Identifying app ideas and business cases for organization

Introduction

As a business owner and IT manager do you have questions in mind?

• What are app ideas that can be mobilized?
• How are ideal app ideas identified?
• Will these applications be successful?
• What happens if these applications fail?
• Data Security?
• What about ROI?
• More questions.....

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks” - Mark Zuckerberg

Identifying app ideas

• Create app ideas which will excite the business owners and users. 
• Each of these app ideas should have a ROI (Return on Investments). ROI is not just return on expenditure, ROI can be saving time, customer satisfaction, better compliance etc.
• Come up with an inventory of applications for each department and LOB (Lines of Business) in your organization. 
• Remember that these app ideas are for encouraging business owners to think mobility in their respective department and are not final app ideas. 
• Take these app ideas to respective departments.
• They will usually have their own ideas. Add these app inventory.
• Prioritize app ideas along with business owners.
• Pick up three app ideas
• Start developing these ideas

Return on Investments (ROI)

Any system without ROI are a bane to organization. ROI metrics and measurement should be defined for all app ideas before going further. 

ROI = (Revenue – Cost)*100/Cost

There are more ROI parameters apart from above calculation. 

• Branding
• Productivity Improvement
• Customer Satisfaction and Delight
• Compliance
• Lead Generation
• Lower cost of customer acquisition
• More metrics…….

Measurement should be done at regular intervals to calculate ROI. 

Define MVP (Minuscule Viable Product)

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is for web, MVP (Minuscule Viable Product) is for mobile applications. Define MVP

• Choose three features in each of these three apps which will excite users to download app.
• Do not choose more than three features in each app. If users don’t adopt, you will be left in lurch. 
• Each app should go live in two months.
• Use existing infrastructure (servers, web services etc.) to get these apps developed.
• Do not use expensive tools for your initial development, use free platforms like Native, Cordova, and React Native for these first couple of apps. You can get into advanced commercial platforms after you get a hang of mobility in a year.

User Acquisition and Retention

Having the app out on Appstores and MDM’s will not serve the purpose. Driving the user acquisition and retention is a continuous process. 

• Mail Blasts: Send regular mailers(spam) to users to increase acquisition
• Keywords: Take your time in creating meta-data on App Stores. Title and description of the app should be easy for bots to index.  
• Deep Linking: Apple and Google have started basic deep linking in apps. Though preliminary, this will get enhanced for full-fledged indexing.
• Mobile app analytics: Analytics is best feedback we can get from user’s without compromising on their privacy. Look for the usage trends and adjust app accordingly.
• Crash reports: Always be on lookout for crash reports, Each crash is minus one user.
• Feedback: Look out for Appstore and in-app feedback.
• Incentivise the app usage, provide brownie points for app usage.

Continuous addition of features

• Add new features
• Remove redundant features users are not interested in
• Improve customer experience
• Keep your fingers crossed

Application Sunsetting

After all the hard work, if there is poor user acquisition or ROI, Kill the app and get on with new ideas. Never get attached to your app ideas. 

Conclusion

There is no magic wand to identify successful app ideas for your organization. Approach should be to create miniscule viable product and then enhance them through user driven feedback. If user acquisition does not increase, sunset the application.