How to Start your App Business as a Non-Techie

Have you ever had an idea for an app? Probably, you spoke to your friends and family about it, and maybe you even received good feedback. So, what has stopped you to get it started? If your answer is ‘I don’t know how to build apps’, continue reading.

I had been in this situation many times and it took me years until I started to work on my first projects. The reason was very simple: I did not know how to build apps and I also did not know anyone technical who was interested in joining me. Unfortunately, this is how the majority of great ideas dies. And perhaps, you are reading this with a great idea in mind and are just waiting for the right moment or opportunity to get started. I wrote this blog post to fight the stereotype that you have to be a developer in order to start an app business and want to motivate you to begin working on your ideas.

The article explains how you validate your idea, create a first product and attract a large following of users without any technical or other expert knowledge. Don’t get me wrong - you will need to be smart, creative and incredibly hard working, but at the end, you will have built the basis for a future business. This will allow you to find a technical co-founder more easily, keep more control over the business and give away less equity when you found your corporation.

The approach is based on three basic principles:

1. Learn as you go. Don’t speculate and invest time in learning things you might not even need in the future.

2. Take small steps. Evolve your offering incrementally and understand quickly if you’re on the right way, or not.

3. Re-combine existing tools. Create your first value proposition around existing products and be creative to re-combine them into something new that people value.

The overall process can be divided into three phases. During the first phase, you will validate people's interest in your idea and build your own audience of potential future customers. In the second phase, you will improve your offering continuously and evolve it towards a marketable product. In the last phase, you will found a small team and build your own customised app product.

Phase 1: Get Attention and build your Audience

Most likely, you have already spoken to friends and family about your idea, maybe you have even conducted a short survey and are confident that your app would add value by solving a common problem.

So, how do you start from scratch? In the first phase you will build a large following of a few hundreds or thousands of interested people. This will help you understand how many people seek a solution for the problem you are trying to solve. Additionally, this will build the basis for potential future app users who you can market to for free.

You can effectively build your initial audience by providing people with valuable and interesting information on a suitable platform of your choice.

Start by considering helpful content for your audience. Are they looking for facts about a subject? Or do they need regular updates on a certain topic? Or do they simply want to be entertained by creatives? Secondly, think about the best platforms to present your content such as social networks, blogs, forums, or email newsletters. Choosing the right medium is absolutely critical to your success, so keep your target audience and type of content in mind while making your decision. Also, don’t let your choice be influenced by the marketability of the platform. This means do not choose Facebook over a niche forum, because you think you will earn more with Facebook in the future. Always remember that building a growing audience is the main goal at this stage and not their monetisation. Once you are confident about your choice of content and platform, invest time into the quality of your content and write your first posts, or create your first images or videos. Congratulations - this is your very first product.

Finally, we will have to bring it to market, or in other words, grow an audience on the platform around your content. Therefore, do your research and read about tips and tricks to grow a following on this particular platform. Most likely, this will involve a lot of manual effort such as commenting on other people’s profiles and linking them to your community. Even though this takes time, you will see traction of your community very quickly if your content is valuable to your audience. Depending on your medium, you will have a few hundreds of followers after just a few weeks or months. Again - this takes time and effort, but you should constantly see the numbers of your community grow. At the end, you have built up a large audience, that you can easily access, and have proven real interest into your content.

Phase 2: Evolve your product

The focus of the first phase was to gain initial traction and create a follower base. Nonetheless, in order to keep your momentum you are still dependent on delivering content, answering questions and replying to comments on a regular basis. Of course, it is not possible for you to continue doing this forever, especially as your audience scales. Currently, your personal reward from your product is still very small irrespectively of your high efforts.

For this reason, it is important that you evolve your offering around two metrics:

1. Increase the value of your product for your audience

2. Decrease your operational effort

It is absolutely critical that every single future product iteration will lead to these two outcomes. This might now sound abstract to you, so let me give you a few examples.

Imagine you have an idea about an app which helps people find the best cafes in their area. You envision an app which lets users share their experiences with different cafes in order to help other users find the best cafe around them more easily.

In order to create an initial audience, you started to write blog posts about cafes that you personally visited and reviewed. After posting regularly for a couple of weeks, you established a base of regular readers. In order to evolve your product towards your more interactive app vision, you want your followers to start sharing their experiences as well. In order to initiate a discussion with them, you decide to open up an official chat which allows all your followers to ask you questions about the cafes directly. Your audience is very pleased by your new offering, asks you many questions and finds your feedback very helpful. Considering the two metrics above, you have definitely increased the value of your offering, but at the price of higher operational effort on your side. If you continue improving your product in this way, you will quickly run out of time.

You now understood that you have to become more efficient in answering your follower’s questions. You read through all questions and create a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page on your website. Every time one of your audience members now asks you a question, which is answered in the FAQ, you just send them the corresponding link. Even though this safes you a lot of time and decreases your operational effort, you passed on the effort now to your follower, who has to click on the link, search for the question and then read the answer. Ultimately, you decreased the value of your product.

So how could you have done it any better? An easy way would have been to open a discussion board separately from your blog posts, which would allow people to post questions and tips regarding the cafes you reviewed in your blog. Then you could have rewarded audience members to answer other people’s questions by for example giving awards for the most helpful or liked comments. Your members would enjoy supporting other followers and would also benefit by receiving help themselves. Consequently, it would increase the value of your product and at the same time, your own effort would decrease as you don’t have to answer every single question yourself.

The example above not only shows what you have to consider when you improve and evolve your product. It also shows that you can be creative in using different existing tools and products, re-combine them and anticipate what your audience needs and what would facilitate your own effort. You can make significant improvements to your offering without any technical knowledge or experience. It rather takes you to do a lot of research about what kind of tools are accessible to you and how you could combine various of them into something new and valuable. Moreover, the example also illustrates that each incremental change should go with a fairly small implementation effort in order to protect you against time wastage if your audience rejects the product change.

Continue with these incremental steps always having your end goal in mind. Your product will continuously bring higher value to a growing audience base. Eventually, you will reach a point at which you realise that your desired product change cannot be realised by simply combining existing tools or products, but rather you will have to create an entirely new technical solution in order to continue to improve your offering. At this stage, you will most likely start looking for a technical co-founder.

Phase 3: Found a Team

Let’s stop here for a second and think about what has happened. You built a large follower base, created a product that people care about and incrementally evolved it to serve more people with higher value. Wow - what a success!

As you now start to look for a technical co-founder, you will not just have a vague idea or vision. Every developer, that you will speak to, will appreciate not only your direct access to a large base of followers, but also your clear understanding of how your next product iteration will look like. You will be able to provide clear instructions and provide any co-founder with some sort of security that the solution will be adopted by some of your followers. As a consequence, you will be able to make more technical talent interested in working with you. Additionally, you will have a stronger negotiation position to keep more control over the business and give away less equity when you found your corporation.

Conclusion

Starting your own app business does not require any previous knowledge, nor any technical know-how. You have to be incredibly hard working and determined to get initial traction, and be smart and creative to evolve your product by re-combining existing tools.For all your effort you will be rewarded with a large follower base as well as an initial product that your users value. This will give you leverage to find the right technical co-founder and improve your negotiation situation for the incorporation of a startup. It will now be the responsibility of your entire team to continue to evolve your offering into a marketable product as the basis for your business.