MBA2020 Q&A Wednesday: How do I know if people would want my app?

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Hey o welcome to the $100 MBA show, helping you navigate the world of business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Brian and Brian asks I'm in the process of building a mobile app that I think is going to be really popular. It's targeted for people in the business niche, but I'm wondering how how do I know people will want to buy my app? There's a lot of upfront investment when it comes to building a mobile app, both in iOS and Android, and I want to make sure before I start investing that people actually want to buy what I have in mind. Any suggestions would be super helpful. Appreciate it Brian. Love the question. Brian, Idea validation is something that I really promote, something I really, really believe in because like you said, you don't want to invest a lot of time and energy and of course capital to build out your product and then find out no one wants to buy it. So in today's episode I'm going to answer Brian's question on how he can validate his idea, make sure there's buyers for his product before he invests a lot of Money and time in building out the final version or what I would say the production version of his app. There are many ways to learn if there's interest in the market and the problem you solve, and how to practically test if people are willing to give up their hard earned dollars for your app. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. 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The reason why idea validation is so important is because in order for you to have a viable business, you need enough of the market, enough people to buy your product and service to be viable, to be a viable business. It's not just enough for you and your friends to think you have a great idea. They can't be your only customers. So Brian's question is a good one. So the first step in idea validation is being able to be very clear on what exactly are you solving? What's the problem you're solving with your product? You should try to be able to answer this question in no more than one sentence. Yes, I am sure your idea, your software, your app does many things. But what is the one thing that is the reason why people are going to install it? We're going to buy it. What's the main problem you are solving with your solution? Your app, for example, when Dropbox started, the problem that we're solving is allowing you to access your files from anywhere in the world. So it's cloud storage, right? You can access your files in the cloud. That's really what it does? Yes, it does all these other things and now you can share and collaborate and all this other stuff. But the original version, that was the idea. What about PayPal? PayPal made it easy for you to send and receive money with Just an email address. That is what PayPal is. That's how it got started. That was the main thing it did. Now it does a whole bunch of other stuff. Checkout buttons and payroll and a whole bunch of other stuff. But that came later. We want to make sure that our core product, our core offering is something people want. So what you want to do is you want to do a bit of research and frame your solution to the problem that you are solving in a form of a question. So for example, the question would be how do I track how much time I'm spending online? Now you want to search how many people search for this term every single month. And you could do this with Google's Keyword Planner. This is an easy free tool online where you can pop in any phrase and see how many people searched for this keyword this month or last month or the month before that. Another great tool is Google Trends. This tells you what topic, what industries, what markets, what keywords are trending. So for example, during the pandemic, remote work was something that was really, really skyrocketing and it's tapered down. Since what you want to look for in a really viable long term business is something that's trending and kind of moving and growing slowly over time. We're not looking for peaks and valleys here. The other thing is that you need to make sure that people are willing to buy your products. So one of the things I did with our software, Webinar Ninja is I presold the software before I launched it. I literally created a landing page, a one pager on my explaining the problem. I solve how I will solve it with my software. And I put up a few mockups and screenshots and a video of me explaining what this software does. Webinar Ninja and I basically pre sold the product. I said hey, if you'd like, I'm going to give you a great deal. And our beta users at the time, they got lifetime access. So they paid one time and they had access to the software for life. Now you may not want to do this forever, but it's good for just your first hundred or so users so that you can learn from them and you can get some startup capital. But most of all you're going to learn are people willing to pay for your solution. Now if you have a great deal, like say for example, you're going to give them lifetime access to your app for $50, this should be like a no brainer. If they're not willing to give up $50 or $100 or whatever your price is for lifetime access to your app before you build it. They're not going to pay you $10 a month. If there's a strong enough pain to the problem, people are going to be willing to part with their money and then at that point, money talks. You'll see if the sales come in from your pre sales. For us at Webinar Ninja, it did. We saw a huge demand and therefore we got the signal that people are willing to buy this product. So let's build it now. If you feel like it's going to be really hard to sell it just off some mock ups, a video, a sales page, and you do have a bit of cash and time, my recommendation is not to jump right into the native app, iOS or Android app. That can be quite costly and a lot of time will be spent on doing that. Instead, the easiest, quick and dirty way to do this is to create a web app, basically a website that's responsive and looks good on mobile. People can create a shortcut on their phone and they'll have an icon just like an app and it'll open up like a browser. This is called creating a minimal viable product. People can log into the site and there's a lot of no code tools that can allow you to build a very simple app as a web app and then you can go ahead and get people to buy it and use it right on their phone. This is especially doable when your product is simple, when you don't over complicate it. When your first version just solves a specific problem. Once you nail that and people are happy with the way you solve that problem, then you can add to the product, then you can get sophisticated, then you can add other features and other bells and whistles. But if your core product is not solving the problem, you got a problem. Plus, a web app is easy to use. You could just buy a URL. People can easily go to it. They don't need to install anything. They don't have to guess if it will work on their phone or not. They can use it on their computer. And then guess what, there's tools that you can convert your web app into a mobile app later on. Remember, your job here is just to get people to buy your product. And once they've bought, it's going to allow you to fund your business. You're going to get sales, you're going to get confirmation that you're on the right track. You're going to get feedback from your customers so that you can improve upon your product and iterate and make the right improvements. And guess what? You have a legitimate business now. You're exchanging value for money.

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To wrap up today's Q and a, Wednesday's question from Brian. How do I make sure people want my app? Well, you gotta present the value to them. This is the bottom line. This is what people actually use to make a decision to buy. So you can do that through a sales page like I mentioned, with mock ups, with even a demo with your figma files or your sketch files or whatever your design files are for your app. If it's a deep enough pain, if it's a problem that they really need solved, they'll be interested and they'll be willing to give up their money to get first access to get a great deal. You can also go the web app route and I actually recommend this route even if you do pre sell it. Start with a web app and then move on to the mobile app. Even if you include both for those lifetime members, just so that you get a proof of concept going, just so you get people having something in their hands so they can use it and feel like they got rewarded for backing you up. And of course they get to use your solution. Now you might be thinking, Omar, how do I promote this launch? How do I market this? Well, of course you can use paid advertising, you can leverage your own network, you can use email marketing, all that kind of stuff. But of course you can use other platforms that have an audience that might help you out, which is something like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Now, some of these platforms have their own rules. It's a little bit easier for some types of products to be approved versus others. You're going to have to do a bit of homework to find out. But I know a lot of huge software companies that started out on Kickstarter, like ghost ghost.org, the founder John O' Nolan was here on this podcast sharing some amazing wisdom in an in depth discussion, so you may want to search that in our archives. But he started his app on Kickstarter, he raised the funds, and now they're a multimillion dollar company. Well, that wraps up today's episode. Thanks so much to Brian who asked today's Q and A Wednesday's question. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. And don't forget, as you're listening to this episode right now on a podcast, appreciate. Go ahead, open up your phone and hit subscribe, hit follow so that you get access to over 2,000 business lessons in our archives. It's the only way to get access to all those lessons. Also, you get first access to every episode. It gets downloaded automatically so that you never miss a beat. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Let's not complicate things. Business in its simplest form is a value exchange. You are giving something of value to somebody. In exchange, they're giving you value, which is money. So the value has to be there. It has to be worth their money. So validate that before you build, before you invest your time, your effort, your thoughts, your life savings. Because of the fundamental roots of your business. If it's not there, you're asking for trouble. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. I'll see you. Take care. Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything, even though I order the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time.

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