premium features, is a great option. In addition, Quibi offered a free trial. However, the content was only provided after the trial ended.

Spotify, however, places a high value on user value. For example, Spotify offers you streaming music and playlists for free. In addition, premium subscribers benefit from ad-free listening, offline listening, and so forth.

Netflix is moving to an ad-supported to replace its premium model. This is to help increase its shrinking user base. These models are available to even the most powerful of the large.

It would help if you focused on growing your user base, not turning them into cash cows. It will be much easier to make money when you do that.

Short-term thinking

The speed of app development is fast, but it's essential to have a long-term plan in place. Many projects fail because the founders, initial stakeholders, or other project participants lose interest or become distracted.

The relative ease with which you can start an app project today has the unintended side effect of making it easy to stop maintenance, drop or abandon projects. So naturally, apple and other platforms do not like this. They even stop updating apps after three years and remove those that fail to meet a minimum download threshold.

It is possible to reap the rewards of a commitment. Fortnight Studios' client Simba Sleep was once again a success. This was due to a good product market fit, careful testing, and iteration before the app's final version was developed - in just six weeks. It reached the top 20 of the health and fitness category with a 4.8/5 rating and over 10,000 downloads. You think it's done. Wrong.

My team and I constantly improve our work rather than saying, "job done." This is how we can drive approximately 15,000 monthly downloads and keep users engaged (measured by monthly active sessions). 46% of users track their sleep using the app every night, while 52% retain it daily.

There is more sleep app development companies on the market than ever before. But, as with all other categories of apps, you must take a different line to success. Instead, you need to have a long-term perspective and adapt to continue winning for a long time.