Sean M Everett
Precisionist & Class Clown
SeanMEverett.com
Evolyte.com
-
App Idea of the Day #7: Platform for Social + Local iPhone Apps
Concept: create a drag-and-drop platform to make iPhone apps with social and location features. The current state of DIY iPhone app building platforms take the easy approach, add Twitter or RSS feeds, but nothing that an app needs to have in order to compete with other great startups.
Problem: this is an ongoing problem with us. Do we invest hundreds of man-hours, blood, sweat, and tears to spend the time building a custom app, without any sense for whether the market cares? What if we could accelerate the build time to a few hours instead of months or even a year? Now that would be powerful.
You basically decrease every startup risk there is because most folks know that if you want to build a successful consumer app, it should include social and local features. You don’t need as much up front capital investment, you don’t need to find someone who knows how to code, or even design, that well, which is the BIGGEST problem most people with ideas face. The only thing you need is an idea, a little bit of cash, and few mouse clicks.
Monetization
Would anyone pay for this? I know I would, and I’d be willing to pay thousands of dollars because I know how painful this is. Here’s an example:
I graduated with my MBA from the University of Chicago Booth, ranked the #1 business school in the nation by Businessweek more than once, in the spring of 2011. So, you have some of the smartest guys and gals in the midwest, each with great ideas. They talk about them openly in entrepreneurship classes, but the fact is none of them know anyone who can “build it”.
So would these, educated, and well-funded folks pay money for this service? You bet you ass they would. And probably in the thousands of dollars for each one.
So then what do you have? The volume of a large amount of people paying a large amount of money to solve a large amount of pain. I think 1 + 1 = 3, in this case.
Why Not Learn?
Sure, you can study the latest technologies like Node.js and MongoDB, you could take a $6,000 class that would teach you Ruby on Rails, you could even watch tutorials about PHP and MySQL, but that’s hard. And there’s nothing that’s yet disrupted all that time and pain. It’s a closed system. One of the darlings of the latest Y Combinator class is a company called CodeAcademy, which teaches you JavaScript from the web, but again, you have to learn how to code.
They say the best apps are the ones that solve your own problems. The first app I’d likely build using this platform would be a social app for ideas, so I could market research all the ideas we have, and then build the best idea with the most social traction using this platform. Man, now that’s circular.
Design
One of the best lessons I learned about great user interface design was that it should not only be intuitive, but it should make decisions for the user, so they don’t have to. The right decision. In this case, if we at Evolyte know what it takes to make a successful app, and what things don’t matter, why wouldn’t we set up this platform with that in mind?
For example, we know nobody is going to download your app if all it does is show your tweets, so why would we offer that option? Rather, we’d include the ability to sign up using Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, because we know it decreases sign-up “pain” and gets people using the app that much quicker. It also allows users to “search for friends”, another social item we could turn into a check-the-box type feature.
Visual
Keep it simple. A one-time, flat price for each feature. Remember how iTunes made every song $0.99? It becomes a binary decision - you either want the song or you don’t. You don’t have to spend an hour in Excel doing a bunch of calculations based on tiered pricing models and monthly fees (and oh, what if I forget to cancel…).
You turn the purchase of software into buying some groceries — I’ll have some orange juice, eggs, and bacon. That will be $10 and boom, you’ve got breakfast.
Replace orange juice, eggs, and bacon with social, location, and notifications, and boom, there’s now an app for that.
Is it going to be hard to build? Yes. Is it impossible to build? No. But as Mr. Gray Hair in Wall Street famously said to Bud Fox, “Good things, sometimes, take time.”
I’d love to build this, but the complexities are so vast that I’d need some great engineering and design help.
