“Build an app” they said, “it will be fun” they said… What they didn’t say was how long it would take and how expensive it would be.
I’d been helping people manage their money for years, and even giving away copies of my budgeting spreadsheet for free. The problem was that every time we wanted to improve the spreadsheet, we didn’t have a way where all existing spreadsheets could be updated.
Our challenge was how to transition from a reasonable spreadsheet to a kick-ass app. And this is where many were learnt.
I started by doing relevant market research on what was already out there in the budgeting and money education/management space. I found that all of the offerings made the same assumption – that people who worked out their budget, would stick to it.
In my experience of educating people about money, I knew this assumption was far from accurate! We knew that without life goals being identified and then linked to a budget, people always struggled – no matter how great the ‘software’ they may be using.
Without a clear ‘why’ or ‘how’, most people struggle to stick to any sort of budget.
We knew this element is needed to form the basis of our app.
Four tips for developing your own app
Tip #1 – You need an app developer who is both competent and gets what you’re trying to achieve. The first few developers we spoke to were either outsourcing the work overseas and didn’t seem to get how things work in Australia, or they were prohibitively expensive. Thankfully, we found a guy based in Germany who did his own work, understood what we were trying to achieve with the app and loved where we were going with it.
Tip #2 – Whatever the initial budget is, double it! Quotes varied wildly from $2k for OS developers to $80K for on-shore ones.
We settled on an $8-10k option. The first draft kind of worked but without an aestheticly pleasing interface, and lacked a lot of flexibility to switch for users. The initial budget quickly evaporated, and we had to pay more to get the developer to keep making the improvements we wanted. Big lesson: there are always things you want to change, or improve on the fly, so flexibility and a ‘slush fund’ of extra capital to accommodate these changes is critical.
Tip # 3 – Plug in for ongoing support post launch with your App developer.
When the app went live, the developer moved on to other projects. When glitches or opportunities to improve arose, he simply didn’t have capacity to help. We had to start looking for someone again and after a very false start with a rookie in Australia and three months later, we finally found someone who was excellent and could work ongoing for a few hours a week. Bugs got fixed quickly, he asked when he needed help understanding what we meant and made as many suggestions for improvements as we did.
Tip #4 – If you build it, but don’t market it, nobody will come. Until we started using it every day in our business and promoting it with prospects, nobody was using it. We tried and failed with search engine optimisation but we were always outranked by existing apps that had existing users. It wasn’t until we started using PR and social media to support the app that we saw our usership grow.
Building an app was a massive learning curve, and took way longer than anticipated but it has definitely been worth it.
