We just released one app which was not on our development plans, by any stretch of imagination – T47 Expenses. The only reason was that from all the offerings in Play Store, we could not find one app to fill-up all our requirements. Most of them are making interesting things with nice interfaces but not all them are open to future expansions.
Our release was not only to show ourselves that (maybe) we can penetrate an aglomerate offering but mostly because we foresaw some possible fat tail options. We left the application under-developed (so-to-speak) because the efforts might not bear fruit and might exist just in our imagination. In order to expand the app we learnt to allow customers/businesses to see value and ask for changes.
And here was in fact the idea which prompted this post:
- the app is not finished, is just a little bit better than others and hides a few ideas not fully developed
- the intent market is businesses, although is not declared as such
- we don’t know yet what will be the direction for it, but waiting for input from our partners
How do we wait for input? For starters, collecting usage of the app via Google Analytics, then ratings and comments is another (anemic) feed-back.
The release was also an exercise in humbleness: the name is quirky and will ask the reader to send us her opinion about it, and just searching in the same category seems to stretch anyone’s patience – there is a lot of offerings. How do you differentiate your app?
There are a lot of ideas we heard and here is our experience:
- buy your ratings and comments – there are many companies offering it
- stalk the “gurus” on the subject to blog about your app
- play nicely with the editors of e-publishers to mention about it and suddenly you may get famous
- insist on nice design
- find companies to white label your app for their own brick-and-mortar advertising
Summary: Developing an application but not really closing it and waiting to see what is the reaction on it, we were waiting for prompts for the next push in connecting with businesses – that was the expectation.