Part I of IV
The Business Model is the most important decision you’re going to make about your app. It doesn’t matter if you have the best design, great functionality or user aclaim, if the app doesn’t meet your business goals, then it isn’t going to make you successful.
Before choosing the partner that will assist you with turning your vision into a reality, you need a reality check. This reality check boils down to two questions:
1. Will I do what it takes to get it to the Android Marketplace? This might mean investing in your dream or it might mean sacrificing funtionality in version 1 to meet my budget and timeline?
2. Why do I want this Android app? Brand awareness or to make money?
I really enjoy working with startups. I went through dotCOM as a consultant and love the ups and downs that goes with someone coming up with an idea, building a team, hunting for capital and sometimes seeing the idea go live. Doesn’t always work out well. One of the first things I tell my clients is that ideas are easy, implementation hard.
I’m working with one potential client right now who has a pretty cool Android app idea. He’s never been involved in eCommerce before so I spent sometime with him explaining design documents and development tasks. It definitely will be a fun project, push some limits of Android and involve some heavy backend integration as well as some integration with the device’s camera. So after a few email exchanges, I told him (in a nutshell):
You know this is going to cost you about 15,000 just to get started and it’s not even clear that you’ve thought of this, or that or this other thing.
I gave him a sample design document that he did a great job on and he sent it back with a note saying more or less:
I guess I need a second job.
So there you have it, he’s just now answered, half jokingly, the first reality check question which I, being a Santa Cruz California surfer, like to call the surfer question: Am I going to go big or go home? Am I truely committed to my idea? Am I willing to sacrifice, in the short term, a part of my vision to get to where I need to be?
The next question really is what decides the business model. Why
do I want this Android app? Am I trying to reinforce my brand with my target community? Or am I planning on selling the Android App? Or finally do I want to give it away for free and put ads on it?
We at Red Droid Software are seeing three legitimate business models and have deployed our own apps in all three
1. Brand Awareness
2. Ad Supported
3. For Sale
This series of blog articles will examine each business model and discuss some advantages and disadvantages of each. Red Droid has deployed Android apps underneath all three business models and have spent a year and a half collecting data on each.
Our next article in this series will look at using the Brand Awareness model, some launch strategies and why its vital to implement our battle tested Android Marketplace Ranking Optimization (AMRO) strategy. Think SEO but for the Android Marketplace.
The next article will look at ad model. RedDroid Software has developed a formula that more or less ballparks expected revenue based on anticipated downloads. How do we know this? Well because we have five ad supported Android apps, some with massive install bases and some with small focused market segments and track installation base and ad revenue. So we can pretty much estimate ad revenue per day based on a number of parameters. And in our Ad Supported of this blog series, we’ll discus that further as well as some pretty interesting differences between the leading ad networks.
Finally we’ll look at the Holy Grail of models, the For Sale model. Red Droid currently is running three apps for sale and we’ll discuss some things that we are seeing, how to improve sales and what to really expect. It ain’t pretty.