Give Your Ideas a Platform: How to Create an App in 7 Steps

Today, we have an app for everything and anything! Have you ever had an idea for an app that you thought could blow up into something big, but don’t know where to start? Well, now is your chance to code that magic into an app. In what follows, we will give you an exhaustive cheat sheet on how to create an app. And as a bonus, we’ll also talk about how a mobile attribution platform, like Trackier Mobile Marketing Platform, can help you scale your newly launched app into an instant success. Sounds interesting? To know more read this blog!

Define your concept

You have an idea, now what? Think about the market you’re serving, who’s your ideal customer, and potential audience types– don’t skip this step although a lot of them do.  

You must talk to as many people as you can and get as much data as you can. Make sure you understand their pain points and how your app might help solve those problems. As an app developer, you might have some ideas in mind for features that they think may not be valuable to them, or they might introduce you to new ideas that you’ve never thought of, this is gold. 

Creating a Unique Value Proposition

While accurately defining your concept, this is a good time to think about the unique value proposition that makes your app stand out from its competition. To do so, document the features and feedback of your app. If you come across ideas that do not align with the early goals of the product you are trying to build, that’s okay. List those things out but don’t get distracted by them.

Let Your Creativity Shine Through Design

Not to sound novice but start on paper; mocking up crude drawings of how the app makes the features of your app come together. There’ll be a lot of brainstorming and switch on your creative mode to start iteration since it’s easy to make changes here. So, don’t skip to high fidelity just yet. If you have some customers who are excited and want to help with this process get feedback from them as well. As you start getting more detailed designs, you can start moving on to development. Design and development should work together to make tweaks as the app evolves. 

Tip: Be careful getting sidetracked by building anything too specific that might only fit the needs of one customer.

Lay The Foundation

Make sure your development team is set up for success. It is essential to ensure your web-to-app framework is up and running and checked into GitHub. Develop the front end of your app and start documenting the configuration notes in your project file. Your team can add to this document as the project evolves.

Before you start building the core features of your app that will deliver value to your customers you’ll need certain things that most apps just require such as:

• Logging 
• User tracking
• Authentication & authorization
• Basic UI layouts

Develop Mobile Apps Beta Version And Begin Testing

Find a milestone that works for your team. Smaller sets of features that can be stacked together. It is key to shape the process, tackle features, and find out what works best for your team.

During the development phase, when the superpower relies on the web framework you have chosen which helps to build your UI and backend structure. Many teams use UI Frameworks such as React, which leads to developers getting blocked all the time – either the React developers are waiting on the API developers or vice versa. The app developers should focus their efforts on building features for customers while simultaneously developing early builds into the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store. Both stores support test versions that can be used internally before the products are ready to be shipped to your users. 

Reach Potential Customers

There is no particular stage of when you should market your app. However, it is best if you start marketing during the development phase. Here are some tips to market your app:

• Share some screenshots of the app design. Include behind-the-scenes content. 
• Give a peak of the app-building process that you’re following to build anticipation
• Get your team to share their thoughts on how things can be improved

Marketing helps to keep your customers engaged with what you’re bringing to the market. Stay in touch with them and get constant insights to develop a product that sends shockwaves to the users and competitors! You can market your app on social media platforms like LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, or wherever people find themselves online. 

Deployment and Go-To-Market

As your app has been getting built out and deployed to staging, you want to be doing ongoing testing. Your development team should write automated tests that stress functionality as it’s built and that can be used to find regression bugs as features are added. Document those bugs and prioritize them accordingly in your project management software. 

In conclusion, you are ready to launch! If you follow all the steps mentioned above, it shouldn’t be too much of a burden on how to build an app that seamlessly rolls out your product globally. You should have confidence in yourself and the app once it’s ready for your users.