Apps are everywhere! Think about it! Think about any popular brand and you will find that they have a mobile app that you can download. Apps are predominantly made by businesses for customers. From a business standpoint, mobile apps are excellent business solutions irrespective of the intent they are used for. Apps are effective ways to boost your sales because it is easier to interact with your customer base through an app.
With the ever-increasing dominance of smartphones for interacting with the Internet, it is likely that apps will soon become extremely crucial for selling your products. This brings us to a very important business idea – how to create an app!
Recommended for: coders and app developers, or people with an amazing idea for a lucrative app
How much can you earn: the app market is huge so you can stand to make a lot of money if you’ve got a great app idea; however, since it’s so easy to create an app and the potential is so big, that naturally leads to a lot of competition – there are literally millions of apps out there (most of them for Android and for iOS users)
Start-up costs: pretty big – the biggest companies can easily spend up to $1 million for a single app, but as a smaller project, you could create an app for about $50,000 to $100,000. In other words, unless you’re sitting on a lot of money, you’ll need to find some investors to help you turn your app idea into a reality
Building an app costs a lot of money – this is, in fact, one of the most expensive strategies to start with from this entire list; however, as expensive as it may be to turn your app idea into a reality, so can the profits be pretty amazing.
There are several options when it comes to monetizing your app:
- Charge an upfront fee for signing up – it’s actually cheaper to create an app that people pay for upfront rather than one with in-app purchases, but the profits will also be lower; plus, there are so many free – or rather, seemingly free – apps available that people might be reticent to buy a no-name app
- Charge for in-app purchases – this is probably the most popular app monetization model right now. Users get the app for free (although there are even some paid apps that also offer in-app purchases – I don’t recommend it, you’ll make a lot of people very angry!) and then, in order to get more out of the app, they have to make all kinds of in-app purchases
- Make it free – this is another popular model and usually, it’s monetized with in-app advertising; however, be aware that in-app advertising can easily become extremely annoying, particularly if the user doesn’t have much control over when the ads start. Because of this, I recommend you offer various perks in exchange for watching ads and this way, everyone’s getting something out of it
However, the big question is, where do you get the money? In my personal experience, it’s not so much the funding that’s the problem. At least, not if you have a great idea for an app. What is a bigger problem is finding good app developers to help you turn your idea into a reality – unless you’re the developer, in which case, you’re good to go! Just check out my guide on how to get funding for a start-up business idea to see what options you have (angel investors, crowdfunding, etc.)