Many developers get the entrepreneurial itch to launch their own company and avoid working for someone else. An area of growth that’s attractive is mobile app development. Because phones are ubiquitous to our lives, apps are overtaking websites as the main way businesses reach customers. But you don’t need to be a hard-core technophile to build a successful mobile app business. As you’ll see, having marketing moxie and the right set of development and launch tools is the formula for success.
Local Business Success
For insight into the keys to mobile app business success, just look at Melbourne’s Michael Barnett, founder of Your Phone App and Australia’s leading mobile app developer. Barnett started with a primary input of a successful startup, seeing a problem area that lacked solutions. Barnett recognized that small companies are continually challenged to connect with customers. Mobile apps are a great way for a small business to interact with customers, and Barnett found an efficient solution to deliver customized apps to a needy market.
Many startups focus on big. They focus on enterprise solutions that reach global customers. The fact is, the most accessible problems to solve are those of local businesses. Barnett reached out to local businesses, measured their pain points, and realized they face the same challenges as larger businesses, but lack the resources to solve them. He calculated that he could help them by providing the apps that could solve their primary customer challenges.
Great apps require easy-to-implement features that help customers increase sales, promote their brand, offer effective customer communication, and build customer loyalty. Technically, meeting all of these requirements in developing an app gets complicated real fast. So Barnett had to find a way to work through the complex development requirements.
Having the Right Tools
To build an app development business, he needed to have the tools to efficiently design, deploy, and test client apps. Building the business required getting out in the community, building a pipeline, and closing sales, not spending time coding. A critical factor in Barnett’s success was finding an app reseller platform from which he could quickly launch new apps, without investing in a development team. White label app reseller platforms such as Bizness Apps, the platform and service that Barnett chose, provide a drag and drop interface for putting together the key features that small business customers need in their apps.
Particularly with the vast number of local retail, food, and personal service businesses that Barnett identified as needing mobile app solutions, he found several key features of mobile app building platforms that greatly reduce the design to launch timeline. Clearly brand control is at the top of the list since the customer brand and identity has to be presented uniquely. Functionally, ordering systems and location aware features are particularly key to local businesses that work within the customers’ communities. And loyalty programs build on the brands and ensure follow on sales. Barnett also found that great customer support from the reseller platform added extra resources to his arsenal and further reduced the investment and distraction of building in-house support.
Extending Current Business Lines
As great as the local business market is for mobile app services, mobile app reseller platforms have further helped agencies and web service companies offer app development and deployment as a new business line and differentiator. Digital marketing maven RYNO Strategic Solutions, out of Phoenix, Arizona, found that adding mobile app services provided a significant new revenue stream from existing customers and enhanced their suite of products leading to bigger, better sales opportunities and greater customer retention. They found that adopting a reseller platform like Bizness Apps did not distract from other key product lines. It provided an efficient development platform that let RYNO shorten their mobile app launch time to a week for many customers.
Whether your focus is on the accessible local small business market, or as an extension of a current business, mobile apps are a great business opportunity. Reseller platforms with great support services allow you to focus on the customer problems rather than the development headaches. The key to success is then to focus on obtaining app clients by identifying their pain points in customer awareness, acquisition, and retention, while at the same time having a solutions platform to efficiently meet those client needs.
