About a week ago I had put up a post called “So your app has bombed“. I won’t rehash the details so if you want to read, or reread, what it was about, you can click here to do so. The short version is that after launching my first app, Are You Faster Than, it did poorly in terms of downloads so I had gone back and reflected on why that was and what lessons I had learned from it.
After I initially wrote the post I figured that was going to be the end of that app and that I would move onto other things. But a couple of interesting things happened.
First, as I started to think about my next projects I began to think about them with a different perspective, with the lessons I had just shared fresh on my mind. Not surprisingly, I realized that a number of my ideas would probably suffer the same fate and be failures as well. Why is that exactly?
Well I would say the number one reason was that some of the projects just didn’t excite me enough. They were good ideas, but they focused on things that I was not super passionate about. And if I am going to spend the time and energy to develop an application it really needs to be something that I find fun, fascinating and challenging! And realizing that wasn’t how I felt about some of the projects I knew I wasn’t likely to put the energy into them, and sweat out the details in a way that is needed to make a great app.
Second, there were some aspects of the projects that were just a bit too far out of my knowledge base right now. One would have involved some degree of Javascript which I have never even attempted to look at, let alone try to program in. Though the amount of work I’d have to do with that language would be pretty small, I can recognize that I am not yet at the point where I can learn another language in an acceptable amount of time relative to what I wanted to do. Sure under ideal circumstances that technical challenge would be manageable, but you almost never have ideal circumstances so I opted to put that project aside for the moment.
And the most interesting thing I realized is that I still really liked the original app I had released. In the original post I had brainstormed a number of possible ways it could be improved. And a few days after writing that post my mind went back to those ideas. Without going into too much detail about my thought process, I realized that for an app like this having a social element to it would really create a compelling reason for people to want to use it. And there are definitely interesting ways to make the app social. In fact outside of productivity or specialized, professional applications, social interaction is now something that most users just expect. And why shouldn’t they! Smartphones and tablets are always on, mobile, highly sophisticated devices that have become ubiquitous in our lives precisly because they foster social connections so easily.
So one week later I am now in the process of going back to that app, breaking it and pulling it apart so that I can begin the process of developing it into something more. And even though what I am working on right now might not be enough to make it a huge success at least I can be sure that I will know how to better launch it this time around. And that I will be putting out an app that is much more thought-out and engaging for users.
This follow up hopefully shows the value in looking honestly at your own work, and mistakes, through a critical eye to learn and grow from those experiences. When you do that you can then really move on and further elevate yourself. And as you have seen in this case sometimes the outcome is surprising … I certainly didn’t think I would come back to the Are You Faster Than app but here I am. And in a few months time I will come back to this, and the previous post, once the revamped app has been released so that I can follow the story through to its next phase and offer a bit more insight into the long game processes involved in app development.
Manitoba Ninja 